Bosnia shows that peacekeeping missions in civil conflicts can often have little impact on the level of violence

The conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine have been accompanied by calls for intervention from foreign countries. One possibility for this form of intervention would be a peacekeeping mission of the kind conducted by the UN in Bosnia during the 1990s, but do such missions actually have the capacity to stabilise conflict-torn regions? Using data from the Bosnian war, Stefano Costalli writes on the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations. He notes that peacekeepers were generally deployed in the areas in Bosnia which had the highest levels of violence, but that the response was largely reactive and often suffered delays. Ultimately there was no link between the deployment of UN peacekeepers and an actual reduction in violence.

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