UN Integrated Peacekeeping Operations and NGOs: Reflections on Governmental Rationalities and Contestation in the Age of Risk

Abstract

In the first decade of the new millennium, with the adoption at the UN of the ‘responsibility to protect’ as the organizing concept for intervention, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerge as increasingly important partners in international peacekeeping operations. Postmodernist analysts of liberal international security have critically addressed the growing role of international interventionism as well as NGOs. The literature, however, has overstated the effectiveness of liberal biopolitical rationalities in successfully inscribing all political actors, to include NGOs, into their script. Based upon the exploration of discourses of UN reform and integrated peacekeeping, this article argues that, while in the post-Cold-War world international security is reconceptualized in biopolitical terms and calculating rationalities are deployed, the implementation of the biopolitical liberal script is ridden with ambiguities, indecisions and stumbling blocks. International liberal mechanisms for governing disorder produce not only effects of domination and control but also spaces for political appropriation and contestation by NGOs and civil society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this article was supported by the Dean Niles fellowship, Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. I would like to thank Max Stephenson for enticing my interest in NGOs, for our innumerable conversations on this topic and for his partnership in our broader research into community-based foundations and peacekeeping. I would also like to thank Michael Pugh and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, p.58.

Alex J. Bellamy, and Williams Paul, ‘Introduction: Thinking Anew about Peace Operations’, International Peacekeeping, 2004, Vol.11, No.1, p.2.

Caroline Thomas, ‘Global Governance, Development and Human Security. Exploring the Links’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2, 2001, pp. 159–75.

Roland Paris, ‘Human Security. Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?’, International Security, Vol.26, No.2, 2001, pp 87–102.

David Chandler, ‘Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 3, 2009, pp.53–70. The literature on human security is huge, and a complete review of it is beyond the scope of this work. For a recent debate on human security see the special issue of Security Dialogue, 2008, Vol.39, No.4. See also Tadjbakhsh Shahrbanou and Anuradha M. Chenoy, Human Security: Concepts and Implications, London, Routledge, 2007; Jean Sandra MacLean, David R. Black and Timothy M. Shaw (eds), A Decade of Human Security: Global Governance and New Multilateralisms. Global Security in a Changing World, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

Oliver Richmond, The Transformation of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2005; Oliver Richmond and Henry Carey, Subcontracting Peace: The Challenge of NGOs Peacebuilding, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity, 2003.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

For a critique of liberal security regimes see Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live, London: Routledge, 2009; Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, London: Routledge, 2004; Laura Zanotti, ‘Imagining Democracy, Building Unsustainable Institutions: The UN Peacekeeping Operation in Haiti’, Security Dialogue, Vol.39, No.5, 2008, pp. 539–61; idem, ‘Normalizing Democracy and Human Rights: Discipline, Resistance and Carceralization in Croatia's Euro-Atlantic integration’, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.11, 2008, pp. 222–50; idem, ‘Taming Chaos: A Foucauldian View on UN Peacekeeping, Democracy and Normalization’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.13, No.2, 2006, pp. 150–67. For a critique of NGOs see Mark R. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Cambridge: Polity, 2007; idem, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Books, 2001.

Michel Foucault and Michel Senellart, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage, 1999; Nikolas S. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Sergei Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; idem, ‘Three Theses on “Governance and the Political’, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.7, 2004, pp. 267–93; Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, New York: Routledge, 2004.

Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War (see n.10 above)

Ibid., p.27.

The use I make of ‘political rationality’ is drawn on Dean's definition. Dean defined ‘political rationality' as ‘[a]ny form of calculation about political activity, i.e. about any activity which has as its objective the influence, appropriation, redistribution, allocation or maintenance of powers of the government of the state or other organizations. Political rationality is a species of governmental rationality in so far as it entails thinking about directing the conduct of others or ourselves. To the extent that its objective is to influence the way governmental organizations exercise their powers, its concerns are quite distinct.' Mitchell Dean, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: SAGE, 1999 p. 211. The use I make of political rationality has less to do with specific calculations, and is closer to the elaboration of frameworks for thinking about political issues and their solutions.

The term ‘NGO’ embraces very diverse organizations, spanning from international NGOs, generally well funded and active in a several countries, to community-based foundations, which are local in their scope of action, even though their funding sometimes come from non-local sources and may be connected to international networks. As is well known, NGOs are supported by various mixes of government, private and corporate funding and have very diverse goals. While the author is well aware of their many differences, this paper works with a broad definition of NGOs as political actors that are different from the institutions of the state and that are driven by non-profit goals. An empirical enquiry into different types of civil society organizations and their modalities of operation is beyond the scope of this article. An exploration of the interactions between community-based foundations and international organizations is the goal of a broader inquiry that the author is conducting in the context of a joint research project with Max Stephenson, Director of Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance.

