Space, Performance and Everyday Security in the Peacekeeping Context

Abstract

Studies of peacekeeping have helped to reveal the complexities, dilemmas and challenges of operations since their inception, and almost certainly into the future. Yet, despite the empirical and theoretical breadth of this canon, the field continues to be dominated by political science, development studies, international law and military studies, whose scholars tend to draw on ‘problem-solving’, macro-level and positivist perspectives in their writings. The impact of post-structural and post-positivist epistemologies developed in sociology, human geography and cultural studies remain marginal in the field. Given this, the present article seeks to complement and develop the study of peacekeeping through its framing of blue-helmet activity as embodied, spatial-security practice that is performed ‘out front’ for the ‘beneficiary’ audience. In so doing we draw on critical geopolitics, military/human geography and sociological theorizing with a focus on space and performance. Our main aim is to show how the concepts of space and performance can be used to illuminate perceptions of everyday security by recourse to a modest, illustrative empirical component based on fieldwork in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia.

Notes

The illustrative empirical component included in this article is based on fieldwork in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia. The rationale for selecting these mission sites concerns the importance of both diversity and universality in these places. They are geographically disparate, were at different points in their evolution and involved both UN peacekeepers and NATO peacekeepers. Our interest was in the ‘responsibility to protect’ incumbent upon the peacekeepers. Given that the boundaries between mandates are often blurred (B. Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, London: Hurst, 2006, p.7), it is unclear how useful formal mandate definitions are to what is expected and achieved on the ground.

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We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this observation that has been made by others, including Pouligny, who states that ‘classical approaches [to peacekeeping] … dominate international security studies … which tend to make the intervener a sort of sole actor confronting human, natural or environmental “obstacles” in the accomplishment of his [sic] mission’. Pouligny (see n.1 above), p.xi.

In some respects the current article converges with that of Pouligny (see note 1. above), who states that ‘one is surprised by the small amount of attention paid … to the different elements of the societies concerned [in peacekeeping operations]’ (p.x). However, our focus is on theoretical rather than empirical development.

A survey conducted to gauge public opinion on responses to the peacekeeping presence in the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) captures this trend J. Krasno, Public Opinion of UNMIL'S Work in Liberia. New York: Peacekeeping Best Practices Section, Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2006 (at: www.peacekeepingresourcehub.unlb.org/PBPS/Library/Liberia_POS_final_report_Mar_29.pdf). On closer scrutiny, at least seven of its 24 questions are framed in ways that are more likely to elicit a positive rather than negative response. One example is question 3 of the survey, which asks, ‘How would you rate the work of UN Peacekeepers in making you feel safer?’ Whilst respondents are offered choices ranging from ‘very good’ through to ‘poor’, a more rigorous approach to establishing how peacekeepers ‘made people feel’ would be to ask an open question, rather than one loaded with the word ‘safer’; other questions asked in the survey are framed in similar, directed ways and highlight the wider limitations of this quantitative form of research tool.

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Pouligny (see n.1 above). Although, rather than seeing space as constituted by peacekeepers, Pouligny discusses how UN missions ‘cover’ or ‘occupy’ space in ways, we believe, that underplay the breadth and depth of this profound transformation and reconfiguration of territory.

Pouligny (see n.1 above), p.1.

Inevitably, capital cities pay host to a disproportionate concentration of mission resources in terms of quantities of both personnel and equipment, further underscoring the divide between urban and rural spaces (Pouligny [see n.1 above], p.29) and the overall ‘distribution of security’.

See Pouligny (see n.1 above, p.28), who has commented on the links between scale of territory and numbers of deployed personnel and also, albeit in passing, the importance of maps in these contexts.

G. O'Tuathail and S. Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics, London: Routledge, 1998, p.3.

O'Tuathail and Dalby (see n.33 above), pp.3–4.

Pouligny (see n.1 above), p.28, emphasis added.

See: P. Higate and M. Henry, Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Kosovo, Haiti and Liberia, London: Zed Press, 2009, pp.53–67.

M. Burawoy, A. Burton, A.A. Ferguson and K.J. Fox (eds), Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis, California: University of California Press, 1991, p.282.

Cited in P. Hubbard, R. Kitchin and G. Valentine (eds), Key thinkers on space and place, London: Sage, 2004, p.5.

We develop the notion of raw space here for purposes of analyses and in no way to deny the relevance of space – including the meanings and names attached to particular places – that exist for the indigenous population prior to the peacekeeping presence.

The work of Mark Duffield has helped to inform our thinking here, in regard to the implications of UN-franchised security architectures that stipulate the design of compounds within which a range of stakeholders live, including employees of NGOs through to UN personnel. See www.bris.ac.uk/politics/gic/coreprojects/#aidarchitecture. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Ritzer, the construction of compounds by a wide range of stakeholders including NGO and UN employees according to certain universal ‘security criteria’ stipulating height and thickness of wall can be seen as a McDonaldization of space whereby compounds around the world are exactly the same in design.

