„[C]orruption directly affects several key peacebuilding activities […]“. (Zaum/Cheng, 2008: 4) In my Phd project I work on political corruption in the context of UN peacekeeping. The aim of this research is to find out in what way the United Nations deal with political corruption in their peacekeeping missions. This topic leads to a number of related questions, for example: Do the United Nations offer peacekeeping forces guidance in dealing with corruption? Is corruption in general considered to be a significant problem that must be addressed with specific measures? One important aspect here is that peacekeeping missions vary greatly in form and mandate. Especially in so called wider peacekeeping missions (Bellamy/Williams, 2010:193) the soldier’s tasks are far beyond their traditional responsibilities, sometimes even to the point of supporting the formation of new institutions. Strengthening weak institutions is most important because processes of democratization are prone to lead in another crisis if they remain incomplete (Teorell, 2015:18). In order to address these questions I analyze official documents publicized by peacekeeping related organs of the United Nations for example resolutions of the Security Council and reports of expert groups with a multilevel (qualitative and quantitative) approach. My dataset contains all official documents from the beginning of United Nations Peacekeeping in 1948 until today. I also employ data on the national composition of the missions taking into account that culture is a highly relevant factor in the perception of corruption. The preliminary analysis of this dataset (which contains more than 2000 text documents) indicated various types of corruption related contexts. This analysis therefore focusses on forms of corruption occurring especially in the context of peacekeeping missions.
