The West’s Policeman? Assessing Italy’s Status in Global Peacekeeping

ABSTRACT

Since the 1960s, and especially the 1980s, Italy has participated in and led numerous peace support operations (PSOs), predominantly under the aegis of international organisations. Italy’s participation in PSOs authorised by the UN, the EU, NATO and other multilateral agreements stems from a combination of national interest and humanitarianism/multilateralism. However, although acknowledged as a significant contributor, a clear assessment of its status in global peacekeeping is still missing. In fact, Italy plays a role that is comparatively greater than all Western nations in the international fora taken into account, and, as such, can be described as ‘the West’s policeman’, from both a quantitative (number of troops) and qualitative (role within the missions) perspective. This might be somewhat curbed in the future, however, due to some of the country’s limitations on foreign policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Italy
• Italian foreign policy
• Italian peacekeeping
• policing
• peacekeeping

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the journal’s editors and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this study.

Notes

¹ The UN outlines five phases: conflict prevention and mediation; peacemaking; peace enforcement; peacebuilding; and peacekeeping, which, in essence, frame the wider concept of peace support itself. It should therefore be noted that peace support and PSOs also include peacekeeping and peacekeeping operations (PKOs), although the two terms are used interchangeably in this article.

² Italy’s anti-militarism partially stems from its post-WWII Constitution, whose Article no. 11 “condemns war as an instrument of aggression”, a ‘peace clause’ that is comparable to Japan’s Article no. 9 and Germany’s Article no. 26.

³ Frontex, which manages J.O. Themis, regrettably does not release unclassified details of the operation for academic and research purposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriele Abbondanza

Gabriele Abbondanza is a Unit Coordinator and Researcher at the Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney, Australia.