Ethics as Moral Practice in Peacekeeping Missions: Insights on the Importance of Ethical Training

ABSTRACT

Identifying peacekeeping as practical ethics helps analyze how the problems of existing approaches to military ethical training led to practical problems of standard setting. This article illustrates the value of understanding ethics as a theoretical framework to confront and prepare for moral practice. Pointing out the problems in terms of how military ethics ascertain the nature of ethics, the field of military ethics frames problems in ways that undermine standard settings for moral practice. Specifying these problems complements established theoretical inputs and helps peacekeepers better adjust to the moral choices and dilemmas ahead. This is particularly because military ethical training is also about coming to terms with society’s moral standards and demands that led to peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions in the first place. The article illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of this approach to military ethical training with the example of Austrian peacekeeper ethical training.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• morality
• peacekeeping missions
• United Nations
• virtues
• Austrian armed forces

Introduction

Although military ethical training is often ‘more concerned with cultivating a particular character or set of values than with teaching universal rules,’¹ specific guidelines such as the Rules of Engagement (RoE) or legal rules remain a prime focus of ethical training in Western military forces. These standard approaches, not always labelled as ethical training, focus on deliberative ethical reasoning.² In other words, military education about moral reasoning (i.e. referring to individual standards) by necessity builds on ethics (i.e. referring to community standards). Yet it is when there are no RoE provided by ethical community standards that apply to a situation that military personnel face the need to engage in moral reasoning. Existing approaches to teaching military ethics, relying on standard settings, thus have several blind spots. For example, as the nature, objective, and means of military missions change, focusing on individual judgment (that is moral reasoning, for example by virtue ethics)³ to prepare soldiers might not be sufficient any longer.

This is important to consider because armed forces consider the improvement of their skills and qualities as a virtue,⁴ even if they rely on rigid rules and formal training to impress virtue ethics upon their soldiers. What is more, the introduction of unmanned weapons or autonomous weapon systems, for example, introduces dilemmas for standard ethical guidance for soldiers.⁵ Another persistent blind spot remains the effectiveness of hypothetical ethical training for military practice. Military personnel are ‘routinely exposed to high levels of stress and experiences likely to evoke visceral responses.’⁶ Teaching case studies⁷ of moral dilemmas and hypothetical moral reasoning might thus not always be sufficient preparation.

Focusing on practical challenges, existing research on teaching military ethics partly addresses these blind spots⁸ but less research addresses the practical challenges regarding the ethics of peacekeepers. This is not surprising as peacekeepers are usually soldiers who have undergone theoretical training before. Still, the lack of engagement with the challenges of teaching and applying ethics for peacekeepers is puzzling. In particular, today, they are simultaneously peace enforcers, peacebuilders, peacekeepers, diplomats, and development aid workers.⁹ Certainly, there are studies in moral theory relevant to military ethics. However, they often remain abstract, for example by focusing on the use of force writ large in peacekeeping missions.¹⁰ Ethics for peacekeepers, other than general ethical considerations of the national interest, for example, calls for an ethical framework, based on an impartial stance yet not devoid of military ethics and moral practice where standard ethical settings are elusive.¹¹

These problems and blind spots in communicating, teaching, and practicing military ethics, particularly for peacekeepers, motivate the argument here. As I point out below, first, military ethical training often relies on hypothetical deliberative moral reasoning, not explicitly addressing the particularities of peacekeeping missions. Second, formal ethical training, despite the claim of the importance of virtue ethics, often relies on a set of rather rigid rules (e.g. RoE; international law, etc.). Both approaches have limits, for example regarding the anticipation of contingencies or stressful situations. There is thus, third, an inherent tension between ethical and legal requirements (e.g. RoEs, IHL), ethical training, and the preparation for a moral practice where standard settings fail to give advice. Certainly, ethical training remains limited to hypothetical approaches by necessity, for example on the RoE, specific knowledge about the mission, etc. On the other hand, military training often focuses on virtue ethics, which is not necessarily compatible with formal requirements. This tension leads to the problem of reconciling the two approaches and evaluating their efficiency.

I argue that studying peacekeeping as practical ethics, understood as moral reasoning in contingency situations, helps analyze these problems of standard setting, which is provided by ethical education. In particular, I illustrate the value of understanding ethics as a theoretical framework to confront and prepare for moral practice. Doing so provides a balance between ethical theory and moral practice, one that is suited to peacekeeping missions, especially in its emphasis on reflection and dialogue, practiced at all levels and ranks. Eventually, the development of this argument points out how ethics might better help peacekeepers evaluate why they are doing what and how thereby preparing them for moral choices in unforeseeable circumstances. In doing so, the main contribution of the article is in examining norm contestation and norm implementation in ethics training. I show that the training space is where several values meet: the values that militaries have embedded in their host societies, the values that training suggest they should have for peacekeeping, and the values that they may act upon once deployed.

