ABSTRACT

The determinants of a country's UN peacekeeping troop contribution have been persistently studied. Trade, as a crucial self-interest motivation, is one of the important explanatory variables in the extant literature. However, the existing literature presents mixed results on the influence of trade on peacekeeping troop contributions. To capture the effect of trade on contributions precisely, we need to model expectations about future trade volume in a better way. Countries are pressured by the economic and political risks caused by the trade disruption and lobby groups to send peacekeeping troops to enable future trade or secure future investments. Therefore, trade potential, rather than realized trade, drives peacekeeping troop contributions. A gravity model is used to measure the trade potential between the UN peacekeeping mission countries and contributors, and test its relationship with the UN peacekeeping participation. Based on this measurement and a dyadic troop contribution dataset covering the period from 1990 to 2012, this article demonstrates that the counter-factual predictive trade volume is a relevant predictor of UN peacekeeping troop contributions.

摘要

一个国家的联合国维和部队贡献的决定因素一直被持续研究。贸易作为一种至关重要的自利动机，是现存文献中的重要解释变量之一。然而，现有文献在贸易对维和部队贡献的影响方面呈现出不同的结果。为了准确捕捉贸易对贡献的影响，我们需要以更好的方式模拟对未来贸易量的预期。各国受到贸易中断和游说团体造成的经济和政治风险的压力，要求派遣维和部队以实现未来的贸易或确保未来的投资。因此，推动维和部队贡献的是贸易潜力，而不是已实现的贸易。引力模型用于衡量联合国维和任务国与派遣国之间的贸易潜力，并检验其与联合国维和参与的关系。基于此测量和涵盖 1990 年至 2012 年期间的二元部队贡献数据集，本文证明反事实预测贸易量是联合国维和部队贡献的相关预测指标。