Peacekeeping and the Return of Imperial Policing

Abstract

UN peacekeeping rose to prominence as an instrument of international action based on its enacting a root metaphor that promised the reversal of politics as usual and the creation of a more equitable world. Practices developed in traditional peacekeeping created a culture of peacekeeping that reinforced this root metaphor through a linking of strategic policy to actions in operations. This article argues that developments in the way that peacekeeping has been used are undermining the root metaphor such that the cultural inversions associated with peacekeeping are increasingly difficult to maintain, if they can be continued at all. The result is that peacekeeping has been sliding toward recreating earlier practices of imperial policing by placing the concerns of international actors ahead of those of the local communities in which peace operations take place.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This article is revised and expanded with permission of the publishers from ‘Back to Future? Peacekeeping and Imperial Policing’, SAREM Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol.8, No.15, pp.11–36, Turkish General Staff Press, Ankara, June 2010.

Notes

Robert A. Rubinstein, Peacekeeping under Fire: Culture and Intervention, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008.

Had it made no further contribution during its first 50 years of existence, its decolonization role for many would be enough to justify its creation. See also Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations: A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003.

Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Tanja Hohe, ‘Totem Polls: Indigenous Concepts of “Free and Fair” Elections in East Timor’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.9, No.4, 2002, pp.69–88.

See, for example, Volker Boege, Anne Brown, Kevin Clements and Anna Nolan, ‘Building Peace and Political Community in Hybrid Political Orders’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.16, No.5, 2009, pp.599–619; Kristoffer Lidén, ‘Building Peace between Global and Local Politics: The Cosmopolitical Ethics of Liberal Peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.16, No.5, 2009, pp.616–34; Tom Woodhouse and Oliver Ramsbotham, ‘Cosmopolitan Peacekeeping and the Globalization of Security’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.12, No.2, 2005, pp.139–56.

On the value of such a perspective, see also Ryan Grist, ‘More than Eunuchs at the Orgy: Observation and Monitoring Reconsidered’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.8, No.3, 2001, pp.59–78. As well, interventions intended to bring about order among conflicting parties were well known prior to the creation of UN peacekeeping. Various observer missions were fielded by the League of Nations. Those are not germane to the analysis here.

Rubinstein (see n.1 above), pp.1–6,48–53.

Trevor Findlay, The Blue Helmets' First War? Use of Force by the UN in the Congo, 1960–64, Clementsport, NS: Canadian Peacekeeping Press, 1999.

Rubinstein (see n.1 above), pp.23–31. See also Marrack Goulding, ‘The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping’, International Affairs, Vol.69, No.3, 1993, pp.451–64.

Rubinstein, ‘Cultural Aspects of Peacekeeping: Notes on the Substance of Symbols’, Millennium, Vol.22, No.2, 1993, pp.547–62; Rubinstein (see n.1 above).

Barbara Babcock (ed.), The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.

See, e.g., Robert Dirks, ‘Resource Fluctuation and Competitive Transformations in West Indian Slave Societies’, in Charles Laughlin and Ivan Brady (eds), Extinction and Survival in Human Populations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, pp.122–80.

See Rubinstein (n.1 above); Rubinstein (n.8 above); Rubinstein, ‘Intervention and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Peace Operations’, Security Dialogue, Vol.36, No.4, 2005, pp.527–44; Rubinstein, ‘Motivation et Maintien de la Paix: Élaboration d'un Lien Entre Agir et Structure’ [Motivation and peacekeeping: modelling the link between agency and structure], Anthropologie et Sociétés, Vol.30, No.1, 2006, pp.137–55.

Michael Apter, Reversal Theory: The Dynamics of Motivation, Emotion and Personality, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oneworld, 2007.

David Last, ‘Marcher sur la Corde Raide: Le Maintien de la Paix et le Maintien de l'ordre Imperial’ [Walking the line: peacekeeping and imperial policing], in Jocelyn Coulon (ed.), Guide du Maintien de la Paix 2007 [Guide to Peacekeeping, 2007], trans. David Last, Outremont, QC: Athena, 2007, pp.63–88.

Roland Paris, ‘International Peacebuilding and the “Mission Civilisatrice”’, Review of International Studies, Vol.28, No.4, 2002, pp. 637–56; François Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; Paul Higate and Marsha Henry, Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia, London: Zed Books, 2009; Jarat Chopra, ‘The UN's Kingdom of East Timor’, Survival, Vol.42, No.3, 2000, pp.27–40.

Charles Gwynn, Imperial Policing, London: Macmillan, 1934. This undermining of local forms of political, economic, and moral action forms the foundation of the mechanics and doctrine of imperial policing with which Gwynn is mainly concerned.

Jok Madut Jok, ‘Sudan at the Crossroads: Promoting Physical and Human Security’, paper presented at a conference on ‘Sudan at the Crossroads: Transforming Generations of Civil War into Peace and Development’, Fletcher School, Tufts University, 12 Mar. 2004.

Chiyuki Aoi, Cedric de Coning and Ramesh Thakur (eds), Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping Operations, Tokyo: UN University Press, 2007; Suprita Kudesia and Robert A. Rubinstein, ‘Exchanges of Value in Peace Operations: Complex Meanings of “Private” and “Transnational” Transfers’, International Studies Review, Vol.11, No.4, pp.430–39; Chopra (see n.15 above).

Katarina Ammitzboell, ‘Unintended Consequences of Peace Operations on the Host Economy from a People's Perspective’, Aoi et al. (see n.18 above), p.76.

See, e.g., Catherine Lutz (ed.), Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, New York: New York University Press, 2009.

For example, Michelle Kelly and Morten Rostrup, ‘Identify Yourselves: Coalition Soldiers in Afghanistan are Endangering Aid Workers’, The Guardian, 1 Feb. 2002, p.19; Jane Barry and Anna Jefferys, A Bridge Too Far: Aid Agencies and the Military in Humanitarian Response, London: Humanitarian Practice Network, Overseas Development Institute, 2002.

See the essays in Sarah Jane Meharg (ed.), Helping Hands and Loaded Arms: Navigating the Military and Humanitarian Space, Clemensport, NS: Canadian Peacekeeping Press, 2007.

Chopra (see n.15 above); Debrix (see n.15 above); Higate and Henry, (see n.15 above); Roland Paris, ‘Peacekeeping and the Constraints of Global Culture’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol.9, No. 3, 2003, pp. 441–73; Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Hohe (see n.3 above); Hohe, ‘Clash of Paradigms: International Administration and Local Political Legitimacy in East Timor’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol.24, No. 3, 2002, pp.569–89; idem, ‘Justice without Judiciary in East Timor’, Conflict, Security and Development, Vol.3, No. 3, 2003, pp.335–57; Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Global Reservation: Notes Toward an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol.9, No.3, 1994, pp.412–22.

Hohe, ‘Justice without Judiciary’ (see n.24 above), p.341.

Rubinstein (see n.1 above).