Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal. 2021. Incredible commitments: How UN peacekeeping failures shape peace processes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Excerpt

In Incredible Commitments, Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal raises an important challenge to the literature on United Nations peacekeeping: given catastrophic and memorable failures of UN peacekeeping operations especially in the 1990s, why have parties to internal armed conflicts continued to seek out UN peacekeeping operations? This question, and Dayal’s answer to it, are central for practitioners and academics alike. First, UN peacekeeping is the most prominent activity of the United Nations, with arguably increasing demand but supply stretched thin and vivid debates about the form and future of UN peacekeeping operations. Second, a considerable body of research on the deployment and impact of UN peacekeeping (and third-party actors in general) has relied on a credible commitment theory of third-party involvement in internal armed conflicts. Dayal’s book persuasively challenges this theory and offers an insightful alternative explanation with implications for research on other international organizations as well. …