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Why do peacekeeping missions succeed or fail? Prior work has focused primarily on the behavior of the organization supplying the mission, the mandate and resources devoted to the mission and the characteristics of the conflict into which the mission is being sent. Missing from the literature is an analysis of how the belligerents help shape the peacekeeping mission that ultimately arrives in country and what those efforts mean for the mission's outcome. Peacekeeping missions almost always go to a conflict with at least one party's consent. Thus scholars have worked from the assumption that consent is a signal of long-term peaceful intentions, rarely considering the strategic behavior belligerents exhibit in their interactions with peacekeeping institutions. This paper demonstrates that the mixed record of peacekeeping is evidence that presence or absence of consent is not a powerful enough indicator of intentions to settle. Next, the paper offers an alternative source of information about belligerents commitment to peace. Drawing from formal theories of war termination, I hypothesize that the nature of the belligerents peacekeeping offer is more informative than the presence or absence of consent. Starting from the perspective that consent serves as a mechanism for bargaining leverage, I argue that what belligerents try to negotiate with respect to the peacekeeping mission may serve as a clue to their true interest in committing to lasting peace. I expect belligerents who try to negotiate weaker peacekeeping to be more likely to violate ceasefires and/or attack missions, with important consequences for the effectiveness of the mission. I demonstrate these dynamics with empirical tests on new data that capture the terms of consent for peacekeeping missions sent to civil wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1974 Richard Johnson published his seminal Managing the White House, which examined the management styles of presidents Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. Johnson identified three dominant management approaches - the "competitive", the "collegial" and the "formalistic"- and argued that because each had their own strengths and weaknesses, none could be considered superior. Since Johnson published his book, however, most presidents have adopted variants of the formalistic approach, and scholars now describe it as the "standard" method for managing the presidency. The competitive and collegial models have been relegated to historical curiosities. In this paper we reexamine Johnson's typology. By identifying the underlying structural attributes that differentiate the three management models, we make two important points. First, the models in their ideal form differ significantly in how they channel information to the president and, potentially, in their impact on presidential decisionmaking. Second, the historical evolution of the management approaches, from FDR's competitive model to the now dominant formalistic model, can be understood as an implicit tradeoff, in which presidents opt to limit the choices flowing to them in order to achieve greater decisionmaking efficiency, but at the cost of making less informed decisions. We conclude by arguing that scholars, when advising presidents on how best to organize the presidential staff, pay more attention to the costs of using the standard model, and the potential benefits of competitive staffing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do peacekeeping missions succeed or fail? Prior work has focused primarily on the behavior of the organization supplying the mission, the mandate and resources devoted to the mission and the characteristics of the conflict into which the mission is being sent. Missing from these analyses is an analysis of how the belligerents help shape the peacekeeping mission that ultimately arrives in country and what those efforts mean for the mission's outcome. Peacekeeping missions almost always go to a conflict with at least one party's consent. Thus scholars have worked from the assumption that consent is a signal of long-term peaceful intentions, rarely considering the strategic behavior belligerents exhibit in their interactions with peacekeeping institutions. This paper demonstrates that the mixed record of peacekeeping is evidence that presence or absence of consent is not a powerful enough indicator of intentions to settle. Next, the paper offers an alternative source of information about belligerents commitment to peace. Drawing from formal theories of war termination, I hypothesize that the nature of the belligerents peacekeeping offer is more informative than the presence or absence of consent. Starting from the perspective that consent serves as a mechanism for bargaining leverage, I argue that what belligerents try to negotiate with respect to the peacekeeping mission may serve as a clue to their true interest in committing to lasting peace. I expect belligerents who try to negotiate weaker peacekeeping to be more likely to violate ceaseres and/or attack missions, with important consequences for the effectiveness of the mission. I demonstrate these dynamics with empirical tests on new data that capture the terms of consent for peacekeeping missions sent to civil wars. The data include UN missions, regional organization missions and peacekeeping operations conducted by single states. Preliminary results suggest that missions operating under limitations set by the belligerents are more likely to experience renewed violence. Further tests also suggest that the predictive value of any signal is strongest for predicting behavior in the short term following a mission, while longer-term measures of mission success are subsumed by other factors. I discuss the ramifications of these results for the overall effectiveness of peacekeeping missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As civil conflicts continue to rage around the globe, the UN has increasingly used peace- keeping to try and quell these devastating wars. Attention focuses on the interveners to explain success and failure, yet very few scholars have focused on the combatants themselves. In fact, the literature tends to assume that consent signals a true desire for peace with the hope that interveners can alleviate cooperation issues inherent to civil conflict. We argue that consent is not always a signal of peaceful intentions and further that peacekeepers may be used for strategic purposes, emphasizing that combatant inter- ests and motivations for giving consent must factor into the discussion of peacekeeping success and failure. We illustrate the various dynamics with cases from Africa. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reexamines the typology used by Richard Johnson in examining the management patters of U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. The three management approaches identified by Johnson were the competitive, the collegial, and the formalistic. It was found that scholars put more emphasis on the costs of using the standard model and the potential benefits of competitive staffing when giving pieces of advice on how best to organize the presidential staff.

Peace negotiations between warring belligerents often fail and those that do succeed initially are often challenged soon after implementation by spoiler groups. In this paper, we examine via a formal model the strategic incentives of the primary negotiating groups to include extremist factions in the peace process and thereby increase the risk that no agreement is reached or to exclude the extremist faction from the negotiations. While this latter course increases the chance than an agreement will be reached it also increases the risk that whatever agreement is signed will come under attack once it is implemented. Under what conditions are extremist groups included in the peace process and what strategy is most likely to encourage the formation and implementation of a peace agreement that can endure? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Durability of Peace: Agreements, Enforcement, and Information Recent efforts to explain why some peace agreements last while others fail have focused on the strength of the agreement itself (Fortna 2003, 2004). Maintaining peace, even if both belligerents want peace, can be difficult if there are temptations to defect or there are reasons to fear that one may be played for the sucker (Walter 1997, Fearon 1998). Strong agreements that can increase the costs of defection, enhance monitoring, or reward cooperation help to solve this enforcement dilemma. While we do not dispute that commitment problems plague many agreements and that strong agreement can help to ameliorate this problem, we demonstrate in this article that information problems are also an important explanation for why some peace agreements last while others do not. While some agreements fail despite the belligerents’ desire for peace, other agreements fail because at least one belligerent prefers war to the previously negotiated settlement. These informational arguments lead us to expect that cease fires that come about as a consequence of third party pressure are more likely to fail than ‘naturally’ derived ceasefires and that ceasefires that come about after wars with consistent battle outcomes are less likely to fail. The empirical results strongly support these expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the threat of intervention affect aggressive behavior in crises? Previous theoretical work suggests that potential interveners influence an aggressor's choices in conflict, including the demands she issues. This paper presents two empirical tests, one using informal hypotheses and one testing strategic hypotheses generated from a formal model. It suggests that demands are endogenously chosen and shows that potential interveners exert moderating effects on aggressor's demands. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the strategic dynamics of intervention in international conflict. Using a formal model that includes three strategic actors, I develop expectations over conflict onset, duration and participation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]