 I want to talk about peacekeeping today, we think about peacekeeping as kind of maybe not being all that important, but if you look at conflict across the world, the UN has more troops than any other single state, more than the US, more than France, more than the regional organizations, more than NATO, more than the African Union, combined right now in the field. The UN has more troops deployed than any other entity. So when it comes to peace and conflict, this is what's happening right now as UN peacekeeping, especially when we're talking about ending conflict or mitigating the problems of fragile states. So we have 16 different missions with an eight billion dollar operating budget per year. It's not a very big budget and we have nine multi-dimensional missions right now. And by multi-dimensional, these are the missions that aren't just monitoring ceasefire lines, but they're trying to do much more to reconstruct the state, including political and economic reconstruction and legal reconstruction. So you very kindly mentioned my first book and this is the cover that this book was a study of the successful operations and during the from the end of the Cold War, through the mid-2000s, the UN was concluding a large multi-dimensional mission successfully at a rate of about every other year. And El Salvador was one of them I would count. So Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Cambodia, eastern Slovenia, and Croatia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone, these were successful missions in the sense that the UN implemented its mandate and then left. That's what it had to mandate. DPKO, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations did basically what they were asked to do and then they exited the countries. And none of those countries has returned back to war. Sometimes we see limited fighting, but none has returned back to war since the conclusion of these large multi-dimensional missions. But that ended in 2005. So since 2005, the UN has not completed another mission. And that was something that it used to do regularly. So my starting point for this book is what happened to peacekeeping? Why can't the UN do what it used to do on a regular basis? So the UN is no longer implementing its peacekeeping mandates, but it is the presence of peacekeepers correlates with some good things that we want to see in fragile states experience and conflict. So statistically speaking, peacekeepers correlate with fewer civilian casualties, lower battle deaths, and a geographic contraction of conflict. My question is, how do peacekeepers achieve their goals? What are the main causal mechanisms in multi-dimensional peacekeeping? How do peacekeepers cause peace? The dominant causal hypothesis in the quantitative literature right now is that peacekeepers alleviate the security dilemma by providing security guarantees, right? So the idea, the imagined idea is that peacekeepers come in, they interpose themselves between two warring sides, and they provide security guarantees that allow both sides to step back from the brink of conflict. And I think for many of you, you know, if you've been to any peacekeeping mission or you've studied civil wars at all, you know that there aren't two sides in civil wars anymore. I mean, hypothesis doesn't have any basis at all. It's just a hypothesis, trying to explain a cause of a correlation that really is absurd. So it's nonsense. Peacekeepers come from dozens of different countries. They don't speak each other's languages. They often don't speak the language of the people where they're stationed. They don't train together. Their equipment isn't interoperable. They are very far from being able to provide military guarantees. They don't do that. That is not how peacekeeping functions. That's not the causal mechanism in peacekeeping. So what do they do? How do peacekeepers exercise power? And I'm thinking about power in Robert Dahl's classical sense, power as being the ability of A to convince B to do what B otherwise wouldn't do. So how do peacekeepers convince people to transition from war to peace? And I'm looking at three main means of power. Coercion, inducement, and persuasion. I think that these are the main means of power in general in life. So whether we're talking about parenting or anything else for that matter, right? You can coerce somebody. You can bash them or do something physical. You can induce somebody with carrots or you can persuade them with your words. And these are roughly the three categories that peacekeepers employ when they're trying to convince people to change their behavior. And we probably all employ these three means of power at various times. I'm taking my examples today from the Central African Republic. I was conducting field research for this study in several different places, but I just want to talk about the Central African Republic today because otherwise it would take way too much time, much as I would love to talk about some other cases. I think you know we've been talking an awful lot about the Central African Republic during this conference. It's the bottom country on the human development index. It experienced violence to about two years of violence, but before then decades of rapacious colonial rule, many different rulers who emulated the colonialists and the colonists and essentially took the wealth for themselves. This is a wealthy country in the sense that it has a lot of natural resources, fertile land, and not too many people. But during the violence of a population about four and a half million people, almost the entire Muslim population fled. The UN has documented 30,000 cases of sexual abuse during the conflict and more than half the country remains in dire humanitarian need. Of all countries in the world, this is the one that is in really great need. If you see where Central African Republic is located, it's in the middle of Africa. It's landlocked. It's in a difficult neighborhood. To the south we have Congo, which has been at war since the mid-1990s. Moving up through South Sudan, which is at war, Darfur, this is the Darfur region of Sudan. Chad's been on and off at war. Cameroon and Congo Brazzaville are roughly okay, but it's a difficult place to live. It's not so surprising in the sense that the Central African Republic succumbed to the things that its neighbors are succumbing to. Again, the question is how do peacekeepers convince the government and rebels to change their behavior, to not engage in violence as a means of forwarding their interests? I'm using Bob Art's typology of military power. We can think of military power in a number of different ways. Usually, we think of military power as just as the offensive use of force or the preventive use of force. Actually, there are lots of different ways in which you can use military power. You can use military power to deter, to defend. Peacekeepers don't use compelling force, as what I argued before. Even though they're given the mandate to use it, they cannot do that. They can't even deter attack because they don't have second strike capability. What they can do is defend themselves. Sometimes they can defend civilians. They employ an awful lot of swagger, which is simply confusing. It is puzzling, but this is what they do a lot of the time on patrol. I'll give you some examples. Unfortunately, they engage in swagger. Policing is probably the