Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new evidence that UN peacekeeping missions of the modern era, with their wide-ranging mandates and environmental awareness, can have measurably positive effects on host country water quality. This week, we’ll look at another issue area that has become a focus for peacekeepers as peacebuilding has become a vital part of the peacekeeping portfolio: the economic well-being of civilians.

As we noted last week, in addition to deterring ceasefire breaches and preventing the resumption of conflict through direct engagement with the major parties, peacekeepers since the Cold War have taken a more expansive view of their role in conflict zones. If conflict is a result of structural factors as well as choices by individual actors, the theory goes, then preventing a return to conflict requires addressing structural issues. One of the most fundamental structural issues — and one that is often exacerbated by conflict — is economic deprivation.

In a recent article in the American Journal of Political Science, Vincenzo Bove, Jessica Di Salvatore, and Leandro Elia try to parse out the effect that peacekeeping missions have on household consumption in economies that have been riven by conflict. They are less interested in UN programs specifically targeted at household consumption than in increased consumption as a positive externality of peacekeeping-driven increases in security. By their theory, the only impetus civilians need to begin returning to pre-war economic activities is a measure of physical safety from the ravages of the war.

To study their theory, Bove et. al. look at survey data from South Sudan during a period when the UN peacekeeping mission there — UNMISS — was specifically charged with conducting civilian protection operations. In the period they studied, some 15,000 blue helmets worked to improve civilian security in South Sudan during a time of both humanitarian and political crisis. It is a useful case for their theory both because of the focus on civilian protection and because the World Bank conducted multiple rounds of a large-scale, detailed economic survey during that time. The granular data generated by the World Bank allowed the researchers to plot how deployments of peacekeepers down to the county level affected the economic conditions civilians in those counties reported experiencing.

The correlations between peacekeeper deployment and consumption are substantial. Bove et. al. found that peacekeepers being deployed in a county predicts an almost 28% increase in the average amount of food civilians in that county consume. Similarly, the likelihood of missing meals falls 10%.

One way to interpret that data would be to say that peacekeepers likely directly inject a fair amount of money into the economy wherever they go, just by buying food and other supplies locally, and that their economic inputs could account for the increased consumption. That would make it less likely that the consumption gains had anything to do with security provision per se, but instead were the result of a kind of roundabout form of humanitarian aid.

Bove et. al., however, tested that interpretation by measuring the effect of peacekeepers on civilian perceptions of security. When peacekeepers were present, civilians reported feeling safer, they didn’t have to travel as far to get to a market, and they were more optimistic about the course of their lives. Once Bove et. al. controlled for all the indicators of increased civilian security, the increased consumption effects basically went away. That is, money from the peacekeepers can’t explain much of the consumption increase without the broader security improvements that the peacekeepers provide. The fact that people eat better when peacekeepers are doing their jobs, then, really does seem to be an externality of reducing conflict.

Esti Lamonaca recounted the experience of being a transgender non-binary soldier during the Trump administration’s attempt to ban trans people from the US military. Following President Trump’s tweets announcing the ban, Lamonaca experienced a surge in transphobic incidents, both from the general public and from their chain of command. They were put under investigation for their gender performance and reprimanded for not maintaining their hair length to the Army’s standard for “female” soldiers. Once the ban went into effect, they were forced to spend two years in the closet. Now, as a veteran and with the ban lifted by the Biden administration, there are still questions about when the Department of Veterans Affairs will provide trans veterans with access to gender-affirming health care.

Rupa Shenoy surveyed responses to the release of the Biden administration’s first annual Trafficking in Persons report. This year’s report has drawn harsh criticisms for the range of practices it puts under the category of “human trafficking,” from horrific cases of people kidnapped into slavery to rather less terrifying instances of Cuban doctors being sent abroad to work with underserved populations. The report also highlights the decline in human trafficking enforcement brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic — the number of alleged traffickers facing prosecution around the world fell below 10,000 for the first time since at least 2013, and no expert believes it is because trafficking has fallen off.

Trita Parsi drew the connection between the heavy toll taken by US sanctions against Iran and the outcome of the country’s recent national elections. Iran’s next president will be Ebrahim Raisi, an ultra-conservative much less open to finding common ground with the US than current president Hassan Rouhani. Turnout in the 2021 election was close to half of what it was in the last presidential election, in 2017, when voters went to the polls in droves to reward Rouhani’s efforts to end the most damaging aspects of the sanctions regime through an agreement not to pursue nuclear weapons. Iran kept up its end of the bargain, but the Trump administration reneged, reinstating sanctions that the Obama administration had lifted. In 2021, Parsi argued, reformist Iranian voters lost faith in Rouhani’s ability to produce concessions from the US and stayed home, handing the race to Raisi.

He even warns about the dangers of smoking.

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The prequel to “Sexy Pinups of the Postwar Era” is presumably somewhere out of frame on the lower shelf.

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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence really showcased the esteem in which it holds both the concept of workplace diversity and the open source intelligence community last week.

If put into motion, Shirley Graham Du Bois’ plan to smooth over the Sino-Soviet split would have made for incredible diplomatic theater.

It’s incredibly poor form for the manufacturers to not seal these bags with yellow ribbon.