victories may be more stable than government victories and even agreements backed by peacekeepers in
the long-run, but there is also the risk that they fail
in the short-term. In addition, the purges, repression
and other unsavory means of consolidating power
that often accompany rebel victories represent violations of international human rights standards.
Reducing Battlefield and Civilian Casualties
Deciding whether or not to deploy peacekeepers
should also include a consideration of the human
costs associated with intervention. Most obviously,
these involve casualties that take place on the battlefield, but wars also kill and displace civilian populations and continue to do so long after a conflict ends.26
Do peacekeepers reduce the number of casualties inflicted by war and does this protection come with any
tradeoffs?
In the more specific case of UN peacekeeping, a reduction in battlefield deaths occurs when peacekeepers are armed and deployed in a sizable number to
intervene in a civil war. In the set of civil wars that occurred in Africa from 1992 to 2011, Lisa Hultman and
her colleagues report that armed UN troops reduced
battlefield violence to a dramatic degree.27 The average number of battle deaths in conflicts without UN
troops was 22 per month; according to their model, a
deployment of 10,000 troops would drop that average
to 6 per month, or a 70 percent reduction in battlefield
deaths.28 There is no such reduction in battle deaths,
however, when peacekeepers serve a policing or monitoring role. Thus, the ability of troops to separate belligerents forcefully and suppress violence is crucial in
reducing the human cost of conflict. Admittedly, large
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