Thus, the article contributes to the call for more theorizing on the training for peacekeeping in general and its ethical training in particular because there are several gaps concerning ethics training in the peacekeeping context. Certainly, the impact of training is always hard to measure and judge.¹² Yet facing the challenges of peacekeeping, this is no reason to exclude it from theorizing. As peacekeeping is supposed to be about norm implementation, theorizing what those who do and their training who eventually work towards that implementation is imperative. In particular, I seek to add to what Holmes summarized as the ‘pre-deployment training space’ that ‘is a field of practice and a site of norm contestation, negotiation and implementation.’¹³ Doing so also provides a glimpse into what theorizing training contributes to the general understanding of peacekeeping.¹⁴ There is consensus about the transition and transformation of the concept of peacekeeping,¹⁵ yet what that transition is about remains unclear. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is a lack of theorizing peacekeeping. Many approaches to theorizing build on either a problem-solving approach or a critical approach that is critical of short-term fixes and rather focuses on power relations in societies.¹⁶ Recent approaches to theorizing peacekeeping point out that after the traditional peacekeeping missions, the pragmatism of short-term fixes remains undertheorized.¹⁷ This is not least because of the reality in terms of deployment on the ground. For example, European countries seem to subscribe only to selective missions, and countries from the Global South, the majority of peacekeeping forces, focus more on regional missions.¹⁸

The article proceeds as follows. The first section looks at traditional approaches to military ethics, reflecting on the military profession as an ethical practice, and virtue ethics as a common approach of how to understand it. The section illustrates, despite all shortcomings, the value of engaging in a virtue ethics approach in ethical training because it helps soldiers to self-assurance through their practice in society. Doing so paves the way to illustrate in the second section how this helps to turn into a practical approach for peacekeepers because it provides grounds to understand the military profession as an embedded practice. Peacekeeping missions, for example, assign activities not normally assigned to soldiers. This points out problems in terms of quite how one would ascertain the nature of ethics. For example, how do these problems affect the standard set of ethics that prepares for moral practice and choice. The third section looks at problems of the conceptualization of ethics among peacekeepers to apply the introduced argument. In the example of the Austrian Armed Forces, the remainder illustrates the advantages and problems of an unstructured approach to teaching ethics as suggested by my argument. The conclusion points out preliminary suggestions of how the findings, despite all their limitations, could help improve teaching and communicate the value of ethics as moral practice, as well as future avenues of research.

The Military Profession as Embedded Practice

Conventional military ethics often focuses on the purpose of military practice of the individual, for example, being more of a ‘sword’ or being more of a ‘shield’ for a community. To serve as the nation's ‘sword’ requires ethics adapted to the requirements soldiers meet in serving the nation.¹⁹ To serve as the nation’s ‘shield,’ focuses on the character of individual soldiers ‘for its own sake, seeing a strong yet human character as a sort of shield necessary to safeguard a soldier’s soul through the stresses, temptations, and losses of war.’²⁰

The distinction between the two approaches addresses the gap between third- and first-person learning and ethics application. Relying on the ‘sword’ approach means serving a set of more or less abstract ideas (i.e. the people of the nation; the parent society). The ‘shield’ approach draws more toward the individual perspective of reflecting on ethics where ethical training regularly starts. A widely acknowledged ethical standard communicated at the individual level is respect for the individual. The United States Army Leadership Field Manual 22-100, for example, argues that loyalty, duty, respect, selflessness, service, honour, integrity, and personal courage form the basis for the respect of the individual based on the rule of law (although loyalty and duty are group-focused vales). This reasoning is an obvious example of the intersection between the aforementioned military affinity for virtue ethics and the formal requirements of following organizational rules.

Virtues are traits of character and habits, acquired by training and practice, and provide the context for practical choices.²¹ Ethical education displays virtues, perhaps most prominently those of justice, courage, and honesty.²² Virtue ethics focuses on the reflection of what one is and ought to be,²³ that is it focuses on the agent rather than the act.²⁴ Virtues are developed and learned in practice and within a community and do not develop autonomously while sticking to formal rules.²⁵ Although teaching and learning ethics is an agent-focused (i.e. moral) practice,²⁶ military ethics requires that agents see their profession as a practice in and for society.²⁷ Other than defining virtues, the important point here is, then, that the ordering principle of a practitioner is a conception of a good life in which she/he sees herself/himself in a certain narrative.

From the military practitioner’s point of view, military ethics not only matches goods such as camaraderie. It is also about living a life embedded in a particular narrative (i.e. the cultural tradition of a community), in which one sees oneself (e.g. the parental, or national society).²⁸ Moreover, military virtues constantly develop within the military community (e.g. through camaraderie), in engagement with others during a deployment,²⁹ or in facing ethical choices during missions. Virtues like loyalty and duty rely on the individual’s allegiance to a collective, i.e. the parent society,³⁰ and moral practices are necessarily embedded within particular memberships. ‘[O]ne’s own particular social identity and historical role,’ thus, ‘necessarily define one’s “moral starting point”. To abstract from these would be to render oneself incapable of ethical deliberation.’³¹

