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ABSTRACT
This article scrutinises everyday practices of French gendarmes who were sent as international police in UN and NATO missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Drawing on qualitative material, it argues that their encounters on the ground largely shaped their practices. Rather than melting into the internationalised peacebuilding milieu, gendarmes endeavoured to serve and survey, that is, to establish relationships with civilian populations as a means to collect security-related intelligence for their national government. The sociology of peacebuilding encounters on the ground thus unveils Peaceland’s social divides and invites to take into account the historicity of the peacebuilders’ societies.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of Yasmine Bouagga, Grégory Daho, Marielle Debos, Jean-Noël Luc and Mathias Thura on previous versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Nathalie Duclos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University François Rabelais Tours and a Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences of Politics (ISP). Her current research focus is on international policies in post-conflict situations, peacebuilding missions, especially DDR and the reintegration of KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) former combatants. She has published War Veterans in Postwar Situation: Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru and Côte d’Ivoire. New York & London: Palgrave McMillan, 2012; ‘DDR in Kosovo: international administrators and combatants alternating between collision and collusion’, Peacebuilding, 4(1), 2016; ‘Demobilisation’, in The SAGE Encyclopaedia of War: Social Science Perspectives, edited by Paul Joseph, Sage, 2017, and (in French) Peace Brokers. Veterans at the Heart of International Statebuilding in Kosovo, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2018.
Cécile Jouhanneau is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University Paul Valéry Montpellier and a researcher at ART-Dev. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, she specialises in post-war politics, peacebuilding and everyday life in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has published Sortir de la Guerre en Bosnie-Herzégovine. Une Sociologie Politique du Témoignage et de la Civilité [Exiting the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Political Sociology of Testimony and Civility], Paris: Karthala, 2016, has co-edited ‘Governing the Memories of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe: Public Policies and Social Practices’, European Politics and Society, 18 (1) 2017, with Pascal Bonnard, and her recent publications include ‘The Discretion of Witnesses. War Camp Memories between Politicisation and Civility’, in Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Semiperipheral Entanglements, edited by Stef Jansen, Čarna Brković & Vanja Čelebičić; London, Routledge, 2016.
Notes
1. The French National Gendarmerie is a national police force with a military status, hence its nickname of ‘soldiers of the law’ (Luc 2010). With more than 100,000 members and a history dating back to the pre-1789 Maréchaussée (Marshalcy), it has been influential around the world, especially in the French colonial empire. The National Gendarmerie comprises departmental gendarmerie (gendarmerie départementale) with a general surveillance mission as a territorial police branch, mobile gendarmerie with a public order maintenance and general security mandate, the Republican Guard that provides guards of honour for the state and security in the capital city, and specialised units. On the recent evolutions of the National Gendarmerie, see Anderson (Citation2011).
2. Interviewees’ names are pseudonyms.
3. An exciting trend of research is being dedicated to interactions between ‘international’ and ‘national’ actors in Security Sector Reforms (Lemay-Hébert Citation2014; Schroeder and Chappuis Citation2014; Juncos Citation2018).
4. The UN have deployed Civilian Police (CIVPOL) in their peacekeeping missions as of the 1960s (Congo, Cyprus), but it is mainly after the end of the Cold war that CIVPOL expanded in number and responsibilities – in Namibia, Salvador, Angola, Haiti, Cambodia and mostly in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Eastern Slavonia in the second half of the 1990s (Call and Barnett Citation1999, 48–49). In 2004, the CIVPOL name was changed into UN Police. While they were 1,677 in 1994, in August 2017 11,530 UN Police were deployed in peace missions (https://police.un.org/en/mission-of-un-police, last consulted in December 2017).
5. We use the concept of habitus that was notably framed by Pierre Bourdieu (and Norbert Elias before him), but our analysis is not an exclusively Bourdieusian one. It also draws very importantly on interactionist sociology, more precisely on Erving Goffman’s approach. Bourdieu’s critical or reflexive sociology is not incompatible with Goffman’s interactionism, quite the contrary. Bourdieu was even instrumental in introducing the latter’s work in France by publishing it in his collection at the Editions de Minuit. And while being influenced by George Herbert Mead, Goffman did not define himself as a symbolic interactionist and considered the interaction order as a type of social order. In this sense, Goffman and Bourdieu agreed that ‘the truth of the interaction is never entirely contained in the interaction’ (Bourdieu Citation2013, 81).
