Punching before the Bell Rings: United Nations Signaling and Pre-Deployment Violence in Civil Wars

In the post-Cold War era, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping has been an effective civil conflict mitigation tool. On the path to peacekeeping, the UN Security Council often signals its growing likelihood to deploy an operation by passing resolutions addressing the conflict. How do these signals affect violence levels in a pre-operation environment? We posit that conflict actors have incentives to improve their relative positions through violence as the UN signals its likelihood to intervene. Using a new dataset that links UNSC resolutions to active civil wars from 1989 to 2014, we find that resolution passage is significantly related to an increase in combatant use of anti-civilian violence. Additionally, as the signal strengthens with the passage of a greater number of resolutions, violence increases. Thus, although deployed peacekeeping operations may effectively protect non-combatants, the process leading to deployment can produce a dangerous environment for civilians.