In other words, there is no use in teaching and expecting ethical behaviour based on abstract arguments only.³² A virtue ethics approach is thus the ‘grammar’ to encounter moral discourse. It is less focused on rule-based ethics and more on ‘the living practices of a community.’³³ In military education, this was and still is the case. Ethics are embedded within the practice of being a soldier within the community of the armed forces and the parental community. In terms of military practice, then, the question is in which narrative does the individual see him/herself? Questions like this matter when thinking about how and what to propose theoretically in military ethics to prepare for moral practice under uncertain circumstances and contingencies.³⁴

Ethics as Practice in and for Changing Peacekeeping Missions

In The City of God, Augustine³⁵ asks, ‘Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?’ Following this logic, Toner proposes: ‘Students of military ethics must ask, “morality being taken away, then, what are armies but great mobs?”’³⁶ In the post-Cold War era, this thesis became viral, for example, during the genocides in Rwanda and outside a ‘safe area’ in Srebrenica. There, violent mobs showed what they could exert while UN forces stood by, or were required to stand by.³⁷ Teaching ethics to soldiers is not so consequential when they cannot act legally on those ethical impulses. In these as in other cases, there is often no definitive answer to the question of whether this was a failure of military ethics in principle, of teaching ethics before the deployment of peacekeepers, or leadership.

Certainly, teaching ethics needs to begin with the military staff. Peacekeepers around the world and from different cultures developed standard tools of ethics to be prepared for ethical dilemmas where, for example, the RoE fail to advise on what to do and what not to do (e.g. in terms of the use of force). It is not possible to eliminate all unethical and immoral decisions. However, being able to reflect on ethics reduces the likelihood of unethical choices or joining the argument that if others do not act according to ethical standards, then ‘why should I?’ Focusing on this aspect reduces the risks of actions that are considered antithetical and inflict harm by any ethical standard.³⁸

Therefore, Toner argues that the military ‘itself must be the principal agent of the change … If society needs a military that not only can win this or that particular war … then it will need a military … committed in short to excellence of product as an internal good, albeit one naturally linked to the external good of national security.’³⁹ Peacekeepers often think of themselves as good peacekeepers who do not distinguish between their roles as peacekeepers and warriors.⁴⁰ A study on the mindset of Swedish peacekeepers, for example, concluded, ‘UN missions need to become more aware of the complexities of the environments they are working in. Self-referencing can inhibit this. If peacekeepers … stop thinking they are good at doing good, they may open up new opportunities to render UN peacekeeping more successful.’⁴¹

The nature of the very first and traditional (UN) peacekeeping missions has been mainly described as depending on the non-use of force and political symbolism. However, when peacekeeping forces start killing people, they inevitably become a part of the conflict’s structure.⁴² This is not surprising, as the development of peacekeeping missions changed and while changing, they also became more proactive, for example, acting as humanitarian missions to stop genocide.⁴³ Given these changes, more often than not, the RoE for missions to enforce the ethical dimension of the use of force remain unclear in their practical application and ethical guidance.⁴⁴

The practice of teaching and living ethics only slowly adapts to novel situations. Ethical guidance for international military missions must be given to peacekeepers to meet their responsibilities comprehensively with respect to local civilians, their national government, parental society, the military structure, their comrades, and themselves, and for mutual recognition among adversaries.⁴⁵ Practice ‘cannot do without some kind of narrative that conveys the purpose and standards of a praxis. A narrative is not only used to explain and elucidate a praxis, but it is also used as a means to initiate and educate practitioners.’⁴⁶ Therefore, ethical frameworks can only be applied in practice if peacekeepers reflect on their moral responsibilities in carrying out their missions.

For example, peacekeepers need to reflect on certain values to act upon human rights as human rights and not just the law (i.e. applying ethics and ethical behaviour in the sense of carrying out an order). To do so, it is necessary not only to know and understand human rights but also to identify with their value. Certainly, this empathic approach must meet a balance between military and moral necessities.⁴⁷ Soldiers, for example, have moral and social responsibilities because they are professionals.⁴⁸ Among others, that means the soldier’s responsibility to society, ‘the ethical obligations of the officer are objective and are not contingent on any desire held by any individual. The professional military ethic is not a relative ethic.’ In any professional ethic ‘good and bad are determined, in part functionally, by how the profession contributes to society.’⁴⁹

Military ethics are principles that enable the professional to fulfil a specific purpose, usually fighting and winning wars. One’s moral framework and understanding of ethics derive thus also from a consideration of the role that one is playing in a particular context⁵⁰ as outlined above. For example, the profession of the soldier and the individual interpretation of ethics might not be contingent on individual desires, but on how the profession contributes to society. On the other hand, society’s notions of its goods and related practices inevitably change (e.g. regarding the development of force and the emphasis on human rights), eventually also changing the professional’s notion of goods. Then, however, duty-based thinking (e.g. how to stick to certain rules) does not suffice in a complex environment.⁵¹ Neither does formal training in hypothetical moral reasoning as outlined here in the peacekeeping example.

