Peace Operations and the Government of Humanitarian Spaces

Abstract

The article identifies how the nexus between democracy, security, humanitarianism and development was built up from the 1990s. It analyses how the discourse of post-conflict peacebuilding has emerged as a notable component of a liberal democratic international order. The article argues that the transformations in peacekeeping operations depend upon a specific spatiotemporal combination – a cleavage between a global and a humanitarian space and the temporality of development. For South American countries, participation in peacekeeping operations became a way to assert themselves as participants of a liberal democratic international order and a reflexive mode to strengthen the process of transformation of their own societies in order to be integrated into a new global cartography.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this article was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [National Council for Scientific Development and Technology], Brazil. I would like to thank Lia Frota e Lopes for her enduring support, and Jens Bartelson, Rob Walker, Iver Neumann and Benjamin de Carvalho for their comments on previous versions of the article. Finally, I would also like to thank Kai Michael Kenkel and Michael Pugh for their comments.

Notes

Roland Paris, ‘Broadening the Study of Peace Operations’, International Studies Review, Vol.2, No.3, 2000, pp.11–19.

Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams, ‘Introduction: Thinking Anew about Peace Operations’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, 2004, pp.1–15.

See, e.g., Alex J. Bellamy, Paul Williams and Stuart Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004; David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul and beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, London: Pluto Press, 2002; Chandler, ‘The Responsibility to Protect? Imposing the “Liberal Peace”’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1 2004, pp.59–81; François Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Books, 2001; Roland Paris, ‘Echoes of the Mission Civilizatrice: Peacekeeping in the Post-Cold War Era’, in Edward Newman and Oliver Richmond (eds), The United Nations and Human Security, New York: Palgrave macMillan, 2001, pp.100–118; Michael Pugh, ‘Peacekeeping and Critical Theory’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, 2004, pp.39–58; Oliver Richmond, ‘UN Peace Operations and the Dilemmas of the Peacebuilding Consensus', International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, 2004, pp.83–101; Oliver Richmond, The Transformation of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Duffield (see n.3 above); David Chandler, Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building, London: Pluto Press, 2006.

Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Oliver Richmond, ‘Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace’, Millennium, No.38, 2010, pp.665–92.

Richmond, Transformation (see n.3 above), p.226.

Newman and Richmond (see n.3 above), p.39.

On positive power, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Mahbub ul-Haq, Reflections on Human Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 38.

See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Martin Wight, Power Politics, New York: Continuum, 1978, p.36.

Ibid., p.85.

Ibid.

Foucault (see n.10 above).

Liisa Malkki, ‘Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations’, Diaspora, Vol.3, No.1, 1994, pp.41–68.

Jens Bartelson, Visions of World Community, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

R.B.J. Walker, ‘Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations’, in V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992, p.189.

Ramesh Thakur, The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Ramesh Thakur and Albrecht Schnabel, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Ad Hoc Missions, Permanent Engagement, New York: United Nations University Press, 2001.

Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

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Mark R. Duffield and John Prendergast, Without Troops & Tanks: The Emergency Relief Desk and the Cross Border Operation into Eritrea and Tigray, Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1994; Chandler, Kosovo to Kabul (see n.3 above); Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping (see n.3 above).

UN doc. A/RES/46/182.

United Nations (see n.20 above).

Ibid., p.2.

Ibid., p.15.

United Nations, An Agenda for Democratization, New York, 1996.

Ibid., p.1.

Ibid., p.2.

Ibid.

United Nations (see n.20 above), p.5.

United Nations, An Agenda for Development, New York, 1994.

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See Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, New York: Zed Books, 2002.

Ul-Haq (see n.9 above), p.42.

On the problem of normalities and normation, see Michel Foucault, Michel Senellart, François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Ibid., p.67.

Ibid., passim.

Ronald Robertson and JoAnn Chirico. ‘Humanity, Globalization, and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Exploration’, Sociological Analysis, Vol.46, No.3 1985, pp.219–42. Although Robertson's concept of globalization as the production of a single place still makes use of such categories as system and unities, I want to preserve here, first, the sense of permanent change due to processes of reciprocal relativization between self/society and humanity/world and, second, the resilience of bounded societal units, which appear misleading.

United Nations (see n.20 above), p.6.

Duffield (see n.3 above).

Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood: Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Ibid.

See Anne Caldwell, ‘Bio-sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity', Theory and Event, Vol. 7, No.2, 2004, at: http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.qub.ac.uk/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html

Laura Zanotti, ‘Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance’, Alternatives, Vol.30, No.4, 2005, pp.461–88.

Robertson and Chirico (see n. 38 above), p.237.

Manuel Castells, ‘European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy’, New Left Review, Vol.21, No.204, 1994, p.21.

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Iver Neumann and Ole Jakob Sending, ‘“The International” as Governmentality’, Millennium, Vol.35, No.3, 2007, pp.677–701.

Hikaru Yamashita, Humanitarian Space and International Politics: The Creation of Safe Areas, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Johanna Grombach Wagner, ‘An IHL/CRC Perspective on “Humanitarian Space”’, Humanitarian Exchange Magazine, No.32, 2005, at: www.odihpn.org/report.asp?ID=2765

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 2004, p.84.

Ibid., p.161.

Foucault et al. (see n.35 above), pp.175–82.

Ibid.

Butler (see n.51 above), p.162.

United Nations, Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), ‘United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. Principles and Guidelines’, 2008, p.19, at: http://www.peacekeepingbestpractices.unlb.org/Pbps/Library/Capstone_Doctrine_ENG.pdf.

See Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Carlos Lopes, Khalid Malik and UNDP, Capacity for Development: New Solutions to Old Problems, London: Earthscan, 2002; Carlos Lopes and Thomas Theisohn, Ownership, Leadership, and Transformation: Can we do Better for Capacity Development?, London: Earthscan, 2003.

DPKO (see n.56 above), p.36.

Ibid.

Ibid., p.40.

Ibid.

R.B.J. Walker, ‘The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International’, Ephemera, Vol.6, No.1, 2005, pp. 34–57; Walker, ‘Lines of Insecurity’, Security Dialogue, Vol.37, No.1, 2006, pp.66–82.

DPKO (see n.56 above), p.40.