This article examines how rising powers, particularly India and China, shape the governance of United Nations peacekeeping operations in Africa. It moves beyond portrayals of these states as norm-takers or ambiguous actors. Instead, it argues that both actively influence peacekeeping outcomes. The analysis identifies three mechanisms: material leverage from troop contributions, institutional positioning in the UN Security Council, and discursive interventions in mandate negotiations. Using a process-tracing approach, the article combines troop data, UNSC voting records, and official debates. It shows that India uses its role as a leading troop-contributing country to push for realistic mandate and greater inclusion of troop contributors in mandate formulation. China, by contrast, uses its permanent member status to shape mandate language and signal constraints through strategic abstentions. Across cases, both states often align with African members, especially on sovereignty, sanctions, and host-state consent. The findings show that contemporary peacekeeping governance is increasingly negotiated and reflects a more balanced and plural governance structure shaped by the interaction of Western norms, African agency, and rising power influence.
This article examines the rise and fall of the G5 Sahel, a regional security organization created in 2014 by Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, with strong support from external partners. While the G5 Sahel quickly became a pillar of counterterrorism efforts in the region, it collapsed less than a decade later following the withdrawal of several member states after successive military coups. The article argues that the G5 Sahel functioned less as a vehicle for autonomous regional security cooperation than as an instrument through which Sahelian regimes managed asymmetric relationships with external actors. By extending the concept of extraversion beyond the national level to regional organizational frameworks, we show how participation in the G5 allowed member states to convert regional cooperate on into diplomatic recognition, military assistance, and financial resources. The collapse of the organization is thus best understood not as an institutional failure per se, but as the unravelling of a regional arrangement whose foundations were inherently political and reversible.
This study examines how homestay hosting arrangements function as everyday spaces of informal peacebuilding for displaced Ukrainian women resettled in Toronto, Canada. Amid growing global displacement, informal models of refugee reception such as homestays offer unique opportunities for safety, healing, and integration, yet remain underexplored in research and policy. This study draws on a secondary analysis of qualitative data from 18 interviews with Ukrainian women who experienced living with Canadian host families. Thematic analysis revealed four interconnected themes: homestays as spaces of everyday peace; emotional and relational dimensions of peacebuilding; gendered labour and power negotiation in shared spaces; and the tension between safety and ongoing precarity. While homestays offered a temporary sense of peace, experiences were shaped by trauma, uncertainty, and complex relational dynamics. Women engaged in invisible emotional and domestic labour to sustain harmony, often without formal support. The findings suggest that homestay hosting can serve as a meaningful site of informal peacebuilding but requires intentional design and support. This study highlights the need for trauma-informed, gender-sensitive practices, and policy recognition of informal hosting as a valuable component of refugee peacemaking. Implications extend to host training, community support infrastructure, and future research on domestic spaces as sites of healing.
A recent article in this journal claims that although there has not been inter-ethnic conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the thirty years since the end of the war, and power has been repeatedly transferred after elections internationally recognized as free and fair, the peace is not sustainable because it falls short on abstract criteria of justice, reconciliation and other normative goals. Authors propose a model of 'Jus Post Bellum' (JPB) to guide further international oversight of and intervention in the politics and social arrangements within BiH in order to achieve 'sustainable peace' there. In this comment, I argue that there is a flawed path dependency in the peacekeeping literature, treating BiH as a classic case of intractable ethnic conflict instead of engaging in a detailed study of the actualities of social and political developments there since the end of the war. I also argue that the events most threatening to sustaining peace in BiH are reactions to interventions by the international representatives originally charged with supervising the peace, instead changing the provisions that had been agreed to by all parties in ways acceptable only to one of them. I conclude with four recommendations for assessing scholarship on peacebuilding.
