Rebuilding trust in national police: The case of the UN mission in Mali

Abstract International interventions often aim to reinforce both capacity as well as perceived legitimacy of national security forces. However, how peacekeeping operations manage to improve trust in the national police has received limited attention. In this article, we evaluate whether and how UN missions can (re‐)build trust in the national police focusing on the case of Mali. We combine data on UN local deployment and nationally representative survey rounds from the Afrobarometer. We use the wealth of information from the survey to disentangle the mechanisms linking UN peacekeeping to positive changes in trust in national police. Employing a difference‐in‐difference estimation, we find that respondents in locations that hosted UN police report higher trust toward the national police forces compared to respondents in the control group. We find that this may be due to UN police improving perceptions of safety, accessibility to and integrity of national police forces.