The Role of Military Equipment in Peacekeeping Operations: Advancing Knowledge on Mission Performance

When are peacekeeping operations (POs) successful? A leading answer from quantitative peacekeeping research is that mission size and personnel composition matter.

The larger the deployment, the higher the number of uniformed troops, and the more culturally different the peacekeepers, the better peacekeeping performance. Practitioners, on the other hand, oftentimes highlight that adequate military equipment is crucial in this regard.

Due to the lack of structured cross-sectional, time-varying data on how POs are equipped, peacekeeping scholars have, thus far, not been able to directly evaluate these appeals in a systematic manner.

Consequently, it is unclear whether POs are indeed under-equipped, whether and to which extent this varies across cases and what role equipment deficiencies play for peacekeeping performance. ROMEO addresses this significant research gap in three ways.

First, it systematically synthesizes and structures information on how POs are equipped (RO1), recording which country contributes material to which PO, supporting which operational function, with how many items of equipment, using which specific system for 87 UN and non-UN POs in Sub-Saharan Africa between 1991 and 2023 (WP1).

Second, ROMEO establishes basic empirical knowledge on military peacekeeping equipment (RO2) by descriptively exploring the new equipment data from WP1 and other sources along four dimensions – availability, suitability, state-of-the-art, and technical interoperability – to compare equipment deficiency over time (a), across UN and non-UN POs (b), and within different actors over time (c).

Third, it advances our understanding on the conditions under which peacekeeping works (RO3) as it uses the multidimensional information from WP2 to statistically model the relation between military equipment deficiencies and the ability of POs to limit conflict-related violence, especially against civilians (WP3).