L. Polman, We Did Nothing. Why the Truth Doesn't Always Come out When the UN Goes in, London: Penguin, 1995.

G. O'Tuathail and S. Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics, London: Routledge, 1998, p.4.

Whereas living in proximity to particular national contingents may facilitate other kinds of spaces. As Pouligny (see n.1 above) states, ‘Military contingents are generally the … most visible … occasions for contact can be nil, or in contrast, very numerous according to the … places they are deployed’ (p.31).

J. Beuving, ‘Lebanese Traders in Cotonou: A Socio-cultural Analysis of Economic Mobility and Capital Accumulation’, Africa, Vol.76, 2006, pp.324–51.

Higate and Henry (see n.36 above).

Pouligny (see n.1 above), p.67; K. Ammitzboell, ‘Unintended Consequences of Peace Operations on the Host Economy from a People's Perspective’, in C. Aoi, C. de Coning and R. Thakur (eds), Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping Operations, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2007, pp.69–89.

Fieldwork carried out between 2004 and 2007 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia and Sierra Leone pointed consistently to this unintended outcome of the UN political economy.

R. Woodward, Military Geographies, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p.108.

T. Duffey, ‘Cultural Issues in Contemporary Peacekeeping’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 7, No.1, 2000, pp.142–68.

Pouligny (see n.1 above), p.97.

In regard to the ‘war on terror’, the concept of ‘discursive assemblage’ has been considered in the following way: ‘[We are] dealing with … an assemblage of practices [including] state policy, “non state scribes” and the representational technologies of popular geopolitics – which together produce the effect they name, stabilizing over time to produce a series of spatial formations through the performance of security’ (L. Bialasiewicz, D. Campbell, D. Elden, S. Graham, J. Jeffrey and A.J. Williams, ‘Performing Security: The Imaginative Geographies of Current US Strategy’, Political Geography, Vol.26, No.4, 2007, p.419). Similarly, peacekeeping performance can be seen to ‘produce the effect [it] names’ where peacekeeper social practice is framed intuitively by many (but by no means all) stakeholders through the mantra of the ‘the responsibility to protect’.

S.D. Brunn, ‘Peacekeeping Missions and Landscapes’, in D. Rumley and J.V. Minghi (eds), The Geography of Border Landscapes, London: Routledge, 1991, pp.269–294; Woodward (see n.48 above).

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Bialasiewicz et al. (see n.51 above), p.406.

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As noted above, care should be taken not to homogenize how peacekeepers are framed by their beneficiary populations.

C. Shilling, ‘The Undersocialized Conception of the Embodied Agent in Modern Sociology’, Sociology, Vol.25, No.4, 1997, p.746.

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Goffman (see n.61 above), pp.5–45.

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M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge, 1962; Nettleton and Watson (see n.63 above), pp.10–12.

Nettleton and Watson (see n.63 above), p.11.

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R.W. Connell, Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p.64.

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See Higate and Henry (see n.36 above) for a fuller account of the methods, logistics and ethical challenges involved in this fieldwork.

In our search for any sense of respondent consensus on security, it was the way perceptions were framed (through space and security) that engaged our analytical curiosity, rather than consistent commentary on the security mood, noted to be volatile and responsive to local concern. Framed in post-structural terms, space and performance represented the common metaphors through which security was expressed. As analysts, our task was to make sense of these unspoken foundations of social life in this unique ‘security’ context.

Y.D. Heifetz, ‘Choreographing Otherness: Ethnochoreology and Peacekeeping Research’, paper presented at the First International Conference of Qualitative Enquiry, Urbana, IL, 2005, p.22.

Others have commented on the ‘superficial nature’ of peacekeeping (Pouligny [see n.1 above], p.x).

‘Such a scene’, it is argued, ‘could be witnessed in any of the countries where a UN peace operation has been deployed. For the majority of the population the presence of the “blue helmets” is often no more than big Toyota Landcruisers … seen passing along the main roads, and more rarely, stopping’ (Pouligny [see n.1 above], p.43).

The perception that peacekeepers are ‘biased’ towards the majority Albanian population has been noted elsewhere (A. Cleland-Welch, ‘Achieving Security after Intra-state Conflict: The Case of Kosovo’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol.14, No.2, 2006, pp.221–39).

Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (see n.53 above).

Ibid., p.141.

Drawing on fieldwork in Cambodia, Pouligny states, ‘If there were problems in the street, most of the time they [peacekeepers] did not even stop … many soldiers told me that they thought about their country a lot, they did not want to die in Cambodia, their family was waiting for them at home. I don't know if their commanders sent them to protect the peasants; I only know what I saw – which was not doing that.’ Pouligny (see n.1 above), p.110.

Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (see n.53 above), p.142.

Ibid., p.142.

Pouligny (see n.1 above).