Peacekeepers Protecting Civilians, Under the Threat of Violence : A quantitative cross-national analysis on how the risk of violence towards peacekeepers affects their ability to protect civilians

While peacekeeping operations have been researched for decades, due to a lack of data there are still many aspects of peacekeeping that remain unexplored. However, with the introduction of the Peacemakers at Risk dataset a wide array of dynamics and relationships can now be researched. This thesis uses this dataset and others in order to study the risk of violence towards peacekeepers and its effects on the peacekeepers’ ability to protect civilians. My main claim is that due to a shift in priorities, peacekeepers that are exposed to risks of violence have a decreased capacity to protect civilians which leads to increased civilian casualties. The study utilizes a time-series cross-sectional quantitative approach in order to study this relationship. After the introduction of control variables, drawn from the literature, to the multivariate regression, the study finds that there is no statistical significance to the relationship supported in the existing data. However, the study can ultimately not draw a generalizable conclusion due to a lack of observations.