Warming, cooling, commodity prices, and conflict: do UN peacekeeping troops reduce the effects?

The conflict literature suggests that UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) reduce the death toll due to armed conflict. In contrast, deviations from moderate temperatures and changes in commodity prices might increase conflict. In this paper, I ask whether additional UN troops in countries with preexisting PKOs and active conflicts reduce the harmful effects of deviations from moderate temperatures and fluctuations in commodity prices on the intensity of conflict. In other words, do PKOs increase resilience? First, I develop a conceptual framework relating mission size to the effects of temperature and commodity prices. Second, I estimate the effects in a monthly country-level panel of PKOs with UN troops from 1990 to 2019. I find that deviations from moderate temperatures, negative shocks to commodity prices, and both negative and positive price shocks in oil exporters increase the conflict-related death toll. However, at the mean level of peacekeeping troops, countries are largely protected. I conclude that policy-makers might benefit from increasing peacekeeping troops in areas exposed to extreme temperatures or fluctuations in commodity prices.