National Interests as Friction: Peacekeeping in Somalia and Mali

ABSTRACT

The concept of friction is applied to challenge the assumption that the main goal of peace support operations is to permanently stabilise a country. By exploring missions in Somalia and Mali, where neighbouring states are the main troop contributors, we suggest to focus on the interaction among troop-contributing countries within missions. They express how national interests play out in the framework of international organisations. Even when a mission deploys, rules that should define how cooperation is to occur during deployment are lacking, especially when they contradict national interests of individual troop contributors. The result is mission incoherence and fragmentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacekeeping
• friction
• national interests
• fragmentation
• incoherence

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Adam Moe Fejerskov, and especially the two editors of the special issue, Louise Wiuff Moe and Anna Geis, for input, guidance and support. A thank you also to the anonymous reviewers for helping us strengthening the argument of the paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Peter Albrecht is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). He is the author of Hybridization, Intervention and Authority: Security Beyond Conflict in Sierra Leone (2020), and has co-authored several other books, including Securing Sierra Leone, 1997-2013: Defence, Diplomacy and Development in Action (2014).

Signe Cold-Ravnkilde is a Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). Her work on Mali, peacekeeping and gender is widely published, including in the co-edited volume Rethinking Gender Equality in Global Governance: The Delusion of Norm Diffusion (2020).

ORCID

Peter Albrecht http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0942-7628

Signe Cold-Ravnkilde http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3524-1360

Notes

1 Around 50 interviews relating to AMISOM were carried out in Somalia (Mogadishu) and Kenya (Nairobi) during 2014–16, and Kenya (Nairobi) and Ethiopia (Addis Ababa) in 2016–17. One of the authors of this article worked for the UN in Somalia, primarily in Mogadishu and Garowe, Puntland, between 2014–16. For MINUSMA, fieldwork was mainly carried out in 2016 in the headquarters in Bamako as well as in Sector East in Timbuktu and Sector West in Gao. 42 interviews were conducted with African and European soldiers and civilian staff in different parts of the mission. 15 follow-up interviews were carried out with MINUSMA staff and other external security actors in Bamako during September 2017 and January 2019.

2 In the context of peacebuilding, friction has been developed as a response to how the concept of hybridity has figured in the debate (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013; Björkdahl et al. 2016). Hybridity offers starting points for comprehending the processes at work between diverse and competing authority structures, sets of rules, logics of order and claims to power that co-exist, overlap, interact and intertwine. The uneasy intertwinement of the global and the local, the formal and informal, and the liberal and illiberal in the peacebuilding encounter is the explicit focus of this lens (Albrecht 2020; Albrecht and Moe 2015; Boege et al. 2009; Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2011). One key element that hybridity lacks, and friction encompasses, is the power at work in this encounter, its conflictual dimension, in short, politics. Friction introduces an element of conflict into the peacebuilding literature, and a potential for both empowerment and disempowerment (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013).