What it Takes to Return : Un Peacekeeping and the Safe Return of Displaced People

We investigate whether UN peacekeeping fosters voluntary returns and alleviate neg- ative attitudes towards displaced people. We expect peacekeeping missions to achieve these goals by improving security and alleviating the socio-economic cost of new arrivals for host communities. Focusing on the crucial case of South Sudan, we combine information on peacekeepers’ subnational deployment with individuals’ intentions to move and host communities’ perceptions of returnees and displaced people (IDPs). To mitigate concerns about non-random assignment of peacekeepers, we propose two instrumental variable approaches. We find that UN peacekeeping affects both the magnitude and the quality of return. Displaced people are more likely to return home if peacekeepers are deployed to their county of destination. At the same time, the local presence of peace- keepers mitigates host communities’ negative perception of IDPs; they also enable the delivery of support to communities that seem to improve attitudes toward both returnees and IDPs