The international community relies heavily on the tool of peacekeeping to provide post-conflict stability. It celebrates success in prolonging peace duration and preventing conflict recurrence. These measurements fail to assess its effects on terrorism. Do U.N. peacekeeping operations (PKOs) contribute to terrorism and augment the opportunities for terrorist actors? Using variations of negative binomial and Poisson regression estimations on an original incident-level dataset of 3,434 terrorist incidents that occurred over the course of two years preceding and following initial U.N. peacekeeping missions since 1991, I find that the deployment of peacekeeping missions has a consistently significant positive effect on the amount of subsequent terrorist incidents. This finding is robust across various models and is strengthened when controlling for the domestic character of terrorist incidents. Lack of effective governance coincides with this development but does not suffice as explanation for the dramatic increases in terrorist incidents following PKOs. A correlation between peacekeeping and terrorist incidents needs to inform future structuring of such operations.
