Pub Date : 2022-03-02DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2022.2047026
P. Neubauer, Cornelius Friesendorf, Ursula C. Schroeder
ABSTRACT Nowadays, police officers are regularly deployed as members of multilateral peace operations. This article examines how these experts implement their mandates and how we can understand their activities. For this, we draw on a set of 90 semi-structured interviews with European police experts who have experience in multilateral policing. We find that, to navigate their work abroad, European police officers primarily rely on their own domestic policing experience, their experience from previous deployments and the experience of colleagues they meet in the mission. The extent to which they can rely on their own experience is shaped by how much discretion they find at their disposal. We identify two conditions limiting their discretion: the preferences, policies and histories of host states, and institutional lock-in effects within missions that reduce officers’ room to manoeuvre over time. While we also find that officers do not normally draw on international guidance documents in their everyday work, missions can nevertheless be regarded as sites where more localized transnational policing practices emerge. These mission-specific transnational practices are formed, over time, by successive cohorts of police officers from different countries.
{"title":"Everyday Police Work Abroad: A Story of Experience, Continuity and Change in Multilateral Missions","authors":"P. Neubauer, Cornelius Friesendorf, Ursula C. Schroeder","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2022.2047026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2022.2047026","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nowadays, police officers are regularly deployed as members of multilateral peace operations. This article examines how these experts implement their mandates and how we can understand their activities. For this, we draw on a set of 90 semi-structured interviews with European police experts who have experience in multilateral policing. We find that, to navigate their work abroad, European police officers primarily rely on their own domestic policing experience, their experience from previous deployments and the experience of colleagues they meet in the mission. The extent to which they can rely on their own experience is shaped by how much discretion they find at their disposal. We identify two conditions limiting their discretion: the preferences, policies and histories of host states, and institutional lock-in effects within missions that reduce officers’ room to manoeuvre over time. While we also find that officers do not normally draw on international guidance documents in their everyday work, missions can nevertheless be regarded as sites where more localized transnational policing practices emerge. These mission-specific transnational practices are formed, over time, by successive cohorts of police officers from different countries.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"308 - 332"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43438856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-02DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2022.2047027
Cameron Mailhot
{"title":"International Interventions and the Multiple Faces of Legitimacy","authors":"Cameron Mailhot","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2022.2047027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2022.2047027","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"333 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41375925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-22DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2022.2044312
Barış Arı
The credible commitment problem refers to the inability of parties in a conflict to commit to a peace agreement because they distrust the other party to keep up their end of the bargain. This problem is the prevailing explanation for why parties in a civil war cannot resolve their conflict peacefully without the involvement of a third party, such as the UN. According to this dominant view, UN peace operations make negotiated settlement possible by providing essential security guarantees that address credible commitment problems. In Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes, Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal contests this prevailing explanation by presenting an alternative theoretical framework in which combatants seek international assistance due to various distributional and reputational reasons, but not because of a predominant security concern. According to Dayal, parties in a peace process learn from highly visible failures of UN peacekeeping elsewhere but keep requesting UN assistance. As combatants often have strong reasons to doubt the UN’s ability to address commitment problems and deliver credible guarantees, the credible commitment theory of war termination is incomplete, if not flawed:
{"title":"Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes","authors":"Barış Arı","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2022.2044312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2022.2044312","url":null,"abstract":"The credible commitment problem refers to the inability of parties in a conflict to commit to a peace agreement because they distrust the other party to keep up their end of the bargain. This problem is the prevailing explanation for why parties in a civil war cannot resolve their conflict peacefully without the involvement of a third party, such as the UN. According to this dominant view, UN peace operations make negotiated settlement possible by providing essential security guarantees that address credible commitment problems. In Incredible Commitments: How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shape Peace Processes, Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal contests this prevailing explanation by presenting an alternative theoretical framework in which combatants seek international assistance due to various distributional and reputational reasons, but not because of a predominant security concern. According to Dayal, parties in a peace process learn from highly visible failures of UN peacekeeping elsewhere but keep requesting UN assistance. As combatants often have strong reasons to doubt the UN’s ability to address commitment problems and deliver credible guarantees, the credible commitment theory of war termination is incomplete, if not flawed:","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"348 - 350"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43879482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2022.2031992
Wouter Reggers, Valérie Rosoux, David Mwambari
ABSTRACT This article explores the interactions between the memories of Belgian peacekeepers killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the weight of the colonial past, and the Belgian foreign policy. Using interviews with Belgian politicians and diplomats, families of peacekeepers, former blue helmets, as well as a corpus of official speeches, this article finds that the memorialization of blue helmets has influenced Belgian political choices on three levels, namely: domestic politics, its bilateral relationship with Rwanda, and more broadly its position in international peacekeeping. In doing so, this article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on the role of collective memory in domestic and international politics.
