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Thaddäus Braun

PhD Student in International Relations and Political Science and Doctoral
Researcher at the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding (CCDP)
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Spoken languages
German, English, French, Spanish

PHD
 

PhD Thesis Title: Belligerents Consent to United Nations Peace Missions

PhD Supervisor: Sara Hellmüller and Corinne Bara

The paper based dissertation examines belligerents’ consent to United Nations peace missions. Although consent is widely recognized as a prerequisite for the success of peace operations, we know comparatively little about why governments and armed groups cooperate with, resist, or ultimately withdraw their support for these missions over time. To shed light on this, he investigates whether it evolves in response to both mission-related factors, such as mandate design, and broader contextual changes, including shifts in military, economic, and political environments. While the central focus is on the determinants of belligerent consent, he also studies consent more broadly through a project looking at Quick Impact Projects (QIPs). QIPs are widely justified by the assumption that delivering tangible benefits to local communities fosters local consent and reduces resistance toward peace missions. By examining their socio-economic effects, he tests the effectiveness of one of the principal operational strategies through which UN peace missions seek to build and sustain consent. Methodologically, the dissertation combines quantitative causal inference approaches with mixed methods research and qualitative process tracing. The latter draws on fieldwork and interviews conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kosovo to uncover the mechanisms through which consent is gained, maintained, and eroded.
 

Profile
 

Thaddäus is a PhD candidate in International Relations and Political Science and a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, where he works on the SNSF project Yes, I Do: A Theory on Belligerent Consent to United Nations Peace Missions. He holds a Master’s degree in Comparative and International Studies from ETH Zurich and previously worked at the Center for Security Studies.
 

Areas of expertise
 

  • Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding

  • Economic Development in Conflict

  • Armed Conflicts and Political Violence