means of coercion that's most effective in peacekeeping. That is, peacekeepers actually engage in reestablishing order, trying to recreate the rule of law, disarming and arresting people. Here are just some examples of defensive use of coercive power. Here's a Rwandan peacekeeper and an American armed personnel carrier. Does anyone know what that weapon is? Does anyone know their weapons? No. Do you have an idea? It's an anti-aircraft gun. If you know anything about the Central African Republic, patrolling with an anti-aircraft weapon is essentially useless because there are no planes in the air. There's no reason to have an anti-aircraft gun. Excuse me? Yes. The guys were actually telling me if they tried to fire it horizontally, they'd probably knock over their truck. Sometimes you can use these things horizontally, but they're designed to be pointed into the air. In other words, this is an example of swagger and this is what you see a lot in peacekeeping operations. They look scary, but in terms of actual military capacity, there really isn't very much. This is not what peacekeeping is about. It's not actually, they're not using military means to achieve their ends. What they are doing though is policing. And what happened in the Central African Republic in this mission that's so interesting is that we have this big mission, Manusko just south in the DRC that's been there for many years and has not been going well. And a lot of people from that mission decided, okay, we're going to do this better in the Central African Republic. The Central African Republic is smaller. It's more manageable. It hasn't been at war for very long. People really don't want to fight. People aren't really interested in this fight. If you talk to people, most people would really rather not engage in battle. So rather than having this operation be primarily military, let's have a police commander as our force commander. So instead of having a military force commander, this peacekeeping operation is headed by a police specialist, which is an innovation in peacekeeping. It's not a part of the mandate. It's just part of what people did in the field and trying to figure out how to do this better. Because military patrols are not enough. What they really need are people who can police, who have the power of arrest, unlike military, military can't arrest, police can arrest. They can gather evidence for cases. They can confiscate weapons. They can do a lot of things that military troops can't do to actually help decrease conflict, to help mediate disputes when they're on foot patrol and things like that. So that was the idea for this operation. Another big idea in this operation was to use inducement in a new way in peacekeeping. Usually UNDP has its offices on one side of town, and peacekeeping headquarters are over here, and they don't talk to each other, and sometimes they actively compete with one another. So the idea in this operation was to bring UNDP into the peacekeeping operation and development and be thinking about development from the very beginning. So the deputy head of mission is the resident representative of UNDP. So the res rep is a part of the peacekeeping structure from the very beginning. And what they're doing is not just quick impact projects, but they're using inducement with the peacekeepers in interesting ways and often intended to build infrastructure, providing hospitals and veterinary clinics, schools, community centers, right? So having central Africans themselves develop their own infrastructure aided by UNDP and the peacekeepers. And they're starting really from zero. So this is the Muslim neighborhood in Bangi, which was completely destroyed. I've been, I've seen ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing in a variety of different countries, notably in Bosnia and Lebanon. But this ethnic, this it's actually more like religious cleansing was unlike anything I'd experienced before. I mean, people leveled the houses, they didn't just take over somebody's house. They actually were taking every brick of the house, or every wire of the house. So it's a kind of religious cleansing. Well, well, that's exactly what it is that I had that that is in some ways unprecedented, at least since in recent years. This is a picture of the parliament. I don't usually take pictures of bathrooms. But it's just to give an example of the extent of the looting. So even a couple of well, this is a year after the fighting had ended, the parliament building still didn't have door handles on the bathroom stalls. Just it's a this is a country that is starting from so little from so low, especially after the conflict, there isn't there isn't anything left. And this is just a mosque that's been burned out. So in this case, this mosque wasn't not the entire structure of the mosque was taken as was the case with many mosques that were actually completely dismantled. And this is what the peacekeeping operation is trying to do to counter these effects, right? So having building community centers in some of the most difficult neighborhoods and having Central Africans build the community centers based on what they're saying they would like to see. So having youth, especially youth digging and designing the centers themselves. Okay, so we have in this peacekeeping operation, great, so many good things happening. Technically, we have innovation in the military side in the use of power of inducement in the use of power of coercion. And then on the persuasion side, usually this is the point where peacekeepers peacekeeping operations tend to fare pretty well. And in this case, it is really not going very well. So in order to persuade, you need to have clear ideas and goals, and you need to have an alignment of your ideals and goals with your behavior. So the ideas and goals, of course, and most peacekeeping operations are peace, democracy, human rights, and setting. So we need to see the setting of a moral example. So the peacekeepers were trying to do a lot of these things. And and we have, we see peacekeepers engaging at a very low level with civilians, the only problem is we also had a French intervention force parallel to the UN's force and the French, if anybody's been following the Central African Republic, you know that the French were abusing children at the airport. And this was not just an isolated case here and there. This was actually a regular institution of of exchanging sex with children for aid. So we had French, the French intervention force engaging in this, we have dozens of cases of peacekeepers of UN peacekeepers engaging in isolated, well, committing rape, which is completely undermined. It's completely undermined their persuasive capacity, as far as I can tell. The So in other words, what I'm trying to say is and we just most of this was happening at the airport. This is the the main IDP camp at the airport in Bongi. So peacekeepers can't use compelling force to achieve their goals. They exercise power through other means, through policing, inducement and persuasion. We saw effective uses of power on some dimensions, but on the dimension of persuasion, it just takes a few people to completely undermine the good works of literally thousands and thousands of others. So we just need to keep this in mind as we move forward and transitioning from and trying to help states transition from ship fragility. Thanks.