{"title":"In Memory of Peacekeepers: Belgian Blue Helmets and Belgian Politics","authors":"Wouter Reggers, Valérie Rosoux, David Mwambari","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2022.2031992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2022.2031992","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the interactions between the memories of Belgian peacekeepers killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the weight of the colonial past, and the Belgian foreign policy. Using interviews with Belgian politicians and diplomats, families of peacekeepers, former blue helmets, as well as a corpus of official speeches, this article finds that the memorialization of blue helmets has influenced Belgian political choices on three levels, namely: domestic politics, its bilateral relationship with Rwanda, and more broadly its position in international peacekeeping. In doing so, this article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on the role of collective memory in domestic and international politics.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"258 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44635687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-29DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2022.2031993
Martin Welz
ABSTRACT Using institutional choice theory, this article seeks to explain why the G5 Sahel, an international organization that comprises Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, was created in 2014 and tasked to deal with conflict management in the Sahel through its Joint Force that was established in 2017. While the use of the theory offers crucial insights into the creation of the G5 Sahel, I also find that the theory overestimates the costs and risks attached to the creation of a new institution while underestimating the desire of states to maintain control over actions on the ground – at least when it comes to security questions.
{"title":"Institutional Choice, Risk, and Control: The G5 Sahel and Conflict Management in the Sahel","authors":"Martin Welz","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2022.2031993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2022.2031993","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using institutional choice theory, this article seeks to explain why the G5 Sahel, an international organization that comprises Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, was created in 2014 and tasked to deal with conflict management in the Sahel through its Joint Force that was established in 2017. While the use of the theory offers crucial insights into the creation of the G5 Sahel, I also find that the theory overestimates the costs and risks attached to the creation of a new institution while underestimating the desire of states to maintain control over actions on the ground – at least when it comes to security questions.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"235 - 257"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44249047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-13DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2021.2024761
Dustin Johnson
ABSTRACT The United Nations and many member states have placed increased emphasis on improving child protection in UN peacekeeping missions, particularly with regard to child soldiers. These efforts often depict a critical role for female peacekeepers in child protection. In this paper I analyse UN child protection documents, drawing on feminist critiques of gendered discourses in peacekeeping and work on children in global politics to explore how the UN understands gender in child protection contexts. I do so through an analysis of how peacekeepers’ gendered subject positions and representations of children in need of protection are constructed. I find that the construction of children primarily as victims lacking agency and in need of being saved, and a focus on female peacekeepers primarily in community engagement, risk perpetuating the neglect of children’s agency during armed conflict and leave the protective masculine basis of peacekeeping largely unchallenged. These constructions have implications for the implementation of both the children and armed conflict and WPS agendas in peacekeeping.
