By any other name? Rethinking the implications of mandate language in UN peace operations for civilian protection

This dissertation concerns the influence of mandate language on civilian protection in peace operations. Because peace operations do not exist in a legal vacuum, and must operate within the law, the first paper situates the 'Protection of Civilians' (POC) concept within the framework of international human rights and international humanitarian law. The second paper then addresses the influence of mandate on civilian protection and determines that even a bare-bones mandate indicator demonstrates that mandates are consequential for POC operations. The third paper introduces one of the main contributions of this dissertation: the Peace Operations Protective Language Dataset(PKO-PLD). In it, mandates authorized between 1988 and 2015 are coded according to their protective elements across different civilian populations. The fourth paper of the dissertation employs this original dataset to consider the impact of the various linguistic components on civilian casualties.In sum, this dissertation reveals that mandates do matter for civilian protection and that, in general, stronger mandates protect better than weaker ones.