 Good afternoon, and thank you, David, for organizing this group and Adam for acting as discussing. So I'm Andrea Ruggeri from the University of Oxford, and in the next ten minutes I'm going to walk through some work that I've been doing with Vincenzo Bovo, who is a political economist at the University of Warwick, and Chiara Ruffa, she's a defense scholar at Stockholm, and she's an expert of field work, ethnographic work, and political scientist. So if you expect quantitative findings, and in that case studies, of course I cannot deliver them now, but what I'm going to say, the core arguments I'm going to share with you are based on a large and statistical analysis of all UN operations since 1989, and three in that case studies, Lebanon, Mali, and Central Africa Republic. So composing UN operation, composing peace, the core point and thesis is going to make is that the composition of the forces on the field in a peace operation are a matter of conflict resolution, are not just a matter of logistics and organization. When I mean peace operation effectiveness, I mean the capacity to stop the belligerence to fight and stop the victimization of civilians. Of course there are different ways to think about peace, but in our way we think in terms of negative peace that is stopping the killing. So I will start from the end. What do I mean? I'm going to start from the take home message. So the work that I'm going to mention has been culminated with a book in 2020 composing peace, but the take home message that we contend that the combination of skills, language, habits and culture provide unmissable opportunities for the United Nations to project its commitment and to bring and keep peace in war-torn countries. So what is actually maybe counter-intuitive is that what we can think a wickedness of the UN Army or actually UN troops is a strength, diversity and different culture and different norms. So UN mission composition matter, the first generation process is crucial. And one of the problem is that we want to stress that this matter has been mostly dealt as a logistical organization matter. Usually the process is that there is a resolution with certain mandates, with certain number of peacekeepers, and then the United Nations has to go around to possible contributors asking for troops. And of course sometimes there are more countries willing, but sometimes it's very hard to get all different blue helmets. I'm going to show you then that it's extremely important to focus on this issue because we have witnessing macro-historical, I would say, trends that bring the United Nations in a very challenging time in terms of also diversity. Composing a mission therefore is in terms of contributors means composing peace. So let me start with some graph. There is a line, the take-back line, that is the number of peacekeepers around the world. So we had a peak just after the Cold War, then we know several failures and therefore we draw of blue helmets, but then there has been an increase and a peak actually around 2015. Nowadays we have 70,000 blue helmets around the world. The blue bars are actually the number of countries providing blue helmets. So I show you the total number of blue helmets, but the point is that you can see that since the end of the Cold War more and more countries are providing blue helmets. And this is actually where also our project started. Does it mean that it's good or bad that we're going to have more peacekeepers coming from diverse countries? And the point is, if I give you the picture in 1990 and look at the colors of different continents, the top four were from Europe and North America. Canada, Finland, Austria and Norway, top contributor of peacekeepers. Look at also the magnitude, the maximum was 1000, so there were not many and the top was what we can think of the global north, but many also Ireland, UK, Sweden and so on. The picture changed dramatically if we move to 2017. Europe and North America disappear, well Italy stays there and it's mostly for actually mission Lebanon. And you can see that country from Africa and Asia are the major supplier of peacekeeping. These days still nowadays where Nepal, India, Rwanda are the top three. And you can see from this picture that the bottom one had a story of global north providing several peacekeepers, whereas the closer days you see that clearly we have more supplier, but also we have more from the global south. And if we focus on these 2010 flows, you can see that the change of blue helmets is within the global south and from east and west and from west and east. So the major trends that I want to show you is that the uniform peacekeeping person has been increased dramatically. The countries providing peacekeepers have been increased dramatically. The average number of countries providing peacekeepers in a single mission, for instance in Africa, from an average of eight countries in the mid-90s, arrived to 20 countries in the mid-20s. And DRC, the largest one, had a certain moment in time, 56 different national armies contributing in the same mission. But also in our book, but I don't have a lot of time, we speak about diversity in terms of different force commanders coming from 50 different nations, but also 97 special representative coming from other many nations. So the question that we answer in the book or we try to address and the question that I want to actually put in your mind and the way that we want to think, you know, if we think about A4P or A4P+, do diverse missions work better than homogeneous missions? And we find that actually they do. So those missions, they have blue helmets with high heterogeneity in terms of nationalities, norms, language, religion, background. They are more able to protect civilians and stop belligerents. I will tell you why we think so, but this is, I think, an important finding. The second one is looking at the relation between what we call the top leadership, the force commander, special representative. Does it matter if they're coming from different countries? Does it matter if they're having a different experience, but also have a different religion? And actually what we find is that usually, and there are different mechanism we can think about, is statistically significant and systematic that diversity between top leadership help actually to stop the fighting. However, there are also possible negative aspect about diversity in terms of how many, what's the distance in terms of norm and language in other levels. If we look at, for instance, the top military leadership and the blue helmets, one of the issues is that usually those missions that are more able to protect civilians are those where the majority or large chunk of the blue helmets are coming from the safe country of the first commander. So what does it mean? It means that it's true that diversity can help to protect civilians. And some mechanisms we mentioned is because they can monitor better misbehavior. They can understand maybe better the locals having different skills. But frankly, one of the problems is that if the first commander has a very short portion of the troops on the ground, it becomes maybe harder to coordinate them. But also we find that blue helmets that are coming from far away actually can be problematic. If you're really far away, but also not just far away geographically, and I'm gonna make a caveat, if you cannot really speak the language, if you have a different religious background, it becomes harder. But notice that geographical distance is not always the best thing because actually if you're coming from too close, you're not that good in protecting civilians and stopping the belligerents. So the issue is that we need to think about blue helmets able, and here I go more on the mechanism, we need blue helmets able to get the trust of the locals because we know that fighting is learning according to shelling. And in order to share information and try to stop the finding, information are not just objects. You need to gather by a trust, and a portfolio of diverse peacekeepers can help them. And you have also to be able to be trusted but to be able to communicate with the locals. The other two points that usually literature suggests is that peacekeepers are very able to stop the finding because they have muscular deterrence, they have the force. What we make a point here is that actually is more the signaling of resolve of the international community. The fact that there are diverse peacekeepers signal the locals that there is an international commitment to stop the finding. And finally, the persuasion, the capacity to actually socialize and have interaction with the locals. So to conclude, more effort should be expanded, transforming military organization into learning institution that can adapt more flexible incorporation with other military organization. So they're coming clearly from different military culture, so they should be done by including multinational coordination explicitly and systematically in training templates. We have learned that training is not enough. We also need socialization. In our three case studies, it's extremely important to see that it's not just the pre-deployment training, it's also the ongoing socialization learning process among peacekeepers. Peacekeepers will need to be socialized into roles where norms are internalized, such as diversity may enhance effectiveness. Creating the appropriate incentive structure, state militaries and their leadership could partially address some of the issue I addressed and highlighted before. Even if we consider the prospect of career advancement, there is space to reshape the attractiveness of peacekeeping as military vocation, because again, composing a mission means also composing peace. I'm gonna stop here. Thanks for your attention.