So far, the theoretical outline has established that to maintain or enforce a certain aim of peacekeeping or peacebuilding by military practice, ethical training needs to prepare soldiers to understand the value of these ends. Second, being able to reflect on ethics (e.g. being aware of the value of human rights), reduces the chances of unethical choices in practice. Third, for a comprehensive understanding of the value of certain ends, soldiers need specific input and instructions on the specific circumstances that the mission faces (e.g. political, cultural, or religious specifics). Fourth, the outline so far suggests that other than defining absolute ethical standards (e.g. in the sense of ethical catalogs of particular virtues), the ordering principle for practice needs to start at the individual’s awareness and conception of a good life, shaped by particular narratives. Looking at the example of the Austrian Armed Forces, the remainder illustrates if and how these insights might explain existing training and help improve it by focusing on military ethics as a moral practice.

The Moral Value of Ends and Practical Wisdom: The Case of Austria

How do Austrian peacekeepers prepare for peacekeeping missions and what insights can we gain from that to identify how ethical analysis can be used to improve that particular training and draw general conclusions? To answer that this section traces the specifics of ethical preparation. In doing so, the section points out how identifying problems by studying peacekeeping as practical ethics helps analyze how those problems lead to practical problems of standard setting, that is ethical training based on ethical rationalization and taught hypothetically.

Before proceeding, three disclaimers on the empirical evidence and the range of generalizations are in order. First, the research is based on a mix of sources such as teaching documents, confidential unstructured background interviews, correspondence with instructors (the training personnel), and informed agents (those who organize the training and those familiar with the training because they have been involved in it or organized it) between 2013 and 2022. The empirical evidence looks specifically at the material provided (e.g. training documents) and supplements it with the statements from the interviews and the correspondence.⁵² Second, there is a lot of nuance in military training. As is the case here, there is no specific ‘ethics’ class. Therefore, the evidence is an aggregation of the material that could be gathered. The informed agents emphasize the ‘general’ military training, therefore having a rather short specific pre-deployment training for peacekeeping missions.⁵³ Third, based on the empirical evidence, I focus on the training for eventual (UN-mandated) peacekeeping missions although Austrian personnel also participate in peace enforcement operations and operations by other organizations than the UN (e.g. by the EU). Yet as the previous disclaimer shows, there are no hard borders as many parts and contents of training overlap.

Several reasons make the Austrian case a compelling illustration of the previous theoretical insights and practical shortcomings. First, there is little research on Austrian military ethics training. Second, Austria has consistently participated in peacekeeping missions.⁵⁴ Third, the material available illustrates how ethical training and reasoning rely on organizational rules (the RoE provided by the military itself or by the UN) and legal rules such as regarding the protection of civilians. Fourth, the Austrian case uncovers a rather unknown fact, namely that unstructured ethical training could have some previously missed potential worth specifying. Studies on countries similar to Austria (e.g. small, neutral, members of the European Union) found that post-modern factors (e.g. seeking personal fulfilment) motivate soldiers to participate in international military missions.⁵⁵ At the same time, European armed forces, as studies on the Dutch armed forces illustrate, are perceived by the public of the parent society as ‘too sweet and innocent for war.’⁵⁶ In the case of Austria, studies in the 1990s falsified the widespread image of soldiers, portraying them as an interface between society and the armed forces. Rather, they were weaker rooted within the parent society than commonly assumed and financial issues were an important factor in the choice to participate in peacekeeping missions.⁵⁷ Here, I focus on a broad overview of the most important aspects of training and how they relate to the challenges of the above-outlined theoretical approach.

In the course of Austria’s pre-deployment training, ethics for outgoings are not assigned to one particular course. Rather, ethics are taught implicitly and often informally based on different sources and courses. They range from input on the traditions of military ethics to psychology to intercultural awareness to input from military chaplains.⁵⁸ Likely to be prepared to confront different value systems and thus ethics, intercultural competence is also a content of ethics training.⁵⁹ The theoretical lectures for the pre-deployment training for (UN) contingents mainly draw on UN peacekeeping material.⁶⁰ More specifically trained in the field of the Protection of Civilians are participants of the ‘Comprehensive Protection of Civilians Course on tactical level,’⁶¹ a task more and more required in peacekeeping missions, particularly within the UN framework.⁶²

The teaching methods depend on the individuals who teach them and who are rather free to choose their style of how to transfer knowledge. As the sources of the input on ethics differ, so does the method: lecture-based teaching, role games, case studies, or workshops. According to an informed agent, the course preparation can only be as good as the course instructors. One comment common to almost all sources is that traditional military ethics is not on the agenda for mission deployment preparation. Rather, ‘ethics’ is introduced through ways of intercultural awareness and cultural competence as well as in courses provided by the military chaplaincy.⁶³ This corresponds with the larger problem that the deployment training for UN missions is administered by the UN’s member states and therefore varies and that cultural competence can be at odds with moral competence.⁶⁴

