and action’ (2014: 1–2). Autesserre’s ethnographic approach shows how the everyday cultures of foreign peacekeepers, peacebuilders and aid workers have cohered to create a ‘politics of knowledge’ about how to build peace in foreign lands. The culture of Peaceland is reinforced by the tendency to bunkerize the deployment of foreign personnel and keep them generally separated from the locals via various security procedures. It also often dismisses local expertise and instead privileges personnel who possess technical, thematic knowledge. And yet, ironically, many of the organizations that comprise Peaceland operate with a ‘culture of secrecy’. Autesserre concludes that the seemingly mundane elements of Peaceland’s everyday culture have a significant impact by inhibiting the effectiveness of peace operations.
Cosmopolitanism
Some advocates of a cosmopolitan approach, perhaps emerging from the ‘global culture’ of the 1990s, insisted that building truly stable international peace and security requires a particular way of understanding, organizing and conducting peace operations. This explicitly normative approach was pioneered by Mary Kaldor (1999), who thought cosmopolitan peace operations were a necessary response to the anti-civilian violence prevalent in what she called ‘new wars’. A second generation of human security was needed, one that was rights-based and employed both top-down and more inclusive bottom-up approaches to peacemaking simultaneously (Chinkin and Kaldor 2017: 479–526). Peace operations have an important role to play in that context and should be reconceptualized as instruments of ‘cosmopolitan law enforcement’ (Kaldor 1999: 124–31; 2006).
According to Kaldor, since ‘the key to resolving new wars is the construction of legitimate political authority’, the solution lay in the ‘enforcement of cosmopolitan norms, i.e. enforcement of international humanitarian and human rights law’, that would enable the protection of civilians and capture of war criminals (2006: x, 132). In this schema, cosmopolitan peace operations involve the creation of a new type of uniformed professional combining soldiering with policing skills. Such operations should address the challenges of ‘new wars’ that stem from their particular exclusivist strain of identity politics, their criminalized mode of warfare, and their globalized systems of finance. Peacekeepers should be prepared to act without the consent of some of the main belligerents – a basic tenet of traditional peacekeeping (see chapter 7) – but seek the consent and support of the victims instead (2006: 135). This, Kaldor recognized, would require peace operations to use force against those that threatened civilians and would therefore involve risking the lives of peacekeepers. Her ideas have been criticized for their simplistic portrayal of contemporary conflicts as involving only innocent civilians and their tormentors (Hirst 2001: 86). Nevertheless, some of Kaldor’s proposals – such as the need for a new conception of impartiality and the centrality of civilian protection – correspond closely with some of the main developments in the practice and policies of peace operations (see chapter 5). In particular, the UN has begun to embrace the need for a more ‘people centred’ approach to its peace operations.
Another variant of this approach, developed by Tom Woodhouse and Oliver Ramsbotham (2005), drew from cosmopolitan political theory, cosmopolitan conceptions of global governance which emphasize inclusivity and accountability, and principles of conflict resolution to argue that peace operations should promote cosmopolitan politics. The vanguard of this effort should be conducted by a standing UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) comprising specially trained military and civilian personnel. UNEPS should be capable of protecting civilians from harm and implementing the full range of the UN’s human security agenda (2005: 153; see also Langille 2014). This is a contemporary variant of the long-standing proposals for a UN standing army dating back to the organization’s origins (see Roberts 2008). However, persuading a critical mass of governments of the merits of the UNEPS idea, let alone operationalizing it, has remained a distinctly uphill battle.
Peacekeeping as liberal imperialism
At the opposite end of the political spectrum from cosmopolitanism, an alternative approach conceptualized UN peacekeeping as a neo-imperial tool of the great (Western) powers designed to pacify the global periphery. Developed most fully by Philip Cunliffe, this view argues that, as a key mechanism of military power projection, UN peacekeeping ‘enable[s] wealthy and powerful states to suppress and contain conflict across the unruly periphery of the international order without the encumbrance of open-ended political and military commitments’ (2013: 2). The great (Western) powers do this by using surrogates and proxies to keep order. UN peacekeepers have thus become agents of a system of ‘imperial multilateralism’, which Cunliffe describes as the ‘highest form of liberal imperialism’ (2013: 2, 23, 28). This approach sees UN peacekeeping as the most recent phase of ‘a historic tradition of imperial security’ (2013: 27), pointing out how the interests of Western colonial powers were important 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