6. Security Sector Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia has attracted considerable academic attention. See for instance Vetschera and Damian Citation2006; Muehlmann Citation2008; Ioannides and Collantes Celador Citation2011; Juncos Citation2011; Vandemoortele Citation2012; Berg Citation2014; Tolksdorf Citation2014.
7. Between Spring 2013 and Spring 2015 we conducted seventeen in-depth semi-directive interviews with gendarmes. They lasted from two to three hours. We recruited our interview participants via different channels, from the most formal (SIRPA Gendarmerie) to the most informal (through a message posted on the closed gendarme online forum Gendopex and through the use of mutual acquaintances). Nathalie Duclos conducted the interviews alone in 2013, and Cécile Jouhanneau joined her in 2014 and 2015. We were sensitive to how being female civilian interviewers affected the content of the interviews, as well as to the fact that some interviews were conducted in the gendarme’s workplace and others in their home or in cafés. Moreover, our investigation was two-tiered: in the first phase of our research we gathered empirical material on the ground, in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nathalie Duclos conducted fieldwork in Kosovo in 2001 and 2002, performed 12 interviews with gendarmes in Prizren, Prishtina and North Mitrovica and conducted observations in a police precinct in Prizren in 2002, while Cécile Jouhanneau has engaged in ethnographic research in Bosnia and Herzegovina (mainly in Brčko District and Sarajevo Canton) since 2006.
8. Our results are deeply inserted in the specific chronotopic context of mid-1990s-mid-2000s international interventions in the former Yugoslavia: they testify to the development of vague international missions as well as to a turning point in the French gendarmerie (towards civilianisation, bureaucratisation and managerialisation). Even though we cannot exclude that French gendarmes sent as civilian police, especially those recruited before the 2000s, are still trying to escape the transformations of their corps, we lack the empirical evidence to generalise this claim. However, what we do wish to generalise is the argument that any investigation into intervention as practice should be highly sensitive to social and historical context in the host societies as well as in peacebuilders’.
9. Revue de la Gendarmerie Nationale and monthly magazine Gend’Info, but also open online forums dedicated to gendarme life, such as forum-militaire.fr and gendarmes-en-colere.forum2discussion.net.
10. Based on which we gained access to the viewpoint of some international policemen’s Bosnian host families and to the discourse and attitude of gendarmes on the ground in Kosovo. Nathalie Duclos regularly went in Kosovo since July 1999, first to conduct a research on the institution building aspect of the mission, namely the establishment of the KPS (Kosovo Police Service), conducted by the CIVPOL. She notably made ethnographic observations in a police station in Prizren after being authorised to follow the French gendarmes monitoring local policemen deployed in that station. Her current research deals with the integration of former combatants in the new state institutions in Kosovo, especially the security sector. Her first research on the KPS was funded by the IHESI (Institute of High Studies in Interior Security), a research centre linked to the French Interior ministry – not to the Ministry of Defence that was the Gendarmerie’s line ministry at the time. Her subsequent research on former combatants conducted since 2003 has also been totally independent from the French military organisation. The results of her research are not subject to the imprimatur of the French Gendarmerie nor military organisations. Cécile Jouhanneau research has never received any funding from the Gendarmerie or the Army. Relying on her command of the Bosnian language, she has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia since 2006. Having lived in 2006 with the family of a former IPTF/EUFOR interpreter and then in 2008, 2010 and 2014 with a family who had hosted UN civilian policemen during the war gave her access to unprompted stories of interactions with international policemen that corroborated the claims made by gendarmes who had been stationed in other Bosnian localities.
