Reforming 21st Century Peacekeeping Operations

Governmentalities of Security, Protection, and Police

Marc. G Doucet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317382638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific focus on analyzing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping operations led by the United Nations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian-inspired approaches in the field of International Relations, it highlights how interventions can be viewed through the lens of governmentality and its key attendant concepts. The book draws from these approaches in order to explore how international interventions are increasingly informed by governmental rationalities of security and policing.

Two specific cases are examined: the UN's Security Sector Reform (SSR) approach and the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda. Focusing on the governmental rationalities that are at work in these two central frameworks that have come to guide contemporary UN-led peacekeeping efforts in recent years, the book considers:

• 
  
  

• The use in IR of governmentality and its attendant notions of biopower and sovereign power

• 
  
  

• The recent discussion regarding the concept and practice of international policing and police reform

• 
  
  

• The rise of security as a rationality of government and the manner in which security and police rationalities interconnect and have increasingly come to inform peacekeeping efforts

• 
  
  

• The Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework for peacebuilding and the rise of the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda.

This book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, security studies, critical theory, and conflict and intervention.

1 Reforming 21st century peacekeeping operations

Governmentalities of security,
protection, and police

The study of disease helps one understand a healthy body and the study of societies that have broken up can give us some insights into how to keep societies together. It is becoming more and more evident that one of the key strategic challenges of the next twenty years actually will be how to help keep societies together, how to prevent state failure and its potentially devastating consequences.

(Guéhenno, 2015: xv)

If one begins by asking for the ‘cause’ of the Gulag […] one makes the Gulag appear as a sort of disease or abscess, an infection, degeneration or involution. This is to think of the Gulag only negatively, a dysfunctioning to be rectified […]. The Gulag question has to be posed in positive terms. The problem of causes must not be dissociated from that of function: what use is the Gulag, what functions does it assure, in what strategies is it integrated?

(Foucault, 1980: 135–136. Emphasis added)¹

The post-Cold War concern among academics, experts, and practitioners with reforming international peacekeeping operations brings into to the domain of thought and knowledge rationalizations of violent conflict as problems that can find a measure of their resolution with the assistance of some form of international intervention.² The first of the two quotations above, taken from the prologue of the mémoire of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the former Under-Secretary-General for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, captures what often animates this rationality. Large-scale conflict, violence, and insecurity are akin to symptoms of a disease that threatens the health and wellbeing of societies and their populations. Left unattended, these symptoms risk destroying the lives of innocent people and cancel any prospect for socio-economic development. The possibility that this destruction is contagious poses a strategic challenge to the international community in general and the United Nations (UN) in particular. Different readings with contending theoretical vantage points offer different diagnoses and prescribe different remedies with a mix of more or less invasive therapies with goals of stabilization, rehabilitation, and reform. Fundamental to these readings is the starting point that the problem at hand is one of dysfunction. This dysfunction can be seen as operating on multiple levels. From a peacekeeping or statebuilding perspective, it may be seen as limited to a dysfunction of the basic governing institutions of ‘fragile states’, most often those associated with establishing and maintaining domestic order: the police, the military, and the rule of law. For the peacebuilding or reconstruction literature, broader socio-economic problems surrounding the lack of development, poor governance, and the absence of human security are at fault. Whether focused on broad or narrow patterns, the dysfunctions are problematized as abnormalities, which in turn call for some form of curative action: immediate measures to protect civilians and reform of state-based security institutions or more inclusive governance processes focused on bottom-up strategies aimed at promoting resilience and local ownership.

What is often left unattended by the manner in which this rationalization of violent conflict is made amenable to solutions aided by forms of international assistance is a vantage point and corresponding set of questions similar to those raised by Michel Foucault in the second epigraph above. Following along the lines of Foucault’s comments on the Gulag, and to paraphrase the epigraph, the questions one should begin with are what use are fragile states and their populations; what functions do they assure with regards to the reform agendas of contemporary international peacekeeping operations; and what is the nature of the strategies in which they are integrated? If Foucault’s work is of interest to analyses that seek to account for ‘dysfunctions’ it is because he draws our attention to how modern rationalities of government often work to provide an account of the dysfunctional, the abnormal or the excluded. Rather than ignore dysfunctions, Foucault brings us to consider how they themselves become a central object of government and a key component of how we are to understand power. The governance strategies that ensue labour with the stated goal of transforming the abnormal into the normal despite the fact that this goal remains, in real terms, an impossible horizon. Nowhere does this work seem more evident than with ongoing reform efforts to address the shortcomings of international peacekeeping operations.

