Do peacekeepers contain conflict? Insights from spatially disaggregated data

Mission-level data strongly suggests that peacekeeping operations offer a path toward conflict reduction. Recently available spatially disaggregated intra-mission data tells a more complex story. Peacekeepers are deployed, within missions, to where violence strikes, and they can prevent bloodshed, but the evidence for the latter is relatively brittle and contingent. This paper suggests that these findings at different levels of aggregation need not be contradictory, but that they constitute a puzzle that calls for continued efforts to improve and expand access to intra-mission data and a new evaluative approach that investigates a variety of adjustable mission components. I discuss the particular relevance of high-resolution geographic data for analyses of peacekeeping, comprehensively compile recent data collection efforts in this area, summarize their key findings and limitations, and outline a research frontier as it emerges from these datasets.