{"title":"Women as the Essential Protectors of Children?: Gender and Child Protection in UN Peacekeeping","authors":"Dustin Johnson","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2021.2024761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2021.2024761","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The United Nations and many member states have placed increased emphasis on improving child protection in UN peacekeeping missions, particularly with regard to child soldiers. These efforts often depict a critical role for female peacekeepers in child protection. In this paper I analyse UN child protection documents, drawing on feminist critiques of gendered discourses in peacekeeping and work on children in global politics to explore how the UN understands gender in child protection contexts. I do so through an analysis of how peacekeepers’ gendered subject positions and representations of children in need of protection are constructed. I find that the construction of children primarily as victims lacking agency and in need of being saved, and a focus on female peacekeepers primarily in community engagement, risk perpetuating the neglect of children’s agency during armed conflict and leave the protective masculine basis of peacekeeping largely unchallenged. These constructions have implications for the implementation of both the children and armed conflict and WPS agendas in peacekeeping.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"282 - 307"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43769426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-16DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2021.1989304
Tamer Morris
ABSTRACT The legal immunity of the UN has focused the peacekeeping literature on individual accountability and the political willingness of States to prosecute their own. UN immunity applies to peacekeeping operations only when the UN is in effective control. When a State is exerting effective control over its contingent, either solely or jointly, the actions of peacekeepers will be attributed to that State. When States are in effective control, they cannot rely on UN immunity for breaches of their obligations. Once a State is exercising effective control, it must warrant that sufficient mechanisms are undertaken to fulfil its obligations under the law, specifically the extra-territorial nature of international human rights law. The Mothers of Srebrenica case highlights that peacekeeping accountability is not limited to the prosecution of individual peacekeepers. Although UN immunity limits specific avenues of legal recourse, it does not prevent victims from seeking accountability from Troop Contributing Countries.
{"title":"State Responsibility and Accountability in UN Peacekeeping: The Case of The Mothers of Srebrenica v. The Netherlands","authors":"Tamer Morris","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2021.1989304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2021.1989304","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The legal immunity of the UN has focused the peacekeeping literature on individual accountability and the political willingness of States to prosecute their own. UN immunity applies to peacekeeping operations only when the UN is in effective control. When a State is exerting effective control over its contingent, either solely or jointly, the actions of peacekeepers will be attributed to that State. When States are in effective control, they cannot rely on UN immunity for breaches of their obligations. Once a State is exercising effective control, it must warrant that sufficient mechanisms are undertaken to fulfil its obligations under the law, specifically the extra-territorial nature of international human rights law. The Mothers of Srebrenica case highlights that peacekeeping accountability is not limited to the prosecution of individual peacekeepers. Although UN immunity limits specific avenues of legal recourse, it does not prevent victims from seeking accountability from Troop Contributing Countries.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"204 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41379618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-12DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2021.2001334
Timothy Donais
UN iconography around the protection of civilians in conflict contexts tends to be disarmingly reassuring. In one striking – if not atypical – image, a lightskinned and lightly-armed peacekeeper stands silent watch as an African woman goes about her daily business of gathering wood. Beyond the gendered and neocolonial tropes that are hard at work in this particular photo – evoking ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ – the message conveyed is one of quiet professionalism, with the UN’s thin blue line unthreateningly keeping out-of-frame dangers at bay, enabling everyday life to carry on. While the protection of civilians (PoC) in conflict-affected contexts has become increasingly central to contemporary peace operations, in reality the exercise of armed international agency in defence of the vulnerable has a decidedly uneven track record, and peacekeeping itself has proven to be an awkward and imperfect instrument of protection. Too often, despite strong mandates authorizing ‘all means necessary’, peacekeepers have failed to act, with disastrous consequences. Sexual abuse and exploitation scandals, in which peacekeepers prey on the very populations they are sent to protect, have also continued to plague UN operations and undermine their credibility with host populations. And even in cases where the UN can justifiably claim to have been instrumental in saving thousands of lives – as with South Sudan’s PoC sites – in circumstances