At its most basic level, the ethical education of Austrian peacekeepers has a dual focus. First, ethical education teaches about the value of certain ends that peacekeepers seek to protect or enforce (e.g. why it is important to protect human rights). Regarding the question of how those values and principles are taught, no clear answer is readily available. The material provided for teaching ethics both seeks to provide the answers as to the necessities of peacekeeping and, by way of explaining these answers, helps soldiers reflect on why it makes sense to consider these parameters (e.g. international law) and the given answers (e.g. human rights) in their own decisions. For example, the material provided by the UN stresses that human rights are part of the mission and task and that those tasks arise from the missions of peacekeepers’ duties.⁶⁵ The second focus relies on common sense pleas to the rational faculties of individual soldiers as professionals, in other words, the emphasis on practical wisdom.⁶⁶

As diverse and unsystematic as this dual focus might be, it hints at the value of understanding ethics as preparing for moral practice. Therefore, this focus offers some potential for understanding ethics as a moral practice not previously recognized. This is, for example, as the outlines stress the professional character of soldiers concerning their parental society, assumed to help them excel in practice. The UN modules, for example, appeal to the personal and professional integrity of the soldiers. The material available calls on the military profession as a practice that is embedded in a particular society and in a particular community of practitioners who seek to acquire standards of excellence. Emphasizing professionalism, virtues for practitioners – justice, courage, and honesty – are an inherent part of the practice of this guild of practitioners.

This focus on ethical training stressing virtues is particularly obvious in the general ethical training for Austrian non-commissioned officers (NCOs). As one instructor put it, it focuses on ‘trains of thought’ rather than strict obligations and instruction (‘do this, don’t do that’). That is to say, to illustrate how something came into being, what is its goal, and why is it important to consider these parameters in one’s decision-making. Military ethics then, as outlined above, develop relationally between the institution of the military, its practices, the parent society, the individuals, and their practices. Certainly, there is an established set of rules and instructions, but instructors emphasize that general ethical training focuses on developing instruments that individual soldiers can apply in military missions. Significantly, the ethical training for staff sergeants/senior NCOs concludes with a focus on the traditional virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love – in the context of Austria’s legal principles of freedom of religion and freedom of conviction.

The intersection of these two approaches (teaching the value of ends and common-sense pleas to the rational faculties of individual soldiers as professionals) unknowingly seeks to bridge the gap between formal procedural requirements (i.e. organizational rules) and the possibilities of arising ethical dilemmas in practice. Bridging this gap requires a failsafe by trusting the soldier’s behaviour as a virtuous professional. The latter needs the construction of awareness and reflection of the individual’s place in society and profession to comprehend and value the ends they are trained to practice. Taken together, these aspects seem worth picking up in training and referring to them explicitly.

Certainly, as outlined, there are limitations to generalizing based on these insights, lest argue to apply this approach to other militaries. However, there are insights from this case that show the importance of theorizing ethical training in the first place and peacekeeping training in particular. Toward that end, it might be an advantage that ethical training avoids teaching ethics in an assigned one-size-fits-all class that provides intellectual input and then leaves the staff off to other modules. Rather, the combination of the different inputs from cultural awareness to human rights to religious classes promises an angle to help soldiers reflect on their moral choices. This includes motivating soldiers to reflect on their ideas of a good life and point out their involvement in the parent society. Certainly, this ideal type might be an aspiration that is hard to live up to. Especially if singled out as a pedagogical approach. However, it shows how ethical training preparing for moral practice recognizes that to pursue goods, the individual ‘has first to recognize the goods of the community as goods he has to make his own.’⁶⁷ For ethical training, this requires tapping ‘into the “internal goods” of the soldiers’ to ‘getting them to aspire to excellence.’⁶⁸

Conclusion

The education and practice of peacekeepers are exceptional cases when it comes to ethical theory and moral practice. Peacekeepers engage in a host of activities that have formerly not been ascribed to the tasks of soldiers, nor are they adequately prepared for those activities. Ethical training that prepares for moral practice is thus useful and relevant, not least to explore the self-image and the ethical framework and boundaries of the peacekeeper. This helps the peacekeepers and the society at home to better adjust to the moral choices and dilemmas ahead. The case of Austrian peacekeepers illustrates the difficulties that ethical training faces in education and practice. This is, for example, the case focusing on virtue ethics. Although the ethical training for Austrian peacekeepers displays elements of the often praised virtue ethics, the example also shows fallible ways of virtue ethics, especially if there is no systematic way of training or role models available.⁶⁹ Virtues, for example, might not be unanimously shared among the profession itself nor in the field in a different setting.⁷⁰

The argument and findings presented here, despite their limitations, lend themselves to several suggestions for improving and furthering military ethical training, particularly, but not exclusively, for peacekeepers. For example, the need for trust in soldiers’ behaviour, the need for personnel to act with awareness of their place in society, and that ethics should be spread across more than just one course. Nonetheless, ethics as moral practice conveys a broader approach to military ethics in general and peacekeepers in particular as they went through different stages of changing roles of missions and hostile environments. Peacekeeping history, at least in the context of the UN and its ethical challenges are partly representative of the development of armed forces more broadly conceived, particularly regarding their ethical training.⁷¹

