Monday, June 8
13.20–14.20
Room: Europa
Chaired by
Valeriya Mechkova
Associate Senior Lecturer
University of Gothenburg
Presenter
David Cunningham
Professor, University of Maryland
Co-Author
Susanna P. Campbell
Title
Peace Without Peacekeepers? The Conflict Management Effects of UN Special Political Missions
For decades, UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) have dominated international conflict management. A large literature demonstrates their contributions to violence reduction: shorter wars, longer-lasting peace agreements, reduced battle related deaths and civilian casualties, lower conflict diffusion risk, and in some cases improved democratization and governance. Yet geopolitical changes and UN funding cuts are already reducing PKO deployments worldwide — trends that will likely accelerate. Does the decline of peacekeeping mean a decline in conflict management?
We argue that the literature has overly focused on PKOs to the exclusion of other important instruments. UN Special Political Missions (SPMs) — peace operations without the military component of PKOs — are increasingly deployed in conflict and post-conflict environments as traditional peacekeeping contracts. Drawing on new original data on SPM budgets and personnel, we examine whether SPMs can fill some of the roles traditionally performed by PKOs. Using data from UCDP and V-DEM, we conduct a series of statistical analyses assessing SPM effects on battlerelated deaths, civilian fatalities, post-conflict peace duration, democratization, and political inclusion. We further examine governance quality outcomes using the QoG dataset. Our findings carry important implications for the future of conflict management and for understanding when and how international peace operations succeed.
Presenter
Desirée Nilsson
Professor, Uppsala University
Co-Authors
Magnus Lundgren, University of Gothenburg
Isak Svensson, Uppsala University
Title
Unwilling or Unwanted? The Changing Trajectory of Mediation in Armed Conflicts
At the core of international mediation lies an underexplored puzzle, which this study seeks to resolve: while the capacity to mediate in armed conflicts has expanded immensely over the last decades, the proportion of conflicts that actually receive mediation has declined. How can we explain this counterintuitive pattern? Is it because mediators are increasingly unwilling to become involved, or because belligerents are increasingly resisting mediation efforts? Theoretically, we develop an argument that integrates both supply and demand explanations of why mediation occurs. We posit that major trends in contemporary armed conflicts, such as radicalization and fragmentation, may have reduced the demand for mediation, while shifts in the international conflict management regime, such as the increasing geopolitical tensions, may have reduced its supply. In this paper, we explore these different explanations for the decline in mediation, leveraging complementary datasets on mediation, including new fine-grained data on offers and requests for mediation, and we also draw on data sources such as UCDP and V-Dem. The paper addresses one of today’s most important questions in the study of armed conflicts and their resolution.
Presenter
Micaela Wannefors
Doctoral Student, Uppsala University
Co-Authors
Hannah Frank
Thomas Schincariol
Title
The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back: Separating Close Calls from True Onsets in Conflict Prediction
Conflict forecasting seeks to correctly anticipate events of armed violence. While the field has made significant advancements, differentiating between close calls and true onsets has been overlooked despite its potential to improve our ability to predict new outbreaks of war. In this paper, we investigate why some countries with a high predicted risk of conflict experience limited violence only. We argue that the processes stalling the transition into active conflict display recurring patterns that can be leveraged to enhance conflict prediction. Against this backdrop, we introduce a methodological innovation of the Shape finder aimed at separating the underlying processes of true onset from stalling escalation, where low-intensity violence does not surpass a certain level. Based on the escalation spiral framework, we elaborate pathways to and away from conflict onset. Combining UCDP GED data with unpublished data on low-intensity violence that never reached the UCDP threshold, we apply a hurdle model to identify the dynamics that drive countries into armed conflict. Our preliminary results indicate that the Shape finder is able to separate contexts that consistently lead to armed conflict from those where intensity remains low, and that this information increases the model’s ability to anticipate true onsets. Our findings highlight that the relationship between a predicted high risk and conflict onset is context specific.
Presenter
Magnus Öberg
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor, Uppsala University
Co-Authors
Mert Can Yilmaz, Uppsala University
Margareta Sollenberg, Uppsala University
Title
Why the Difference in Fatality Numbers?
Many claims have been made about what accounts for the differences in fatality numbers in between the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and the Armed Conflict Location and Events Data (ACLED). In this paper we make the first systematic investigation of these claims, estimating how much of the difference in fatality counts each factor accounts for in 189 countries over the time period 2015–2024. We find that general inclusion criteria and thresholds which is the perhaps the most intuitive source of differences is a small but significant driver of differences. Auxiliary coding rules such as rules for handling vague fatality counts explain a larger share of the differences. Most of the difference, however, is accounted for by deep differences in measurement philosophy. Where UCDP strictly and consistently applies the same definition across cases and over time, ACLED has a global definition but make numerous local adjustments and special dispensations for particular countries and forms of violence. Country specific factors account for two thirds of the difference. Specific rules for dealing certain forms of violence, like organized crime or lone perpetrators in some countries, are also account for significant differences between UCDP and ACLED.
Demscore Conference 2026