Dear friends and colleagues,



With apologies for duplicate cross-listings,


I am writing to invite you to the next meeting of the PhD Kenkyuukai, hosted by the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, from 12:20-1:45pm on June 28th (Thursday).



Please note that the meeting room is *Rm 108 / Daiichi Kaigishitsu*, different from our usual location.


Speaker: Miku Matsunaga (University of Essex)
Title: "UN Peacekeeping and Selectivity"
Time: June 28 (Thu), 12:20-1:45pm
Location: Rm. 108, ISS / Shaken Main Building
http://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/guide/index.html



The presenter will be Miku Matsunaga, a PhD candidate at the University of Essex (Dept of Government). She earned her Master of Politics at New York University and Master of Public Policy at The University of Tokyo. Her research interests are international relations, comparative politics, and game theory.



Abstract


I develop a model to explain why the UN Security Council and members take action against violent humanitarian crises in some cases but not in others.The inconsistency in responses raises concerns that these actions are pretexts for an intervener's undeclared interests. This paper delves into the dynamics of selectivity regarding the UN-led Peacekeeping operations (PKO). Two questions are addressed: under what circumstances does the UN Security Council authorize PKO? Under what conditions do democracies participate in the UN PKO missions? Measuring humanitarian crises based on Political Terror Scale, this paper pursues two sets of results. 1) The Security Council's decision on whether to formalize a PKO is influenced by the following factors: the state capacity of the potential targets and their relative economic importance to permanent UNSC member states; the number of refugees; whether a target experiences a civil war, and how long the civil war lasts. 2) Democracies participate in UN PKOs when a target's formidability is low; the chance of victory is higher; humanitarian and security concerns (refugee and civil war) are greater; the expected benefits exceed the costs.




Kenneth Mori McElwain
Associate Professor
Institute of Social Science
University of Tokyo
www.kennethmcelwain.com <http://www.kennethmcelwain.com>
mcelwain@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp <mailto:mcelwain@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp>