Photo: Graffiti Equating and Protesting against the EU and UN Missions in Kosovo, Prishtina, Kosovo
Programmatic Interventions: International Missions and Conflict-Affected Countries
What are the causes and consequences of the variation in peacebuildng and statebuilding activities in which international missions engage? Despite the proliferation in peacebuilding and statebuilding activities among UN and regional organizations' missions, little attention is paid to explaining such variation and the macro- and micro-level consequences that these patterns of convergence and divergence have on war-torn societies.
I address this gap in two ways in this book project. First, I develop a theoretical and analytical framework—“programmatic interventions”—that explains the causes and consequences of the variation in the statebuildng and peacebuilding activities in which international organizations' missions engage. The framework expounds the scheduled, schematic, and procedural approach that these missions take to statebuilding and peacebuilding process in conflict-affected countries and, in doing so, explicates the systemic and contextual determinants of the statebuilding and peacebuilding activities in which missions engage. It also highlights the ways in which missions, through this process, become embedded in war-torn societies, leading to meaningful--and oftentimes divergent--outcomes at the macro and micro levels of analysis
Second, I assess each component of the "programmatic interventions" framework using original data on the peacebuilding and statebuilding activities of all UN and regional organizations' missions deployed in the post-Cold War era. I demonstrate that activity variation is dependent upon both supranational process of activity standardization and organizational specialization as well as contextual factors tied to activity apportionment and sequentialization among missions concurrently and successively deployed to conflict settings. Focusing on the crucial case of post-conflict Kosovo, I also demonstrate via an original survey experiment and text analyses of over 28,000 newspaper articles that Kosovars' institutional trust is heavily dependent upon the international mission tasked with its (re)construction process and that this relationship is heavily dependent upon two interrelated mechanisms: mission and institution portrayal in the media and individual assessments of the mission's effectiveness.
Ultimately, I present and assess in this book project a unified framework for understanding, at once, the causes of international missions’ engagement in various post-conflict statebuilding and peacebuilding activities and the impact that variation therein has on key outcomes at various levels of analysis.
What are the causes and consequences of the variation in peacebuildng and statebuilding activities in which international missions engage? Despite the proliferation in peacebuilding and statebuilding activities among UN and regional organizations' missions, little attention is paid to explaining such variation and the macro- and micro-level consequences that these patterns of convergence and divergence have on war-torn societies.
I address this gap in two ways in this book project. First, I develop a theoretical and analytical framework—“programmatic interventions”—that explains the causes and consequences of the variation in the statebuildng and peacebuilding activities in which international organizations' missions engage. The framework expounds the scheduled, schematic, and procedural approach that these missions take to statebuilding and peacebuilding process in conflict-affected countries and, in doing so, explicates the systemic and contextual determinants of the statebuilding and peacebuilding activities in which missions engage. It also highlights the ways in which missions, through this process, become embedded in war-torn societies, leading to meaningful--and oftentimes divergent--outcomes at the macro and micro levels of analysis
Second, I assess each component of the "programmatic interventions" framework using original data on the peacebuilding and statebuilding activities of all UN and regional organizations' missions deployed in the post-Cold War era. I demonstrate that activity variation is dependent upon both supranational process of activity standardization and organizational specialization as well as contextual factors tied to activity apportionment and sequentialization among missions concurrently and successively deployed to conflict settings. Focusing on the crucial case of post-conflict Kosovo, I also demonstrate via an original survey experiment and text analyses of over 28,000 newspaper articles that Kosovars' institutional trust is heavily dependent upon the international mission tasked with its (re)construction process and that this relationship is heavily dependent upon two interrelated mechanisms: mission and institution portrayal in the media and individual assessments of the mission's effectiveness.
Ultimately, I present and assess in this book project a unified framework for understanding, at once, the causes of international missions’ engagement in various post-conflict statebuilding and peacebuilding activities and the impact that variation therein has on key outcomes at various levels of analysis.
