11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Markus Stephan Tepe
Discussant/s:
Markus Stephan Tepe
Meeting Room G

Wenqing Huangfu, Tao Li, Xiangning Wu
Who Are Staffing the UN Organizations? Contributions, Connections and Ideologies.

Shenghao Zhang
UN peacekeeping contribution and status enhancement

Bernd Schlipphak, Constantin Schäfer, Oliver Treib
Authority Matters: Institutional Reforms, Cosmopolitanism, and the Public Legitimacy of International Organizations

David Weyrauch
Signalling disagreement or struggling to compromise? Analyzing abstention votes in the United Nations General Assembly.
UN peacekeeping contribution and status enhancement
Shenghao Zhang
University of Essex

A large literature sees status and reputation as drivers of international conflict onset, understanding status-seeking events as necessarily salient and dramatic. However, it may also be possible that status can be achieved via more quiet means such as peacekeeping. Accordingly, qualitative scholars regularly identify status and reputation as key motivations to contribute to peacekeeping missions. However, there is no systematic evidence that peacekeeping contributions really enhance a country’s status, possibly due to the difficulties associated with measuring status. In fact, countries can emulate the values and practices of the established powers and use peacekeeping as a tool to change its military status like Argentina’s deploying peacekeepers to overcome with the legacy of the military regime and gaining recognition and status (social mobility). Lower status countries can also find new value dimensions in peacekeeping like Canadaʼs wanting title of “good citizen” to increase its status (social creativity). Based on the literature’s theory of social mobility and social creativity, I propose a network theory (i.e. invitation continuation, cooperation continuation, signalling theory) that UN peacekeeping network can influence military status network. I use Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) network to measure military status network for signing an agreement shows military interaction and perceptive recognition, which echoes status. In other words, I am interested in whether peacekeeping ties can explain the formation of DCA ties and hypothesise that if a sender establishes more peacekeeping ties, the sender will also establish more DCA ties. I use (temporal) exponential random graph methods to test this network theory.