Understanding Peacekeeping. Alex J. Bellamy
in shaping some of the UN’s key early operations in places such as Suez and Congo. More recently, Cunliffe argues, the Security Council’s three Western members have leveraged peacekeeping operations to promote their interests, for example in West Africa and Haiti. He also notes the clear echoes between some contemporary UN peacekeeping mandates and those of earlier imperial policing operations (see also Duffield 2001; Pugh 2004). This is not that different from arguments made by some self-confessed liberals who also saw many post-Cold War peacebuilding missions trying to ‘transplant the values and institutions of the liberal democratic core into the affairs of peripheral host states’ (Paris 2002: 638).
Critics of this approach contend that, while they have increased their influence over UN peacekeeping mandates since the end of the Cold War, the P3 are not as dominant as the concept of imperialism implies (Gowan 2015). Neither the Security Council nor Western states can dictate the processes or outcomes of UN peacekeeping, let alone missions conducted by non-UN actors such as the African Union and the continent’s regional arrangements. Instead, the contemporary reality is not imperial dominance but messy crisis management with multiple actors that can influence the course of events, including host states, major T/PCCs, the UN Secretariat, and regional organizations.
Critical theory
In international relations, critical theorists argue that our theories are constitutive of reality – that is, how we think about the social world shapes our behaviour in it, as well as vice versa. Analytically, critical theorists have focused on explaining configurations of power in global politics and on who benefits and who loses out from dominant systems, structures and practices. Critical theories of international relations have come in several variants, but most of them have the explicit purpose of promoting human emancipation, broadly understood as the freeing of people ‘from those oppressions that stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do, compatible with the freedom of others’ (Booth 2007: 112). In relation to peace operations, therefore, critical theorists have examined three big and important questions: what theories, values, ideologies, interests and identities shape the way peace operations are understood; which actors benefit most as a result; and what theories and practices of peace operations are most likely to advance human emancipation (e.g. Bellamy and Williams 2004).
In addressing the first question, some prominent critical theorists have argued that peace operations maintain (and are informed by) a particular understanding of international peace and security that is ostensibly compatible with the capitalist global political economy (Pugh 2003: 40). Capitalism, however, has created peripheral regions of the global economy where the state and economic development sometimes collapse into anarchy and competition between oligarchs, warlords and gangsters, who use violence to pursue their interests. Sometimes, the global core responds by despatching peacekeepers to establish and protect a capitalist economic order (Pugh 2004: 41; Duffield 2001) or impose the ‘normalcy’ of democracy on chaotic parts of the world (Zanotti 2006).
With reference to the second question, critical theorists have shown how a variety of actors can benefit and lose out from the transnational political economies created by these missions, which, after all, comprise thousands of relatively rich foreigners deployed to some of the world’s most desperate or poorest regions (e.g. Andreas 2008a; Jennings 2015). Other theorists have highlighted how peace operations can themselves be a source of insecurity to some locals, including through peacekeepers engaging in sexual violence and organized crime (e.g. Whitworth 2004; Higate and Henry 2009).
Finally, in order to understand how peace operations might more effectively promote human emancipation, critical theorists have sought to amplify the voices of ‘the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless’ (Said 1994: 84). It is the ‘peacekept’ who should be the ultimate beneficiaries of peace operations, but policy-makers must therefore listen to their experiences of life alongside peace operations (Pouligny 2006). Listening to such local voices is a necessary – but not sufficient – part of reforming the peacekeeping enterprise and developing more emancipatory policies, or what the HIPPO Report of 2015 called ‘people-centred’ peace operations (UN 2015c).
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The five approaches discussed above provide distinct ways of understanding peace operations and their roles in global politics. They do not exhaust the potential options, nor do they cover every aspect of the five levels of analysis described earlier. But they do remind us about the political choices analysts and practitioners make when they choose what to study and how to study it. Next, we briefly summarize how previous academic studies have measured the effects of peace operations in global politics.
1.3 The impacts of peace operations on armed conflict
During the Cold War, the relatively small number of peace operations saw few attempts to generalize about their net impacts and effects. During this period, UN peacekeeping was generally viewed as a rather niche enterprise, either facilitating decolonization or providing a mechanism for resolving international conflicts without risking direct superpower involvement (e.g. Rikhye 1984: 234). After the Cold War, however, the dramatic increase in the number and scope of peace operations encouraged more scholars to generalize about their overall impact and effects. Almost all these studies have focused on UN missions and tended to use some form of quantitative method. This was partly because the UN conducted more peace operations than any other actor over the longest period of time (more than seventy peacekeeping operations over seventy years). But it was also due to the availability of reasonably good data about UN peace operations compared to those conducted by states or other international organizations. This was an especially important consideration for more quantitative studies. These scholars found that, in general terms, UN peacekeeping operations have had a range of beneficial effects.
First, UN peacekeepers tend to deploy to crises where other international actors are reluctant to lead (Fortna 2008; Bellamy and Williams 2015). Second, once deployed, UN peace operations reduce the likelihood of armed conflict reigniting after settlements have been concluded (Fortna 2004, 2008). Specifically, where peacekeepers are deployed, the likelihood of war reigniting falls by 75 to 85 per cent compared to those cases where no peacekeepers are deployed (Fortna 2008: 171). A third important impact is that UN missions can reduce the length of local conflict episodes in host countries, even protracted civil wars, and have a good record of stopping the recurrence of major violence (Ruggieri et al. 2017; Doyle and Sambanis 2006; Hoeffler 2014). Moreover, larger UN troop deployments can shorten civil war duration to a negotiated settlement (Kathman and Benson 2019). Fourth, UN peacekeeping operations reduce the geographic scope of violence and the risk of armed conflicts spreading across international borders (Beardsley and Gleditsch 2015; Beardsley 2011). Moreover, when UN troops are deployed to situations of ongoing armed conflict, their presence is associated with a reduction in violence; the more UN peacekeeping troops deployed, the lower the number of battlefield deaths (Hultman et al. 2014). UN peacekeepers have also been shown successfully to mitigate local communal violence by organizing intergroup dialogues (Schmidt 2019). Those same troops can further reinforce the likelihood of a successful mediated settlement to the armed conflict in question (Beardsley et al. 2019). Sixth, UN peacekeepers can deter atrocities against civilians (Melander 2009). This is particularly important given that, by the 2010s, over 90 per cent of UN peacekeepers were explicitly mandated to protect civilians, and they did so in part by deploying to locations where non-combatants are at risk (Hultman 2013). They were usually successful in this endeavour, and the extent of protection increased with the number of UN troops and police deployed (Hultman et al. 2013; Kathman and Wood 2016; Fjelde et al. 2019). However, the ability of UN peacekeepers to reduce sexual violence in armed conflicts is contested: while some analysts conclude it is generally weak (Johansson and Hultman 2019), others suggest that ‘missions both reduce the chance of any violence and limit its prevalence’ (Kirschner and Miller 2019).
In sum, careful scholarly studies have recognized UN peacekeeping operations as highly cost-effective means of promoting peace and security, especially since they account for just a tiny fraction of world military expenditure: in 2017, for example, UN peacekeeping operations cost approximately $7.5 billion, or less than 0.5 per cent of $1,739,000,000,000