Where do EU peacekeeping missions go?

Since the late 1990s, the European Union (EU) has evolved on the world stage as a conflict manager. Despite the fact that the EU has already sent numerous civilian and military peacekeeping missions, most scholars have researched the EU as a security actor with case studies on singular peacekeeping missions. This thesis adds to the debate with one of the first quantitative studies in the field of EU peacekeeping missions. It thus addresses a niche in the political science literature. This thesis unpuzzles some of the motivational factors on where the EU sends its peacekeeping missions – and where not. More specifically, it looks whether trade, trade with natural resources, threat of terrorism, colonial ties and a mandate from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) are explanatory factors for to which conflicts the EU sends its peacekeeping missions. These possible explanatory factors were derived deductively from previous literature. This thesis looked at all conflicts from 1998 until 2018 and coded where the EU did intervene and where not. It focuses on conflicts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, since these are the main regions for EU’s foreign policy and of specific interest for its security more particularly. This left a sample of 97 conflicts, out of which for 90 conflicts data are complete. This thesis used an ordinal regression analysis, to represent the ordinal character of no, civilian, small-medium and big EU peacekeeping missions. It also used binary logistic regression analyses as robustness check for the findings of the ordinal logistic regression analysis. The strongest finding is that the EU is much more likely to send a peacekeeping mission, if there is a mandate from the United Nations Security Council. This was highly significant throughout all models. In the binary logistic regression model focussing on military missions, it was also found that threat of terrorism, whether the state in conflict is a democracy and the presence of a peacekeeping operation by another international organization drive the deployment of EU peacekeeping missions. However, strong trade relationships were shown to make the EU less likely to intervene in that model. The findings of this thesis thus suggest that the EU is strongly committed to multilateralism and the UN as central role in international relations. Moreover, it suggests that the EU is less likely to engage in contentious conflicts, in which no legitimization by the broad international community was given.