The increasing prevalence of armed conflict globally poses a significant barrier to achieving child-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the ambitious targets of the 2030 Agenda, the 2023 SDG Progress Report shows that only 11% of child-specific targets have been achieved, revealing a substantial implementation gap. This study examines how armed conflict-measured by battle-related deaths-impedes progress toward child-related SDG targets, focusing on children's survival, development, and protection. Using annual data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and the World Development Indicators (WDI) for 54 countries over the period 2000-2023, this study employs fixed-effects and quantile regression models. Results show that armed conflict significantly impairs child-related SDG indicators, with disproportionately adverse effects in high-conflict settings. Specifically, an average of 2,900 battle-related deaths is associated with a 0.135% increase in neonatal mortality, a 0.151% rise in under-five mortality, and a 0.175% increase in maternal mortality. Furthermore, such conflict intensity corresponds with a 0.183% reduction in access to freshwater, a 0.135% increase in child stunting, and a 0.789% decline in primary school enrollment. These findings highlight the urgent need for targeted policies in conflict-affected countries to safeguard children's well-being and accelerate progress toward SDG2, SDG3, SDG4, and SDG6.
The insurgency in Mozambique's Cabo Delgado province has become a critical test case for Africa's evolving security architecture. Since 2017, escalating violence by armed groups has drawn diverse external responses, most prominently the SADC regional mission (SAMIM), Rwanda's bilateral military intervention, and the African Union's political endorsement. These responses illustrate the increasingly complex and multi-layered nature of African peace and security governance. This article analyzes Cabo Delgado through the dual lenses of regime complexity and convergence. Africa's peace and security architecture functions as a regime complex: a patchwork of overlapping continental, regional, bilateral, and external mechanisms that interact without a single hierarchical authority. Within this context, convergence is the mechanism that enables a decentralized system to operate effectively, allowing diverse actors with distinct mandates and resources to achieve partial coherence and complementarity. Applying this framework, the article examines the extent to which interventions in Cabo Delgado align in strategy and implementation, and what factors facilitate or hinder such coordination, thereby contributing to broader debates on Africa's security governance and hybrid interventions in fragile conflict settings.
Liberal peacebuilding, aimed at fostering mature democratic systems in post-conflict societies, faces significant challenges. Meanwhile, illiberal peacebuilding under authoritarian regimes following one-sided military victories has garnered increasing attention. However, existing research has failed to clarify the mechanisms underlying the acceptance of illiberal peace - specifically, whether such acceptance is from fear (repression) or performance (legitimation). To address this, it is necessary to examine the underlying logic of residents' acceptance of illiberal peace. This study analysed residents' discourses in interviews conducted in Chechnya, where illiberal peace has been established. It specifically examined whether the regime's hegemonic discourse aligns with those of residents. While acknowledging problems with the Kadyrov regime, those interviewed recognized its achievement of 'peace', stability, and reconstruction. Their insights suggest that the regime has achieved illiberal peace not only through repression (acceptance from fear) but also by gaining residents' support (acceptance from performance). Compelled by repression and co-optation to accept the current regime, residents appear to rationalize their acceptance of illiberal peace by attributing meaning to it.
This article examines the 19 mandatory United Nations sanctions regimes to manage intrastate conflicts since 1990 with a particular focus on the latest seven intrastate sanctions regimes created since 2010. The results suggest a trend toward a new phase of UN sanctioning practice. While the 1990s were dominated by coercive, state-focused sanctions aimed at ending armed conflict with rebels seeking a say in state governance, the 2000s were defined by targeted sanctions to constrain armed groups and disrupt war economies making particular use of sanctions against lootable, otherwise legal, natural resources. The post-2010 period doubles down on the application of targeted sanctions. They include increasingly targeted travel bans, asset freezes, and even individual arms embargoes to deal with conflicts propelled by significant criminal actors who thrive on the chaos and violence but are less likely to desire a governance role. However, rather than aiming to drive combatants to the negotiating table, modern UN sanctions aim to manage insecurity. Neither the increasingly surgical sanctions nor increasingly political UN missions are keeping pace with the changing nature of intrastate conflicts.
