Pitfalls and Prospects in the Literature on UN Peacekeeping Contribution: Towards a Global Governance Explanation.

The study of UN peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict countries has grown dramatically in recent years. However the politics of contributing peacekeeping forces to these UN operations still tends to be taken for granted. Where do peacekeepers come from, and what is the politics involved in countries contributing armed forces to the UN? These are some of the questions that this paper sets out to answer. As the global deployment of UN peacekeepers is now famously second only to that of American armed forces, understanding the dynamics of peacekeeping contribution has become a necessity. This paper sets out to understand UN peacekeeping contribution in the aggregate, and to understand the place of such contributions in the context of global governance. This paper also offers a critique of existing theories of peacekeeping contribution. The implications of these massive new deployments of military personnel are sketched out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]