The here outlined approach of ethics as moral practice, first, suggests the need not only to include a constant self-reflection during preparation for the mission and the mission itself but also in the aftermath. Those with practical experience in confronting moral dilemmas are particularly suited to convey what it means to be in such situations. Recent research already points out the value of ‘direct experience as a basis of learning and development through reflection.’⁷² In this regard, future research might look more closely at how the experience of ‘incomings’ from military missions could help to enhance the theoretical training of ‘outgoings.’⁷³ Gathering insights into the interplay between ethics and moral practice requires in-depth case studies that generate general insights beyond the insights provided in the example presented here. Therefore, future research requires looking closely at the debriefing and future professional careers of peacekeepers upon returning from their deployment.⁷⁴ This is also because, as argued here, ethics are embodied in practice, and teaching them, and trainers reflectively,⁷⁵ is only possible to a certain degree, let alone to measure or judge their value and effectiveness.

Second, military ethics needs formal input. Not only on models of ethical and moral reasoning and deliberating about hypothetical scenarios but also to provide insights into the cultural or political details of the local situation in advance. Those may be language barriers and different chains of command, but also different understandings of how to use moral vocabulary when confronted with different people, cultures, religions, and legitimacy claims. The formal input is not only important to achieve comprehensive understanding and empathy, but also to convey the meaning of the mission. It is also, for example, the input that professionals reflect on their part in the parental society. Ethics for peacekeepers, then, needs a component that is accessible in manuals and conveyed via formal methods but it also needs reflection and dialogue between the military and its parent society. Reflection and dialogue are important to avoid ethical training becoming dogmatic. Doing so avoids applying ethical theories to a situation out of the book. The mere application of ethics contradicts the approaches to reflection on ethical values. Reflecting on a moral dilemma needs to be done and practiced in dialogue among all ranks and institutions to understand that soldiers choose the right action for the right reason.⁷⁶ The same is the case for communicating ethical principles or values such as virtues during training.⁷⁷ Ethical training often focuses on conceptual or hypothetical discussions rather than dialogical approaches.⁷⁸ Finally, providing formal input also acts as a failsafe ‘to counter bias and ethical blind spots’⁷⁹ and to prevent to hinder military action.

Third, the different mandates of military missions play an important role in the conduct of missions.⁸⁰ Different mandates, for example, are important regarding soldiers’ motivation and angles of teaching ethics, traditionally tied to a particular national society. For example, ‘nationalist sentiments do not necessarily hinder our preparedness to fight to protect local civilians in UN peacekeeping operations, but these sentiments also do not usually predict active protection.’⁸¹ This is especially the case where the RoE call upon a different code of ethics since they rely not only on self-defense, but on the defense of others. Future research should look at how the interplay between ethical understandings of peacekeepers and normative political conceptualizations and conflicting legitimacies shape the practice of peacekeeping.⁸² Because, in the end, ethical training, understood as moral practice, is not least about coming to terms with society’s ethical standards and demands at home that are relevant to peacekeeping in the first place. A great deal of peacekeeping’s norm implementation thus depends on the norms, their contestation, and implementation at home – where ethical training and moral practice start.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Austrian Armed Forces for their cooperation in providing background information, particularly the informed agents such as instructors and sources for participating in confidential interviews and correspondence, providing background information, and teaching material. Moreover, I would like to thank Eva van Baarle, Peter Olsthoorn, David Walker, Deanna L. Messervey, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments along the development of the paper.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Asal and Schulzke, “A Shot Not Taken,” 411; see also Olson, “Towards a more ethical military”; Olsthoorn, Military ethics and virtues; Vries, “Virtue Ethics in the Military”.

2 At least in Western militaries. Robinson, Lee, and Carrick, Ethics Education in the Military; Baker, “Making good better”.

3 Military codes of honor, for example, refer to virtues such as duty, respect, or courage. This does not mean that military ethics relies per se on classical virtue ethics. Gorman, “War and the Virtues in Aquinas’s Ethical Thought”.

4 Olsthoorn, Military ethics and virtues.

5 Some, therefore, suggest that a rigid deontological ethical approach might be more appropriate. Schulzke, “Rethinking Military Virtue Ethics in an Age of Unmanned Weapons,” 188; see also Cappuccio, Galliott, and Alnajjar, “A Taste of Armageddon”; Renic, “UAVs and the End of Heroism?”.

6 Messervey et al., “Training for Heat-of-the-Moment Thinking,” 2.

7 Coleman, Military ethics; Rubel and Lucas, JR., Case Studies in Military Ethics.

8 van Baarda and Verweij, Military Ethics.

9 Essentially a mixture that resembles the archetype of today’s virtuous soldier. Beard, “Virtuous Soldiers”.

10 Blocq, “The Fog of UN Peacekeeping”; Blocq, “Western Soldiers and the Protection of Local Civilians in UN Peacekeeping Operations”; Tripodi, “Peacekeepers, Moral Autonomy and the Use of Force”; McAllister, “UN Peacekeeping and Ethics”.

