Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes

Abstract

The credible commitment problem refers to the inability of parties in a conflict to commit to a peace agreement because they distrust the other party to keep up their end of the bargain. This problem is the prevailing explanation for why parties in a civil war cannot resolve their conflict peacefully without the involvement of a third party, such as the UN. According to this dominant view, UN peace operations make negotiated settlement possible by providing essential security guarantees that address credible commitment problems. In Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes, Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal contests this prevailing explanation by presenting an alternative theoretical framework in which combatants seek international assistance due to various distributional and reputational reasons, but not because of a predominant security concern. According to Dayal, parties in a peace process learn from highly visible failures of UN peacekeeping elsewhere but keep requesting UN assistance. As combatants often have strong reasons to doubt the UN’s ability to address commitment problems and deliver credible guarantees, the credible commitment theory of war termination is incomplete, if not flawed: