Need to Eat to Live: The interacting effects of food aids and UN peacekeeping on civilian...

"Need to Eat to Live: The interacting effects of food aids and UN peacekeeping on civilian victimization"

by Samaila Adelaiye & Bongjoo Kim (State University of New York at Buffalo)

Abstract:

"Since the 1992 Southern Africa food crisis and the international conferences on nutrition by WHO has started, the focus on food security have maintained in both policy and research community. Recent studies have found that food insecurity is one of the lingering effects of violence that substantially increase the numbers of those who perish as a result of fighting (Ghobarah, Huth and Russett 2003) and also vice versa. (Ray and Esteban 2017) The mechanisms for this effect have focused largely on how the level of violence varies based on how severe the actors’ food insecurities are. However, this paper focuses on how the UN peacekeeping further mitigate the level of violence toward civilians through the moderate effect of providing food resources to both insurgents and incumbents. Given that the high level of food insecurity is related to higher levels of civilian victimization (Koren and Bagozzi 2016), we expect that the presence of robust UNPKO’s interacted with a higher UN commitment to food program on their mission should be associated with lower levels of one side violence in conflict. This relationship can be further strengthened in the presence of PKOs that has its main focus on specific mandates and agendas for the humanitarian aids especially."

Discussants:

Ore Koren (Indiana University)

Martin Ottmann (University of Birmingham)

Megan Shannon (University of Colorado)

OSPC Coordinator:

Cassy Dorff (Vanderbilt University).