This study examines a paradox in United Nations peacekeeping whereby missions that achieve operational success may inadvertently undermine their own political legitimacy. Specifically, it focuses on the advanced intelligence capabilities deployed in recent missions and how these, while enhancing effectiveness, can generate sovereignty concerns that erode local consent. Through a comparative analysis of the UN missions in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (MONUSCO, 2010-present) and Mali (MINUSMA, 2013-2023), we show that intelligence innovations initially strengthened these missions - improving security and crisis response - but later became focal points for opposition when circumstances changed. Two distinct mechanisms are identified: in RDC a bottom-up backlash from civil society framed the UN presence as an illegitimate 'occupation', whereas in Mali a top-down campaign by state elites used sovereignty rhetoric to restrict UN surveillance and ultimately expel the mission. We argue that intelligence assets are contributing factors that amplify pre-existing legitimacy challenges (e.g. scandals or political shifts) rather than primary causes of mission failure. The findings highlight the need to balance technical effectiveness with local consent, and suggest policy adjustments for future peace operations to avoid this legitimacy paradox.
Because humanitarian military interventions declare their objective of 'saving strangers', yet occur in only 9% of intrastate conflicts, the question arises as to whether there are patterns to their occurrence. Insights into such patterns are relevant for assessing the credibility of such missions, while credibility influences how much support these operations receive. Moreover, such insights are needed to evaluate the impact of these interventions. Previous research either conflates humanitarian military interventions with other types of interventions or considers only a specific potential intervener. This study examines the selectivity of humanitarian military interventions without focusing on particular actors. It argues that decisions to intervene are based on both the need for intervention and the anticipated chance of success. Using event history analysis of conflict data from 1989 to 2022, it finds that a higher monthly average of conflict fatalities increases the rate of humanitarian military intervention. This holds when all deaths or only civilian fatalities are considered. Factors increasing intervention difficulty - extensive government forces, internationalized intrastate conflicts and large conflict areas - reduce the likelihood of intervention. Further analysis indicates that above a certain level of intervention need, intervention difficulty becomes the key factor shaping whether a humanitarian military intervention occurs.
This article investigates whether individuals' perceptions of the legitimacy of intervening actors influence how they evaluate reconstruction efforts. While legitimacy is widely recognized as a key factor in the success or failure of interventions, it is rarely examined in relation to the multiplicity of actors engaged in complex, competitive conflict-affected environments. Drawing on the distinction between ideological legitimacy (based on who the actor is) and pragmatic legitimacy (based on what the actor does), the study explores how these sources of legitimacy interact and influence local satisfaction with reconstruction efforts. It introduces an index, the Performance-Expectation Gap (PEG), to measure the alignment or discrepancy between ideological and pragmatic legitimacy and assess their impact on local satisfaction with reconstruction efforts. Focusing on Mosul after the defeat of the Islamic State (IS) and drawing on an original local perception survey conducted in the city (702 respondents), the findings reveal a complex interplay between ideological and pragmatic legitimacy across governmental/non-governmental and national/international actors with notable variation across sectors of intervention. Overall, the article offers a bottom-up perspective on post-conflict reconstruction efforts and contribute to broader debates on its goals, implementation and legitimacy.
Does rebel sexual violence against civilians during conflict influence the imposition of United Nations (UN) targeted sanctions? Literature on sanctions shows that there is a relationship between sanctions and human rights. Additionally, sanctions can lead to changes in conflict dynamics and outcomes. In this study, we are interested in exploring the responsiveness of the international community to reports of sexual violence during civil conflict. Looking specifically at sexual violence by rebel groups, we argue that in line with its commitment to the responsibility to protect (R2P) and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, the UN is likely to impose sanctions on rebels reported to commit sexual violence against civilian populations. The use of sanctions serves as a tool for the organization to hold responsible rebels associated with crimes of sexual violence. Using data on targeted sanctions by the United Nations, our empirical findings show that rebel groups are likely to be subject to UN sanctions if they are linked to reports of sexual violence.
