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ABSTRACT
International peacekeeping in Africa has developed dynamically in the last decade. The majority of global missions are deployed to the continent, the largest regional contingent of troops comes from Africa, and the African Peace and Security Architecture has made significant progress. Peacekeeping is Africanized today more than at any time before. However, mainstream research has insufficiently paid attention to African agency in this context. This article sheds light on the often neglected influence of African politics on international peacekeeping missions. The focus is set on the consequences of neo-patrimonial political systems, which can use international peacekeeping missions as an opportunity to generate rents. It will be shown that such a rent-seeking approach is highly problematic for the troop-contributing as well as mission-hosting countries. Instead of curbing conflict, rentier peacekeeping is prolonging and exporting it. The empirical examples used are the Burundian and Kenyan involvement in peacekeeping in Somalia.
Acknowledgements
I thank Philip Cunliffe, Toni Haastrup, and Hylke Dijkstra for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Malte Brosig is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the Department of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He joined the Department in 2009 after he received his PhD from the University of Portsmouth. His main research interests focus on issues of international organization interplay and peacekeeping in Africa. He is the author of Cooperative peacekeeping in Africa: Exploring regime complexity (Routledge, 2015). Brosig is a rostered consultant for the United Nations University’s Centre for Policy Research in Tokyo and holds fellowships at the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Toronto, the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg.
ORCID
Malte Brosig http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3430-5120
Notes
1. Confidential conversation with AU staff. Officially, fatality numbers are classified information. Since 1948, 3,510 peacekeepers died in UN missions.