Securitisation and Desecuritisation of Violence in Trusteeship Statebuilding

ABSTRACT

The United Nations has engaged in (neo)trusteeship statebuilding in two different contexts: post-Second World War decolonisation and after the Cold War. On both occasions, statebuilding aimed at preventing organised, large-scale violence. Nevertheless, these statebuilding efforts were confronted by several forms of violence, ranging from civil war to a high level of politically motivated violence. In this article, we ask how and why administrations in French Cameroon, New Guinea, Kosovo and Timor-Leste implementing (de)securitised such violence – by addressing it as a serious threat and imple-menting policies of protection, by portraying it as something manageable or even by ignoring it.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank Hendrik Spruyt, Paul Jackson, Toni Haastrup and the reviewers for comments and critique and Miriam Tekath, Ronja Schicke and Alex Burhardt for support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes

1. As (McDonald 2008, p. 569–570) argues, actors can communicate meaning in several different forms: ‘First, language is only one (albeit the most central) means through which meaning is communicated (…). A range of authors in this context have suggested the need to take account of the role of images as potential forms of securitization. Second, an exclusive focus on language is problematic in the sense that it can exclude forms of bureaucratic practices or physical action that do not merely follow from securitizing “speech acts” but are part of the process through which meanings of security are communicated and security itself constructed.’

2. Levine and Nye (1974, p. 118) speak of 10–15,000 victims of this violence.

3. ‘The nationalists no longer acknowledge the French Administration, they have decided to get rid of it by any means’ (Atangana 2010, p. 17).

4. Scholars regard the actions by the French administration and the abolition of the party as a major catalyst for the violent resistance (Bayart 1985, Mbembe 1996, Atangana 2010 or Terretta 2014).

5. United Nations (2017).

6. For example, internal documents on the role of the former resistance commander L7 (Elle Sette or Cornelio Gama), various ‘terrorist groups’ in Bacau, or the behaviour of resistance troops in cantonment towards citizens in spring 2000.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under Grant TRR 138/1 - 2014.

Notes on contributors

Thorsten Bonacker

Thorsten Bonacker is professor for peace and conflict studies at the Center for Conflict Studies at Marburg University, Germany. He is also board member of the collaborative research center “Dynamics of Security” at Marburg and Gießen University.

Werner Distler

Werner Distler is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Conflict Studies and the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security” at the University of Marburg, Germany. His work focuses on interventions as social practices, the role of authority and security in international statebuilding, and on the post-conflict political economy.

Maria Ketzmerick

Maria Ketzmerick is a research fellow at the Centre for Conflict Studies in Marburg, Germany and is currently finalizing her PhD in the collaborative research centre “Dynamics of Security”. In her PhD she analyses the Cameroonian Decolonization process with a postcolonial reading of securitization and is investigating the colonial continuities of security narratives in the current political system.