A paper in the current issue of Conflict Management and Peace Science presents data on every United Nations peacekeeping operation from 1990-2011, coded monthly by country and personnel type. The data, consisting of over 100,000 observations, promises to be of great value to future peacekeeping efforts; it offers granular insights into post-Cold War international interventions, including notable peacekeeping failures such as the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the human rights abuses of the early-1990s Bosnian War. The data was compiled at the direction of Jacob Kathman, an assistant professor of political science at SUNY Buffalo, who demonstrates a simple use case of peacekeeping effectiveness evaluation in the paper.
One commentator, George Mason PhD candidate Charles Martin Shields, applauded the data release and discussed expanding it to include monetary expenditures, which could help international organizations develop best practices for humanitarian intervention, military policing, medical provisioning and other operations.
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