Peace by piece: China’s policy leadership on peacekeeping fatalities

ABSTRACT

How do states respond to peacekeeper fatalities? Peacekeeper fatalities incur costs for contributing states, leading to recalculations of whether voluntary troop deployments generate benefits. Yet it remains unclear how states with non-democratic regime types respond to peacekeeping troop fatalities, whether the ensuing foreign policy decision rests on tactical decisions to continue troop contributions to the mission, and if states affix the same costs to every peacekeeper fatality regardless of how the fatality occurs. This article builds upon existing studies with a detailed case study of China, a non-Western, non-liberal UN troop contributor. China only recently experienced peacekeeper fatalities by malicious acts, which prompted China to become an emerging policy leader regarding peacekeeper safety and security. China’s policy response highlights discomfort about accepting higher levels of danger as a given for UN peacekeeping, with implications for the debate on the robust use of force and China’s approach to international institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• peacekeeping
• peacekeeper fatalities
• combat troops
• leadership

Acknowledgements

The project began under the invitation of Rita Abrahamsen, Caroline Dutton, Marion Laurence, and Gino Vlavonou, organizers of the online workshop Action for Peacekeeping? Middle Powers, Liberal Internationalism, and the Future of UN Peace Operations, hosted by the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa in May 2021. Thanks go to these scholars, the workshop participants, and Andrea Ghiselli for comment and critique. I am also grateful to Roland Paris, Alanna Krolikowski, and the anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback on earlier drafts of the article. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Accidents includes natural disasters, road accidents, stray bullets, friendly fire. Illness includes endemic disease (e.g. malaria, cholera), animal bites, diet. UN contingents themselves can be a contributing source of disease as in the 2010 Haitian cholera outbreak. See Lantagne et al. (2014). Also, Pilkington and Quinn (2016).

2 China keeps troops in ten categories: engineering, force protection, helicopter, infantry, medical, rapid response, surface ship units, transport, transport aircraft, UAVs. See The State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2020).

3 Other PRC sources include PRC personnel deployed to peacekeeping missions, like the UN weapons inspection agency team member who died in a car accident en route to Baghdad in March 2003 (People's Daily, 2003). UN sources record an additional five deaths, including a PRC international civilian personnel that died of accident on mission in UNTAG in July 1989 and four military police that died of accident on mission in MINUSTAH in January 2010 (UN Peacekeeping (n.d.)).

4 In contrast to other multilateral issues like intellectual property or food production. See Fung and Lam (2021).

5 Comment by Western diplomat, correspondence with author.

6 Zisk (2020), correspondence with author. See also Brysk (2009).

7 For more detail, see United Nations (n.d.). For more detail, see Idonor (2010).

8 For more detail, see Fishel and Sáenz (2007). Referenced in the SIPA-DPKO Capstone project (2009), unpublished report.

9 Though it is important to note that newer research challenges the economic incentives to deploy, see Coleman and Nyblade (2018).

10 An excellent point made by Hirono (2011).

11 Serving as force commander, deputy force commander, sector commander and deputy sector commander

12 E.g., the September 2010 UN Senior Mission Leaders’ Course in Beijing; the March 2011 UN Training of Trainers Course

13 Interview with senior Chinese foreign policy scholar cited in Fung (2019a).

14 Retired major general Xu Guangyu is quoted in Chan (2014).

15 Lynch, 2014. Again, then head of UNMISS Ellen Margrethe Løj noted that “I know China is pursuing national interest, but so is everyone else. Don’t tell me the Americans, the Brits are not” as cited in Patey (2021, p. 34).

16 Quoting then head of UNMISS Ellen Margrethe Løj, as cited in Patey (2021, p. 33).

17 Quoting then head of UNMISS Ellen Margrethe Løj, as cited in Patey (2021, p. 36).

18 See Spink and Wells (2016). China dismissed these watchdog reports as “malicious speculation,” see Reuters (2016).

19 Resolution 2518 built upon UN Security Council Resolutions 2436 (2018) and 2378 (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Courtney J. Fung

Courtney J. Fung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Security Studies & Criminology at Macquarie University. Her research focuses on how rising powers address the norms and provisions for global governance and international security, as applied to human protection issues—like peacekeeping, the responsibility to protect, and cyber—with an empirical focus on a key rising power, China. She is the author of China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford University Press, 2019).