Why Protectors Become Predators? Violence against Civilians by AMISOM Peacekeepers in Somalia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study investigates the phenomenon of peacekeepers resorting to lethal violence against civilians, despite their mandate to protect them. While existing literature acknowledges that some peacekeepers perpetrate human rights abuses, including sexual exploitation and excessive force, there has been a notable neglect of studies on lethal violence within the broader spectrum of peacekeeping misconduct. I propose and evaluate two explanations: the revengehypothesis, suggesting emotional responses to attacks on comrades as drivers of violence, and the show of force hypothesis, where violence is an unintentional byproduct of deterring perceived threats. Using original survey data and an event dataset from AMISOM in Somalia, I leverage the random exposure to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Results suggest that while IED attacks on peacekeepers are linked to subsequent violence against civilians, lethal force is primarily used following the loss of a fellow peacekeeper due to an IED attack, supporting the revenge mechanism. These insights reveal the intricate interplay of emotions and peacekeeping dynamics, providing insights into the origins of abusive behavior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".