Understanding Peacekeeping. Alex J. Bellamy
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(e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson 2013; Gat 2017; Hudson et al. 2014).
Culture and peace operations
Another approach to conceptualizing the relationship between peace operations and global politics draws on the power of cultural ideas and habits. Some analysts have suggested that, in its extreme form, foreign peacekeepers exhibit racist attitudes towards local populations, exemplified by the episode of Canadian peacekeepers deployed to Somalia in 1993 torturing to death a local boy (Razack 2004). More frequently, these approaches analyse how the design, methods and objectives of peace operations are shaped by the dominant culture(s) of the actors that authorize and conduct them. One prominent example was Roland Paris’s (2003) argument that the international normative environment – a ‘global culture’ comprised of formal and informal social rules that guide international life – shapes the design of peace operations in fundamental ways (see box 1.2). Global culture helps determine the sorts of activities that are considered appropriate for peace operations and rules out others, irrespective of whether or not they actually aid progression towards peace. For instance, despite its relatively good post-1945 track record, international trusteeship has been ‘disqualified’ as a policy tool because of its neocolonial overtones. Conversely, the dominance of liberal peace theories has sometimes pushed peace operations to implement hasty elections and economic liberalization despite evidence of their destabilizing potential. From this perspective, understanding the liberal global culture can tell us more about the shape of contemporary peace operations than lessons learned from past operations. Understanding how that liberal order is being challenged by populism and rising authoritarianism may also offer clues as to the future trajectory of peace operations and multilateralism more broadly (e.g. Welsh 2016). If, as Stephen Hopgood (2013) suggests, we are witnessing the ‘endtimes’ of human rights, global retrenchment of peace operations is likely.
Box 1.2 The global cultural determinants of peace operations
Peacekeeping agencies and their member states are predisposed to develop and implement strategies that conform with the norms of global culture, and they are disinclined to pursue strategies that deviate from these norms. In short, the design and conduct of peacekeeping missions reflect not only the interests of the key parties and the perceived lessons of previous operations, but also the prevailing norms of global culture, which legitimize certain kinds of peacekeeping policies and delegitimize others … [G]lobal culture constrains … peacekeeping by limiting the range of strategies that peacekeepers can realistically pursue. Peacekeeping agencies seem willing to rule out normatively unacceptable strategies a priori without even considering the potential effectiveness of these strategies as techniques for fostering peace, which is the stated goal of peacekeeping; and concerns about international propriety appear, at least on some occasions, to take precedence over considerations of operational effectiveness. (Paris 2003: 442–3, 451)
A second variant is Séverine Autesserre’s work on the culture underpinning what she calls ‘Peaceland’ – the ideational world inhabited by international peacebuilders in which expatriates from a multitude of different countries have come to share ‘a common collection of practices, habits, and narratives that shape their every attitude and action’ (2014: 1–2). Autesserre’s ethnographic approach shows how the everyday cultures of foreign peacekeepers, peacebuilders and aid workers have cohered to create a ‘politics of knowledge’ about how to build peace in foreign lands. The culture of Peaceland is reinforced by the tendency to bunkerize the deployment of foreign personnel and keep them generally separated from the locals via various security procedures. It also often dismisses local expertise and instead privileges personnel who possess technical, thematic knowledge. And yet, ironically, many of the organizations that comprise Peaceland operate with a ‘culture of secrecy’. Autesserre concludes that the seemingly mundane elements of Peaceland’s everyday culture have a significant impact by inhibiting the effectiveness of peace operations.
Cosmopolitanism
Some advocates of a cosmopolitan approach, perhaps emerging from the ‘global culture’ of the 1990s, insisted that building truly stable international peace and security requires a particular way of understanding, organizing and conducting peace operations. This explicitly normative approach was pioneered by Mary Kaldor (1999), who thought cosmopolitan peace operations were a necessary response to the anti-civilian violence prevalent in what she called ‘new wars’. A second generation of human security was needed, one that was rights-based and employed both top-down and more inclusive bottom-up approaches to peacemaking simultaneously (Chinkin and Kaldor 2017: 479–526). Peace operations have an important role to play in that context and should be reconceptualized as instruments of ‘cosmopolitan law enforcement’ (Kaldor 1999: 124–31; 2006).
According to Kaldor, since ‘the key to resolving new wars is the construction of legitimate political authority’, the solution lay in the ‘enforcement of cosmopolitan norms, i.e. enforcement of international humanitarian and human rights law’, that would enable the protection of civilians and capture of war criminals (2006: x, 132). In this schema, cosmopolitan peace operations involve the creation of a new type of uniformed professional combining soldiering with policing skills. Such operations should address the challenges of ‘new wars’ that stem from their particular exclusivist strain of identity politics, their criminalized mode of warfare, and their globalized systems of finance. Peacekeepers should be prepared to act without the consent of some of the main belligerents – a basic tenet of traditional peacekeeping (see chapter 7) – but seek the consent and support of the victims instead (2006: 135). This, Kaldor recognized, would require peace operations to use force against those that threatened civilians and would therefore involve risking the lives of peacekeepers. Her ideas have been criticized for their simplistic portrayal of contemporary conflicts as involving only innocent civilians and their tormentors (Hirst 2001: 86). Nevertheless, some of Kaldor’s proposals – such as the need for a new conception of impartiality and the centrality of civilian protection – correspond closely with some of the main developments in the practice and policies of peace operations (see chapter 5). In particular, the UN has begun to embrace the need for a more ‘people centred’ approach to its peace operations.
Another variant of this approach, developed by Tom Woodhouse and Oliver Ramsbotham (2005), drew from cosmopolitan political theory, cosmopolitan conceptions of global governance which emphasize inclusivity and accountability, and principles of conflict resolution to argue that peace operations should promote cosmopolitan politics. The vanguard of this effort should be conducted by a standing UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) comprising specially trained military and civilian personnel. UNEPS should be capable of protecting civilians from harm and implementing the full range of the UN’s human security agenda (2005: 153; see also Langille 2014). This is a contemporary variant of the long-standing proposals for a UN standing army dating back to the organization’s origins (see Roberts 2008). However, persuading a critical mass of governments of the merits of the UNEPS idea, let alone operationalizing it, has remained a distinctly uphill battle.
Peacekeeping as liberal imperialism
At the opposite end of the political spectrum from cosmopolitanism, an alternative approach conceptualized UN peacekeeping as a neo-imperial tool of the great (Western) powers designed to pacify the global periphery. Developed most fully by Philip Cunliffe, this view argues that, as a key mechanism of military power projection, UN peacekeeping ‘enable[s] wealthy and powerful states to suppress and contain conflict across the unruly periphery of the international order without the encumbrance of open-ended political and military commitments’ (2013: 2). The great (Western) powers do this by using surrogates and proxies to keep order. UN peacekeepers have thus become agents of a system of ‘imperial multilateralism’, which Cunliffe describes as the ‘highest form of liberal imperialism’ (2013: 2, 23, 28). This approach sees UN peacekeeping as the most recent phase of ‘a historic tradition of imperial security’ (2013: 27), pointing out how the interests