Democracy and UN-interventions : A study of state commitment to UN-interventions 1991-1999

Sammanfattning: After the Cold War a new world-order is in the making. The 1990s prove to be a seminal decade for sketching the contours of the emerging order. This developing order indicates a change in the legitimate use of force.



As civil wars erupted world-wide, the international community managed these conflicts by an unparalleled use of UN-interventions, the most legitimate type of intervention. Where to allocate these interventions and which states decide to do so are argued to have long-term implications for the legitimate use of force. Detecting a pattern of these events suggests what to expect of the future use of force, and how to understand it.



Over the past two decades the research known as the Democratic Peace Proposition (DPP) has shown that democracy affects the use of force (e.g. war) between states. Capitalising on these findings, this study centres on the three questions of how democratic norms affect states' commitment to UN-interventions, armed conflicts receiving a UN-intervention and the relationship between committing states and armed conflicts.



The thesis uses unique data on states' monthly participation to all UN-interventions in the 1990s, to analyse the relationship between state commitment and democracy. The findings suggest tendencies, together indicating a significant development in our understanding of when multilateral use of force is to be expected. The democratic states' preference to intervene in lesser democratic states is very likely to affect the incidence of UN-interventions.