11. On top of their regular net salary, gendarmes who joined the UN civilian police would receive 1.5 times their gross salary as well as a ‘subsistence allocation’ of $108 a day that was supposed to cover their accommodation and food expenses, but greatly exceeded them. One of Nathalie Duclos's interlocutors estimated that in missions abroad, his monthly wage was multiplied by four, which allowed him to plan a home purchase that would have been inconceivable otherwise (informal conversation, Prizren, 22 July 2002). Moreover, participating in UN missions would reduce the number of years necessary for pension contributions, since time spent abroad was attributed a multiplying factor.
12. On US military’s organisational flexibility on the Bosnian ground, see also Moore (Citation2019). And on French military’s quest for increased flexibility on the ground in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, see Daho (Citation2019).
13. Many members of the Serbian military and paramilitary forces in Kosovo had only taken off their uniforms, but not fully demobilised nor left Kosovo and were living in the North of Mitrovica, contrary to what UN resolution 1244 stipulated.
14. Like the US militaries described by Adam Moore Citation2019, on the intervention ground they were exposed to numerous requests for help from civilians. However, gendarmes’ practices on the Yugoslav ground were rather autonomous vis-à-vis the Army proper. At least three factors made our interviewees’ mission abroad singular with regards to soldiers. First, most of them were accommodated in private homes instead of barracks. This increased their immersion into host societies and facilitated their activities of service and surveillance. Second, their training was not as centred on combat as soldiers’ and they were therefore better prepared to answer civilians’ demands for help (cf. Sion Citation2008, 208). Third, even though the French army has developed an intense doctrinal reflexion on the soldiers’ relation to ‘civilian populations’, in Bosnia and Kosovo French soldiers mainly treated them as ‘constraints’ that needed to be taken seriously (Daho Citation2014, 67). This is in sharp contrast with gendarmes’ discourse and practice that tended to consider their local interlocutors as resources.
15. Grégory Daho also describes how certain French military area chiefs in Bosnia would improvise and innovate on the ground (Citation2016, 69–87). Daho (Citation2014) and Olsson (Citation2007) have even pinpointed the long-term historical roots of the hybridisation between humanitarian work and military objectives. The ‘hearts and minds’ doctrine recently mobilised in Afghanistan and Iraq has its roots in colonial counterinsurgency doctrine that devolved considerable attention to the relationships between militaries and local civilians. Eyal Weizman’s notion of ‘humanitarian present’, where the moderation of violence is part of violence itself (Weizman Citation2011, 52–53), thus has a long past.
16. One cannot but lament the scarcity of sociological data on gendarmes in the academic literature. While the French National Police has been the object of growing sociological investigation since the early 1980s, when the Interior Ministry started opening up to and even promoting scholarly research (Jobard and de Maillard Citation2015, 85 sqq), the National Gendarmerie has remained secretive and attached to its military duty of reserve (Dieu Citation1993, 35). Some sociological evolutions have been documented nevertheless. In the three decades prior to the 1980s, gendarmes tended to originate from the working class and the rural world (Bruneteaux Citation1992, Citation1993). 17 percent of them had a peasant father in the 1950s, but only 3.4 per cent of them did in 1991 (Dieu Citation1993, 409–410). In the 1980s, their social origin opened widely to the third sector: while 18 percent of gendarmes had an employee father in the mid-1970s, it was the case for 40 percent of them in the early 1990s (ibid.). Moreover, in the 1980s their education level increased: while after WW2 only 5 percent of them had a baccalaureate degree (end of high school national exam), 25 percent of them did at the end of the 1980s (Bruneteaux Citation1992, Citation1993) and in the 2000s, 75 percent of them had a baccalaureate level (Dieu Citation2007).
17. Confronted with limited data on gendarmes’ social background in general, we endeavoured to gather information on our interviewees’ educational and social trajectories before becoming gendarmes, as well as on their position in the Gendarmerie hierarchy. Born in the 1950s and 1960s, our respondents generally had a baccalaureate degree or less and had not pursued higher education. Most of them were in the lower ranks of the Gendarmerie hierarchy: they were mainly sub-officers (sous-officiers).
