Yes, I Do: A Theory on Belligerent Consent to United Nations Peace Missions
Peace missions, including good offices engagements (GOEs), special political missions (SPMs), and peacekeeping operations (PKOs), are the main tools of the United Nations (UN) to maintain international peace and security. One of their core principles is consent, denoting the agreement of the belligerents to engage with the peace mission in view of facilitating the achievement of its objectives.
Consent is central for peace missions as without the cooperation of the belligerents, they can be severely hampered in the fulfilment of their mandates. Yet, despite the wide acknowledgement of the importance of the concept in both research and practice, there is to date no coherent theory on belligerent consent to UN peace missions. Consent remains under-specified, contested, and elusive.
The project fills this gap by developing a mid-level theory on belligerent consent to UN peace missions. It explores what consent means and how it manifests in practice, over time, and across peace missions. It also analyses the factors influencing consent and how consent relates to effectiveness. Overall, the proposed project makes a groundbreaking contribution by providing clarity on one of the most fundamental principles of making and keeping peace and thereby ultimately seeks to lay the foundations for more effective peace missions in the future.
Principal investigator
Dr. Sara Hellmüller
Dr. Sara Hellmüller is a senior researcher at ETH Zürich. Her work focuses on peace and conflict research, particularly the link between world politics and UN peace missions, norms in peacemaking, and knowledge production on peace. She also studies Switzerland’s engagement on sustaining peace and the protection of civilians during its term, notably as it pertains to UN peace operations.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Margaux Pinaud
Margaux Pinaud is a postdoctoral researcher on Prof. Hellmüller’s project Yes, I do: a theory on belligerent consent to UN peace missions. Prior to this, Margaux was coordinating activities in the SNSF/Agora project Communicating about Peace: UN peace missions and their mandates, which aimed to make academic research accessible to policymakers, practitioners and the public. Margaux joined the CCDP in January 2020 as a Visiting Fellow. She holds a Doctorate from the Humanitarianism and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester.
This project is funded through a Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
Sara Hellmüller 