There is often acknowledgement among academics and practitioners that in the post-Cold War era, international peacekeeping operations have fallen short of their objectives. Even among the advocates, there is a general recognition that the ledger of success stories contains few unqualified entries (Paris and Sisk 2009; Paris, Newman, and Richmond 2009; Call and Cousens 2008). This is true as well for more specific areas of intervention such as the two cases examined in this book. At the same time, however, despite the poor track record the range of actors involved and the scope of the agenda of contemporary international intervention has continued to grow in recent decades (Chandler 2009: 4). It is common, for instance, to highlight how the number of ‘peacekeepers’, or what Oliver Richmond and Jason Franks (2009: 181) refer to in broader terms as the “international civil service of peacebuilders and statebuilders”, began to increase rapidly after the temporary drop that followed the crises in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the first half of the 1990s. The total number of peacekeepers has continued to hover above 100,000 for most years since 2009 (UNDPKO 2016; Providing for Peacekeeping 2016). Connected to peacekeepers and the ­international civil service which accompanies them is a growing humanitarian system with more resources and people working for it. Described by Roger MacGinty (2011: 7) as “humanitarian and peace-support practitioners”, the number of people employed in the system has gone from roughly 274,000 in 2010 to 427,000 in 2014 according to the reports on the state of the humanitarian system published by the Overseas Development Institute’s Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) (ALNAP 2012: 26; ALNAP 2015: 39). The same reports note that total expenditures for the system, which includes UN agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, were estimated to be $37 billion US in 2013, up from $17.9 billion US in 2010 (ALNAP 2012: 26; ALNAP 2015: 38). These amounts do not include the UN’s peacekeeping budget, which for 2015–2016 was approved at $8.3 billion for its fifteen peacekeeping operations (United Nations 2016), nor do they highlight the full range of UN actors involved, which for the average peacekeeping operation can involve dozens of regional and international organizations with their own ‘peacebuilding’ budgets and mandates (Mayall and de Oliveira 2011: 18). Similar patterns of increased financial resources targeting populations marked by conflict are reported in the States of Fragility Reports produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD estimated that official development assistance (ODA) directed towards the 50 states listed in its 2015 report stood at $48.8 billion US in 2012, up from $19.2 billion in 2000 (OECD 2015: 57). Along a similar vein, Development Initiatives’ 2016 Global Humanitarian Assistance Report estimates that in 2014 over 90 per cent of official humanitarian assistance from the OECD countries went to what it terms “crisis affected-­populations” (Development Initiatives 2016: 7). As I have argued elsewhere (Doucet 2016), such figures bring to light aspects of the component parts of the growing assemblage of security governance that has become part of contemporary forms of international intervention of which the UN’s international peacekeeping operations are a central component.

Following Michael Merlingen and Rosa Ostrauskaite, this continued growth can be taken as a reflection of the fact that the forms of intervention that fall under the broad banner of peace-building have become “so naturalized in Western political discourse and mainline academic treatises on security governance as to be nearly invisible” (2005: 297). One of the consequences of this naturalization is that peace-building and its multifaceted component parts have in recent decades emerged as “a major ‘scientific research programme’” (Jabri 2013: 4). Central to this research programme, and its corresponding translations in Western political discourse on international assistance, have been the concepts of security and protection. Indeed, rationalities of ‘security’ and ‘protection’ have emerged in recent decades as the central drivers which underpin many of the strategies pursued by contemporary policy efforts to reform international peacekeeping operations. The knowledge that is produced once these rationalities come to animate reform efforts operates on a terrain of disorder/order. In doing so, the reform efforts tend to be guided by policing logics of prevention, reform, and penalty in the name of providing assistance to civilian populations faced with chronic conditions of violence and insecurity. Reform efforts driven by logics of police couple a Hobbesian view of the centrality of the state to political life with a view of political life that is ultimately determined by the presence or absence of protection from corporal violence at the hands of others. Life tends to be rationalized in a form that is reduced to biological existence and as a result the governmentality of security and protection that is generated comes to operate on a narrow continuum of biological life and death. What emerges then from the contemporary efforts to reform peacekeeping operations when protection and security are rendered central to these efforts is a particular form of biopolitics coupled with a particular form of necropolitics – a politics of life with a politics of death.

This book offers an examination of the governmental rationalities that are at work in some of the key policy frameworks that have driven central areas of the reform agenda of the UN’s international peacekeeping operations in recent decades. Two specific cases are examined, namely the UN’s approach to Security Sector Reform (SSR) and the UN’s Protection of Civilians (PoC) agenda. These two cases have been selected because they have emerged over the past decade as central to the UN’s ongoing policy efforts to reform international peacekeeping operations as part of its response to what is perceived to be the changing nature of violent conflict. The book’s analytical approach in investigating these cases takes its inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault, and Foucault inspired research in and outside the field of International Relations (IR). As Laura Zanotti has argued in one of the few book-length analyses focussed on international peacekeeping from the vantage point of a Foucauldian approach:

[…] both international relations and development scholars have recently voiced the need for moving the research agenda beyond analyses that pattern intervention along grand narratives of empire and domination and exploring instead the specific modalities of deployment of international power.

(2011: 76)

If Foucault’s work is of use for such a research agenda, it is because it offers an assortment of analytical tools that are useful in examining at close range what Mitchell Dean (2010: 27) refers to as the “analytics of government”. A focus on the analytics of government is a focus on unpacking how thought is bound up with policy programs of reforms meant to guide the conduct of individuals and populations in particular directions. As Dean adds, “to analyse mentalities of government is to analyse thought made practical and technical” (2010: 27). This book aims to offer a similar analysis of thought made practical by examining the modalities of power, arti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Reforming 21st-century peacekeeping operations
• 2 Governmentality, sovereign power, and contemporary international peacekeeping operations
• 3 Police, security, and resilience
• 4 Local ownership
• 5 The UN’s protection of civilians agenda
• 6 Conclusion: reforming UN peacekeeping operations
• Index