11 Morality is ‘about how human relations should be in virtue of our being human and in virtue of nothing else,’ whereas ethics ‘is about what relations we should have with other people in virtue of some special relationships we have with them, such as family relations or friendship’. Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, 2–3.

12 Curran, “Training for Peacekeeping,” 93; see also Curran, More than Fighting for Peace?

13 Holmes, “Situating Agency, Embodied Practices and Norm Implementation in Peacekeeping Training,” 67.

14 For example, by pointing out how different peacekeeping missions challenge the peacekeeper’s preparation. Despite several limitations, scandals, and weaknesses, for example of UN missions, peacekeeping missions in general have been largely successful. E.g. Coning, “How Not to Do UN Peacekeeping”; Walter, Howard, and Fortna, “The Extraordinary Relationship between Peacekeeping and Peace”.

15 E.g., Paris, “The Past, Present, and Uncertain Future of Collective Conflict Management”.

16 Pugh, “The problem-solving and critical paradigms”. See also Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders”.

17 Karlsrud, “‘Pragmatic Peacekeeping’ in Practice”; Cassin and Zyla, “UN Reforms for an Era of Pragmatic Peacekeeping”.

18 Koops and Tercovich, “A European return to United Nations peacekeeping?”; Bara and Hultman, “Just Different Hats?”.

19 For the most part, this approach relies on just war theory. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars; Hedahl, Clark, and Beggins, “The Changing Nature of the Just War Tradition”.

20 Toner, “Military Service as a Practice,” 184; see also French, The Code of the Warrior; Sherman, Stoic Warriors.

21 Journal of Military Ethics, “Introduction,” 257; Whitmore, “‘If they kill us at least the others will have more time to get away’,” 3.

22 A virtue, defined by MacIntyre, is ‘an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods’. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 191.

23 Berghaus and Cartagena, “Developing Good Soldiers,” 295.

24 Pfaff, “Virtue and Applied Military Ethics”.

25 Jacobson, “Seeing by Feeling”.

26 Banks, Ethics, Accountability and the Social Professions; Fleck, “Teaching Ethics,” in Military Ethics in Professional Military Education, 70.

27 Walker, “Learning to own professional practice through character – The case of the junior British Army officer”.

28 Toner, “Military Service as a Practice,” 191–92. This is not to speak of this embedding as a source of motivation. Bennett, Boesch, and Haltiner, “Motivation and job satisfaction in the Swiss Support Company in Kosovo”; Juvan and Vuga, “What Motivates Slovenian ‘Peacekeepers’?”; Tomforde, “Motivation and self-image among German peacekeepers”; Miller, “Virtues, Practices and Justice”.

29 Verweij, “Comrades or Friends?”; Jennings, “Blue Helmet Havens”; Verweijen, “Strange Battlefield Fellows”.

30 Asencio, Byrne, and Mujkic, “Ethics Training for U.S. Military Leaders”. See also, for example, Shweder and Bourne, “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?”.

31 Erskine, “Qualifying Cosmopolitanism?,” 127.

32 Putnam, Ethics without ontology, 29.

33 Whitmore, “‘If they kill us at least the others will have more time to get away’,” 3; see also Vries, “Virtue Ethics in the Military”.

34 The evolution of the sovereign territorial nation state, for example, helped to establish a framework to put forward a cosmopolitan approach of how people ought to live together, eventually also inflicting the ethical practices associated with peacekeeping. Curran, “Muddling on through?”.

35 Augustine, The City of God.

36 Toner, True Faith and Allegiance, 134.

37 Dallaire and Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil; Power, A problem from hell.

38 Perry, “How Ethics is Thaught at the U.S. Army War College,” in Military Ethics in Professional Military Education, 153; see also Snow, “How Ethical Theory Can Improve Practice”.

39 Toner, “Military Service as a Practice,” 193.

40 There is less research on the intersection between the warrior role and the role of the professional soldier/peacekeeper. Kraugerud, “Shields of Humanity”; Bonadonna, “Doing Military Ethics with War Literature”. See also Enstad, Warriors or Peacekeepers?; Broesder et al., “Can Soldiers Combine Swords and Ploughshares?”.

41 Hedlund and Soeters, “Reflections on Swedish Peacekeepers’ Self-image and Dilemmas of Peacekeeping,” 413.

42 Urquhart, A life in peace and war, 248; 179.

43 E.g., Coning, Aoi, and Karlsrud, UN Peacekeeping Doctrine in a New Era. At least with one UN example, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and its mandate, there is a similar precedent in the UN framework. Resolution 2098 (2013), S/res/2098 (2013), United Nations Security Council (28 March 2013), http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/2098(2013); Murphy, “UN Peacekeeping in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Protection of Civilians”; see also Troy, “Strategische Kommunikation der Vereinten Nationen am Beispiel MONUSCO”. Impartiality, however, does not mean neutrality as the Brahimi Report on UN peacekeeping missions concedes. UN General Assembly and Security Council, General Assembly Security Council Fifty-fifth session, 9. See critically van Baarda and van Iersel, “The Uneasy Relationship between Conscience and Military Law”.

