Mandates through the rule of law: United Nations missions and foreign direct investment

Under what conditions do United Nations (UN) missions attract foreign direct investment (FDI) in conflict-affected countries? While existing studies examined various factors influencing FDI inflows to conflict-affected countries, there has been little attention to the impact of the UN’s multilateral interventions. This study examines the conditions under which UN missions—peacekeeping operations and special political missions—affect FDI inflows with a focus on their different types of mandates, specifically legal and political mandates. We argue that UN missions that include legal and political mandates tend to attract greater FDI inflows because they facilitate improvements in the rule of law. Analyzing 42 countries in sub-Saharan Africa with intrastate armed conflicts from 1992 to 2016 with fixed-effect panel and mediation analyses, we find that legal and political mandates enhance the rule of law in recipient countries, which, in turn, attracts increased FDI inflows. This research expands the literature on the economic development of conflict-affected countries by theorizing the understudied mechanism through which multilateral interventions impact inward investment, based on their disaggregated mandates, and by providing new empirical evidence.