Local Impact, Global Trust? Peacekeeping Exposure and the Legitimacy of the United Nations

Scholarship on international organisations (IOs) has studied when and why citizens perceive them as legitimate. Despite its important contributions, the literature on IO legitimacy has insufficiently addressed that individuals are differently affected by IO decisions. While IOs are distant and abstract for some, their decisions have enormous consequences for the lives of others. We address this gap by studying how exposure to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions at the local level affect perceptions of its legitimacy. Our empirical strategy utilizes geocoded sub-national data on peacekeeping deployment and sub- national data on UN legitimacy perceptions from the World Value Surveys. We employ entropy balancing to minimize observed confounders on the level of individual respondents and show that those who are most directly affected by UN peacekeeping are substantially less confident in the UN. The finding seems to be driven by responsibility attribution: individuals who live close to UN peacekeepers lose confidence in the UN when they are concerned about a conflict in their country, while UN legitimacy perceptions of individuals in other regions do not show similar patterns. The paper has important implications for debates on the legitimacy of the UN as well as scholarship on the local effects of UN peacekeeping.