Dr Andrea Ruggeri awarded FBA Research Grant on 'Why and How UN Peacekeeping Leadership Composition Matters'

Congratulations to Andrea Ruggeri, who has been awarded a Folke Bernadotte Academy Research Grant for a project entitled 'Why and How UN Peacekeeping Leadership Composition Matters'.

Does diversity in composition of UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) affect their conflict resolution capacity?  Is the cultural distance between mission leadership and national contingents relevant to stop conflict and protect civilians?  Can differences between political and military UN mission leadership jeapardize missions’ effectiveness?  This project aims to create a comprehensive dataset on UN peacekeeping leadership with information both on PKO Secretary General Representatives and Military Chiefs in all the post-Cold War UN missions.  This will allow us to develop a final stage of a broader project on UN PKOs’ composition and their effectiveness in protecting civilians and stopping fighting parties.  These monthly data will include information on the leadership nationalities and their serving periods.  Then we will compute indexes of diversity in terms of interests, language, culture and military norms of PKOs’ leadership to study how diversity influences PKOs’ effectiveness.

This project will run from January 2016 to January 2018.