to the Security Council’s permanent members is often the deciding factor.
16
Outside
of these material influences, some find that the UN is motivated, at least in part,
by humanitarian and democratizing concerns (Carter 2002).
Finally, the Security Council has some idea of a particular faction’s propensity
for peace, and it updates its beliefs about the local’s type when it witnesses revealing
actions. Costless policy pronouncements are not instructive in this context. In wars,
especially civil wars where the factions actively court foreign aid and recognition,
competing sides wish to depict the other as the aggressor. Public relations interests
push locals to declare an interest in peace whether they wish to pursue it. So instead
of using the simple public rhetoric from the local combatants or the ubiquitous,
and usually fleeting, cease-fire arrangements,
17
the UN should rely instead on the
less common, more detailed, and potentially more costly, peace treaties.
18
Peace
treaties, unlike simple cease-fire announcements, are potentially useful signals.
19
As
explained in the preceding section, it is not clear, however, how the UN will interpret
these signals.
3
The Peacekeeping Model
The model represents the implementation phase of a cease-fire in an intrastate war.
A stable peace is not necessary only circumstances where a credible opportunity for
peace exists. The structure of the game is shown in Figure 1.
20
In it, I focus on
the interaction between the veto-member of the UN Security Council (UN) and the
most recalcitrant local faction (L). In the Security Council, only the decisions of
the permanent members matter.
21
These five members each have a veto over UN
16
Some argue that in particular the country’s importance to the United States is the determining
factor (Bennis 1996), with US interests predominately determining the when and where of UN
interventions.
17
The UN is unlikely to intervene without, at a minimum, a cease-fire arrangement. Consequently,
although the absence of a cease-fire agreement would be a strong signal to the UN, because almost
all situations where the UN considers intervening have seen multiple cease-fire agreements, simply
observing a cease-fire does little to reveal the local’s type
18
Cease-fires, by themselves, are seldom good indicators of peace. For example, in the early 1990’s
the Serbs and Croats signed dozens of quickly broken cease-fires.(?) Similarly, Doyle and Sambanis
note the numerous, and usually unsuccessful, cease-fires that populated the 1980’s Sudanese civil
war.
19
For purposes of this paper, treaties differ from cease-fires in two important ways: (1) treaties
include provisions for an ultimate political settlement and (2) treaties include potentially costly
provisions for the opposing sides.
20
In Figure 1, the local’s payoffs are listed first, the UN’s second.
21
UN authorization also requires a majority of the Security Council. Empirically, without a
permanent member holdout, however, this non-permanent member majority never materializes.
Consequently, I ignore the possibility.
6
Convention