Does Peacekeeping Work by Virginia P. Fortna

This paper presents answers to two questions related to a book “Does Peacekeeping Work?” written by Virginia P. Fortna.

Q1: Measurement of Success

A major barricade to weigh up whether peacekeeping “works” is the choice problem—if peacekeepers decide on cases where they are most expected to be effectual and we find some consequence of peacekeeping on extending peace, it is not easy to determine whether peacekeeping has had an autonomous upshot on the length of harmony. To give you an idea about that peacekeeping works, Fortna desires to first make obvious that peacekeepers are not just prefering easy conflicts. She does this by increasing a statistical model to check how a variety of indicators thought to formulate peace more or less constant affect the duration of peace (Fortna, 35).

She limits her analysis to wars fought between 1945 and 1989 because peacekeeping in civil war was quite rare in this period, so she can capture the effect of these indicators in the absence of peacekeeping. Fortna then tests how these same indicators affect the likelihood of peacekeeping in conflicts after the Cold War.

She shows that those factors that make peace the least stable—such as a greater number of combatants, rough terrain, lower levels of development and weaker governments— also make peacekeeping more likely. Peacekeepers appear to pick the hardest cases, suggesting that if they prolong peace then this effect is not the result of a selection process. To test whether peacekeeping works, Fortna conducts quantitative analysis of the duration of peace after all ceasefires in civil war signed between 1989 and 1999. Peacekeeping does in fact make peace much longer lasting—peace is at least 50% more likely to last after a ceasefire if peacekeepers are deployed than if they are not, and the effect is probably much ...