18. Testimony by chief warrant officer Véronique Larrousse, Gend’Info, n°387, May 2016, p. 25.
19. These interview materials match Nathalie Duclos's observations in Prizren in 2002. All her interviewees but one had endeavoured to learn the Serbian language. Sometimes they were even using it in provocative ways, for instance in an Albanian restaurant where everybody else spoke English.
20. On the continuum of the sexual-economic exchange, see Tabet (Citation2004).
21. Again, the context of the interview surely played a role in the emphasis our interviewees put on supposed ‘cultural differences’ between ‘the French’ and ‘Muslims’: in 2010s France, this has become part of a widespread anti-Muslim public discourse (on islamophobic discourse and deeds in France since the 1980s; see Hajjat and Mohammed Citation2013; on how both European liberals and the extreme right wing have spread an essentialist narrative of ‘Europe’ that excludes Islam, including Balkan Islam, see Asad Citation2002, 214). However, during her fieldwork in Prizren in July 2002, Nathalie Duclos repeatedly heard the same assertions: the French gendarmes she met emphasised how close and confident they felt with the Serbs and how difficult it was for them to bind with Albanians. They mostly pitted them to their supposed Islamic religion, while Kosovo Albanians rather tend to identify based on their language (Roux Citation1992).
22. Comparisons with the French rural way of life already abounded in Nathalie Duclos's observations among French gendarmes in Prizren in 2002.
23. On Balkanism, see Todorova (Citation1997). Her definition of Balkanism draws on Edward Said’s work on Orientalism (1978). However, contrary to Bakić-Hayden (Citation1995), Todorova does not consider it as a simple variant of Orientalism: “Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about an imputed opposition [between Europe and an intangible Orient], balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity” (Todorova Citation1997, 17; see also Coles Citation2002, 3).
24. It is remindful of the ‘principle of neutrality’ that is supposed to guide the gendarmerie’s action since the XIXth century (Houte Citation2008, 69).
25. Cf. Nathalie Duclos's observations in Prizren in July 2002.
26. Short for Gendarmes en Opérations Extérieures, i.e. Gendarmes in External Operations.
27. This also matches Cécile Jouhanneau’s experience in northern Bosnia in April 2006, when her host family, who happened to be headed by a former IPTF and EUFOR interpreter, warmly welcomed her as a French national and repeatedly evoked the French-Serbian alliance.
28. Gendarmes met by Nathalie Duclos in Kosovo in 2002 recount that the French government made its strategic priorities explicit by favouring ‘internal-external security’ related positions for the French gendarmes in Kosovo. Its main concern was to gather intelligence and anticipate on transnational migrations, crime and terrorism that might reach France. When applying for unrelated missions such as the protection of local judges, French gendarmes were either invited to change their choice or informed that they would not obtain any extension of their CIVPOL mission (see Duclos, Citation2003).
29. Cocorico is French for cock-a-doodle-doo, the rooster’s call. The Gallic rooster being a French national symbol, ‘Cocorico!’ is an expression of jingoistic pride.
30. On the ‘frontier/crime/immigration nexus’, see Bigo (Citation1996). See also Mégie (Citation2012).
31. On the crucial importance of collecting information on the ground to offer one’s state resources in international negotiations and multilateral decision-making processes, see also Buchet de Neuilly (Citation2019).
32. It would be interesting to extend this analysis to other Western European gendarmerie-type forces. Our argument might hold true for Italian Carabinieri and Spanish Guardia Civil. Indeed, as Derek Lutterbeck’s research shows, they have also been faced with the ‘paradox of gendarmeries’, namely their civilianisation as interior security forces and their concomitant increased role in interior-exterior security challenges (Lutterbeck Citation2013)
33. ‘Although it was not possible to obtain statistics on the social status of these individuals, anecdotal evidence indicates that it, too, was varied. Most interveners seemed to come from the middle class and hold university degrees, but I met people whose families belonged to the highest intellectual or economic strata of their countries and others who came from a working-class or impoverished background (especially among rank-and-file soldiers)’ (Autesserre Citation2014, 60). Autesserre summarises Peacelanders’ social positions as ‘varied’, only to stress the commonalities in their practices, habits and narratives.