What Difference Does it Make? UN Peacekeeping’s Impact on Civil-Military Relations in Troop-Contributing Countries

ABSTRACT

Participating in UN peacekeeping missions used to be seen as an appropriate way to improve civil-military relations in countries where armed forces held undue political power. Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship cautions that sending troops to increasingly coercive peacekeeping missions can contribute to a deterioration of civil-military relations. How can this variance in outcomes of peacekeeping deployments be explained? Taking stock of the existing academic debate on socialisation processes in peacekeeping and comparing the cases of India and Brazil, this article argues that military role conceptions are a key factor for understanding the effects of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries.

KEYWORDS:

• UN peacekeeping
• military sociology
• civil-military relations
• role conceptions
• Brazil
• India

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Lou Pingeot and the members of the Institute of International Relations at TU Braunschweig for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Lotta Klimmek provided fantastic research assistance. Moreover, I am grateful to reviewers and editors for their highly constructive feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Global South” as defined according to the Brandt Report. This also includes China at rank 10, which makes it the only permanent member of the UN Security Council with notable troop contributions at the time of writing.

 

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the German Foundation for Peace Research (Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung), Grant Nr. PS 02/11-2018.

Notes on contributors

Christoph Harig

Christoph Harig is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Joint Operations - Institute for Military Operations, Royal Danish Defence College in Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in Security Studies from King's College London. Christoph's research interests focus on civil-military relations and military sociology.