The project has been guided by the overall purpose to explore what strategies UN peacekeeping mission use to protect civilians and what strategies are effective in protecting civilians from physical violence. By exploring both what peacekeeping missions do and what the impact of various strategies are for reducing violence against civilians, the project has sought to better understand the mechanisms by which peacekeeping missions can contribute to civilian protection.

As a way of empirically addressing the research question, I have pursued a few different conceptualizations of peacekeeping strategies. In a few studies, variations in both capacity and constitution of peacekeeping deployment are measured as a way of getting at the underlying capabilities missions have for pursuing more engaging operational strategies in response to violent groups. In another study, we have coded where peacekeepers are deployed within countries where they operate, since we argue that local deployment enables peacekeeping missions to increase both military and political costs of attacking civilians. We are thus able to examine whether the UN physically deploys troops to the locations where governments or rebel groups attack civilians, as well as the impact of such local deployment for civilian protection. In addition to these quantitative approaches, I have also coded the operational tasks that 13 peacekeeping operations have carried out to the end of protecting civilians. All these measures of how peacekeeping missions act can help us uncover the mechanisms by which peacekeeping could serve to protect civilians from physical violence.

The project has generated a number of important findings. First, it has demonstrated that peacekeeping capacity and constitution matter for civilian protection. When peacekeeping missions have sufficient personnel on the ground they can engage in activities that reduce violence, such as acting as a barrier between the warring actors and aiding disarmament processes. As such, the project has made significant contribution to the research field, which has primarily measured the impact of peacekeeping using a dichotomous measure of presence or not. The findings suggest that a successful peacekeeping strategy is to deploy a large number of troops and police who can engage in operational activities such as separating combatants and policing armed groups behind the frontlines.

Second, the project has explored the importance of local presence, demonstrating that peacekeeping missions take a proactive role relative to rebel groups by deploying to areas where rebels pursue violence against civilians, and in those locations also successfully protecting civilians from violence by rebels. However, peacekeeping seems to work through a different mechanism when it comes to government behavior. While the total number of personnel at the mission level is associated with a lower overall level of violence against civilians by state forces, this seems in general not to be the result of a local presence mechanism, but rather of political pressure.

Third, the project has developed a theoretical framework that summarizes the mechanisms by which peacekeeping may work to protect civilians, which can be used to link overall strategies to operational activities. The framework suggests that protection can come about through the following two mechanisms: reducing the incentives for violence (by increasing the military as well as the political costs of targeting civilians) and reducing the capacity for violence (through physical interference and by reducing capabilities). To allow for a systematic empirical analysis of peacekeeping strategies, data on these activities have been collected for all UN missions with protection mandate in the period 2000-2013.

The research on peacekeeping strategies and their effectiveness has generated a number of new research questions and spin-off ideas. Most notably, it led to questions about how peacekeeping works relative to other forms of interventions and the conditions under which different forms of intervention serve to protect civilians; these are questions that I am now exploring as a Wallenberg Academy Fellow (funded by The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation). This involves, for example, examining the impact of economic sanctions on conflict dynamics, and the degree to which the military command of a rebel group determines the effectiveness of both peacekeeping and mediation efforts in addressing sexual and lethal violence against civilians.

The project has had a strong international profile. Much of the work has been done in collaboration with other scholars. The research on capacity and constitution of peacekeeping and violence-reduction is joint work with Associate Professor Jacob Kathman (University of Buffalo) and Associate Professor Megan Shannon (University of Colorado). We have had research-group meetings in Sweden (June 2013 in Stockholm and June 2015 in Uppsala) and we organized a book workshop on our joint manuscript (November 2017 in Tempe, Arizona). I have also conducted interviews with people working with protection of civilians within the UN Secretariat in New York, and with people who have experience from working in the field with protection issues in peacekeeping missions. The research outputs of the project has been presented at various conferences and workshops, including the international Folke Bernadotte Academy working group on peacekeeping research.

One ambition with the project has been to ensure that the findings and conclusions reach a wide audience. This has been done by publishing in high-impact journals; one article is published in American Political Science Review, the top journal in political science, and another article has been accepted for publication in International Organization, a top journal in international relations. I have also distributed the findings by writing popularized articles and blog posts, both Swedish and international, as a way of communicating the results to policy makers and practitioners.