DPKO, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. Principles and Guidelines, 2008 (at: http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/info/chief.shtml), 19 Oct. 2009.

Béatrice Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People, London: C. Hurst, 2006.

Chiyuki Aoi, Ramesh Thakur and Cedric de Coning (eds), Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping Operations, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2007; see in particular Katarina Amitzboell, ‘Unintended Consequences of Peace Operations on the Host Economy from People's Perspective’ in that volume, and also Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper with Jonathan Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context. Challenges of Transformation, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004.

Zanotti, ‘Imagining Democracy, Building Unsustainable Institutions’, ‘Normalizing Democracy and Human Rights’ and ‘Taming Chaos’ (see n. 10 above).

United Nations General Assembly, ‘Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, UN Doc. A/59/565, 2004.

See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992 [1986]. Scholars have pointed out that risk has been constituted as the result of a specific political rationality for governing disorder. See Mitchell Dean, ‘Risk, Calculable and Incalculable’, in Deborah Lupton (ed.), Risk and Sociocultural Theory. New Directions and Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 131–60. This paper accepts Ulrich Beck's position that risk is both an emerging condition and a socially constituted modality for conceptualising and taming insecurity.

See Beck (n. 24 above).

See Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, Killing to Make Live. The Liberal Way of War, New York: Routledge, 2009. For Dillon and Reid the reconceptualization of the international arena along the lines of a biological system endowed with morphogenic capabilities leads to a ‘hyperbolicization of security’ that aims at exterminating those deviant forms of life that might emerge as a result of contingent mutations. While Dillon and Reid provide extremely useful insights on the linkages between scientific epistemologies, construction of discourses of danger, and the practices of liberal security, I argue here that the most distinctive modality of post-Cold-War ways of governing international disorder is not its will to exterminate, as Dillon and Reid argue, deviant forms of life in order to protect the survival of the species, but rather the taming of the emergence of risk through planning and regulatory rationalities (Accessed at hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr1994/).

United Nations (n. 22 above).

See United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, 1994 and United Nations General Assembly (n. 23 above).

See Ulrich Beck, What Is globalization?, Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

United Nations General Assembly, ‘In Larger Freedom. Towards development, Security and Human Rights for All;, A/59/2005(2005) (at: www.un.org/largerfreedom/), 19 Oct. 2009.

See High Level Panel on System-Wide Coherence webpage at http://www.un.org/events/panel/html/page2.html

See DPKO (see n.18 above), p.20.

DPKO (see n.18 above), p.20.

Ibid., pp.6,15.

Ibid., p.10.

Ibid., p.8.

Ibid., p.96.

Ibid., p.23.

Erin Weir, Conflict and Compromise: UN Integrated Missions and the Humanitarian Imperative, Kofi Annan Training Peace Keeping Center (KAIPTC), Monograph No. 4, June 2006, accessed at www.kaiptc.org, 19 October 2009.

DPKO (see n.18 above), p.28.

Ibid., p.25.

Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War (see n. 10 above).

DPKO (see n.18 above), p.66

Ibid., p.69.

Ibid., p.55

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Scott (see n.45 above), pp.2–3.

Weir (see n.36 above) p.37.

DPKO (see n.18 above), p.54.

Weir (n. 36 above), pp.34–35.

Jaqueline Best, ‘Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Risk: Rethinking Indeterminacy’, International Political Sociology, Vol.2, 2008, p.363.

Best (see n.50 above), p.356, emphasis in original.

Ibid., p.363.

William E. Connolly, ‘ The Complexity of Sovereignty’, in Edkins et al. (see n. 10 above), pp.23–40.

See Chad Lavin, The Politics of Responsibility, Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, Vol.12, No.1, 1985, pp.144–65.

Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power. From Hobbes to Foucaultt, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996, pp.96–101.

Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault between Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp.208–26.

Hindess (see n. 53 above), p.101.

Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (see n. 14 above).

Lavin (see n. 52 above).

Ilan Kapoor, The Post-colonial Politics of Development, London: Routledge, 2008, p.12.

Bhabha (see n. 52 above), p.156.

Kapoor (see n. 58 above), p.124.

Ibid., p.123.