{"title":"Protecting Civilians: Mission Critical or Mission Impossible?","authors":"Timothy Donais","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2021.2001334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2021.2001334","url":null,"abstract":"UN iconography around the protection of civilians in conflict contexts tends to be disarmingly reassuring. In one striking – if not atypical – image, a lightskinned and lightly-armed peacekeeper stands silent watch as an African woman goes about her daily business of gathering wood. Beyond the gendered and neocolonial tropes that are hard at work in this particular photo – evoking ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ – the message conveyed is one of quiet professionalism, with the UN’s thin blue line unthreateningly keeping out-of-frame dangers at bay, enabling everyday life to carry on. While the protection of civilians (PoC) in conflict-affected contexts has become increasingly central to contemporary peace operations, in reality the exercise of armed international agency in defence of the vulnerable has a decidedly uneven track record, and peacekeeping itself has proven to be an awkward and imperfect instrument of protection. Too often, despite strong mandates authorizing ‘all means necessary’, peacekeepers have failed to act, with disastrous consequences. Sexual abuse and exploitation scandals, in which peacekeepers prey on the very populations they are sent to protect, have also continued to plague UN operations and undermine their credibility with host populations. And even in cases where the UN can justifiably claim to have been instrumental in saving thousands of lives – as with South Sudan’s PoC sites – in circumstances","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"165 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46516283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2021.1996237
Maggie Dwyer, Osman Gbla
ABSTRACT Through the case of the Sierra Leonean deployment on the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), this study argues that family-related stress is an often-overlooked challenge in peacekeeping deployments. Using in-depth interviews with Sierra Leonean soldiers who were part of the deployment, military decision makers, and foreign advisors, this article lays out specific factors that created family-related tensions and contributed to lowered morale for Sierra Leonean peacekeepers. It demonstrates that the family-related stress on deployment is not only an issue of family separation, it is entangled with the historic trajectories of the armed forces and the sending country’s socio-economic conditions. The focus on Sierra Leone highlights the additional and unique burdens that soldiers and their families may endure in troop contributions from lower-income countries.
{"title":"‘The Home Stress’: The Role of Soldiers’ Family Life on Peacekeeping Missions, the Case of Sierra Leone","authors":"Maggie Dwyer, Osman Gbla","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2021.1996237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2021.1996237","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Through the case of the Sierra Leonean deployment on the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), this study argues that family-related stress is an often-overlooked challenge in peacekeeping deployments. Using in-depth interviews with Sierra Leonean soldiers who were part of the deployment, military decision makers, and foreign advisors, this article lays out specific factors that created family-related tensions and contributed to lowered morale for Sierra Leonean peacekeepers. It demonstrates that the family-related stress on deployment is not only an issue of family separation, it is entangled with the historic trajectories of the armed forces and the sending country’s socio-economic conditions. The focus on Sierra Leone highlights the additional and unique burdens that soldiers and their families may endure in troop contributions from lower-income countries.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"139 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44612022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-28DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2021.1996236
Silvia Danielak
ABSTRACT In the context of the current UN-led stabilization efforts in Mali, the United Nations peacekeeping mission undertakes significant investments in small-scale infrastructure development. The projects not only point to the spatial imprint of peacebuilding on the post-war landscape, but to the imagined performative power of infrastructure. Based on a survey of policy document and official communications, I investigate UN peacekeepers’ narratives of reconstruction, development, and peace promoted through this infrastructure building, and essentially, their role as urban planners in the context of the international military intervention. The account of peacebuilding through infrastructure projects and development resonates with the liberal peace paradigm but also problematizes the practice of civil–military intervention and its focus on infrastructure as device to achieving peace goals.
{"title":"The Infrastructure of Peace: Civil–Military Urban Planning in Mali","authors":"Silvia Danielak","doi":"10.1080/13533312.2021.1996236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2021.1996236","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the context of the current UN-led stabilization efforts in Mali, the United Nations peacekeeping mission undertakes significant investments in small-scale infrastructure development. The projects not only point to the spatial imprint of peacebuilding on the post-war landscape, but to the imagined performative power of infrastructure. Based on a survey of policy document and official communications, I investigate UN peacekeepers’ narratives of reconstruction, development, and peace promoted through this infrastructure building, and essentially, their role as urban planners in the context of the international military intervention. The account of peacebuilding through infrastructure projects and development resonates with the liberal peace paradigm but also problematizes the practice of civil–military intervention and its focus on infrastructure as device to achieving peace goals.","PeriodicalId":47231,"journal":{"name":"International Peacekeeping","volume":"29 1","pages":"115 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42060157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}