Women Leaders and Peacekeeping Contributions

What impact does women’s executive leadership have on state involvement in UN peacekeeping missions? We aim to explore a few common explanations for state commitment to peacekeeping operations, taking leadership into account for the first time. In particular, past literature has focused on state-based explanations that exclude individual leadership from the equation, often relying primarily on security explanations for committing troops. However, we posit that due to factors such as the political double bind, gendered leadership may matter in this decision calculus. Specifically, we argue that women leaders may be more likely to commit to UN peacekeeping missions as a way to signal their commitment to both humanitarian concerns and security concerns. We place this research among the growing literature on women leaders, the double bind, and foreign policy decision-making.