What determines UN interventions?

The United Nations name as one of their four main purposes "To keep peace throughout the world." Yet sometimes the public wonders why the UN intervenes in one conflict, but remains silent in others of similar magnitude and cruelty. So what determines where to intervene and where not? This paper analyzes a rich data set of 271 domestic and international conflicts, with the goal to unveil what determines the probability of intervention by the United Nation's Security Council in a conflict area. In this context, we employ methodologies from the field of spatial economics, in order to check for regional components in the Council's decision. The goal of this study is to shed light on the reasoning behind the United Nation’s decision to intervene and to specifically analyze whether regional proximity to its main donor nations plays a role. Our data comes from the World Bank data set (World Development Indicators), the Polity IV project, and the Center for Systemic Peace (major episodes of political violence).  In our baseline analysis, we use a logit approach to distinguish the dependent variable by 0 (no intervention), 1 (non-military intervention), and 2 (military intervention).