44 E.g., Last, “Reflections from the Field”.

45 Blocq, “The Fog of UN Peacekeeping,” 208; see also Levine, “Some considerations for civilian–peacekeeper protection alliances”; Whalan, “The Local Legitimacy of Peacekeepers”; Schaefer, “Local Practices and Normative Frameworks in Peacebuilding”; Clark, “Under the Mountain”.

46 Vries, “Virtue Ethics in the Military,” 181.

47 Ciurria, “A New Mixed View of Virtue Ethics, Based on Daniel Doviak’s New Virtue Calculus”.

48 Huntington, The Solider and the State; Huntington, “Officership as a Profession”.

49 Snider, Nagel, and Pfaff, Army Professionalism, the Military Ethic, and Officership in the 21st Century, 9.

50 Ruskin, Diesem Letzten.

51 Neufeldt, “Doing Good Better”.

52 This is without the guarantee of being exhaustive and completely up-to-date as the instructors, classes, and training material change. The information provided by the informed agents was often accompanied by the disclaimer that particular trainings and their materials are either based on their own judgement or that the material provided has been chosen by typical signal words such as “ethics,” “human rights,” “RoE,” etc.

53 A completely comprehensive picture would thus have to look at that general training as well.

54 See the troops and police contributors’ graph on the UN website: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-police-contributors. Additionally, Austria’s participation in peacekeeping missions is a symbol of its international aspiration. “Going international – in the Service for peace” remains an Austrian bipartisan consensus. Schmidl, Going international; see also Schmidl, ““Push” and “Pull” Factors in Foreign Policy”.

55 Hedlund and Soeters, “Reflections on Swedish Peacekeepers’ Self-image and Dilemmas of Peacekeeping”.

56 Sion, “Too Sweet and Innocent for War”.

57 Haas and Kernic, Zur Soziologie von UN-Peacekeeping-Einsätzen; see also Vegič, “The Effects of Previous Deployment on Soldiers’ Attitudes to Peace Operations”; Kernic, “The soldier and the task”.

58 Trauner, “Soldatische Berufsethik und militärische Führung”.

59 Krysl, Interkulturelle Kompetenz.

60 United Nations, “Core Pre-deployment Training Materials”; United Nations, The Protection of Civilians in United Nations Peacekeeping; United Nations, United Nations Infantry Battalion Manual (UNIBAM).

61 Republic of Austria - Federal Ministry of Defence, “Interdisciplinary Training Course for Personnel in Crisis Management on the Protection of Civilians in Armed conflicts on tactical level (PoC/TLC)”.

62 Donais and Tanguay, “Doing less with less?”.

63 There are exceptions. The training for the Civil Military Cooperation (CIMIC) personnel, for example, has sessions on the religious background in the area of deployment (e.g., Islam on the Balkans).

64 Namie Di Razza and Jake Sherman, “Integrating Human Rights into the Operational Readiness of UN Peacekeepers,” 10; Schut, Soldiers as strangers.

65 For the UN’s human rights based approach see Pantzerhielm, “On Multiple Objects and Ontic Fixes”.

66 See also Vries, “Virtue Ethics in the Military,” 177.

67 MacIntyre, Dependent rational animals, 109.

68 Vries, “Virtue Ethics in the Military,” 182.

69 Henderson, “The educational salience of emulation as a moral virtue”.

70 Not least did MacIntyre warn of virtues’ ambivalence. MacIntyre, “Military Ethics”.

71 Dorn and Libben, “Preparing for peace”.

72 Walker, “Learning to own professional practice through character – The case of the junior British Army officer,” 1.

73 See also van Baarle et al., “What Sticks? The Evaluation of a Train-the-Trainer Course in Military Ethics and its Perceived Outcomes”.

74 Wilén and Heinecken, “Peacekeeping deployment abroad and the self-perceptions of the effect on career advancement, status and reintegration”.

75 van Baarle et al., “Moral dilemmas in a military context”.

76 Miller, “Squaring the Circle”.

77 E.g., Clark, “Under the Mountain”.

78 See also van Baarle et al., “The relevance of Foucauldian art-of-living for ethics education in a military context”.

79 Baker, “Making good better,” 216.

80 Benson and Tucker, “The Importance of UN Security Council Resolutions in Peacekeeping Operations”. See also Goulart, “Legitimacy of Using Force as a Fundamental Ingredient for Military Motivation in Robust Peacekeeping Operations”.

81 Blocq, “Western Soldiers and the Protection of Local Civilians in UN Peacekeeping Operations,” 303; see also Hunt, “All necessary means to what ends?”; Yamashita, “‘Impartial’ Use of Force in United Nations Peacekeeping”. Moreover, multinational missions bring several obstacles with them for the missions’ accomplishments. Levine, “Some considerations for civilian–peacekeeper protection alliances”; Narten, “Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Local Ownership”.

82 Billerbeck, “UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies”.