United Nations peace operations and International Relations theory

Kseniya Oksamytna, John Karlsrud

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526148865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

United Nations peace operations have undergone multiple transformations over the more than seventy years of their existence. Multidimensional peace operations have organised elections, helped deliver humanitarian assistance, advised on army and police reform, and fought rebel groups. Such operations not only represent a core pillar of the multilateral peace and security architecture but also fundamentally reshape lives of millions of people around the world.This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of multiple theoretical perspectives on UN peace operations. It offers practical examples of how International Relations theories apply to specific policy issues and simultaneously demonstrates how major debates on UN peace operations - on civilian protection, local ownership, or gender mainstreaming - benefit from theoretical exploration. With insightful contributions from a range of international academics, UN peace operations and International Relations theory is an essential book for scholars, students, and experts working on peace and security and the broader issue of international cooperation.

1
Realism

Philip Cunliffe

The International Relations (IR) theory of realism and the practice of peacekeeping would seem to be at odds with each other. Realist theorising in IR is traditionally focused on, for example, grand questions of geopolitical rivalry between major powers, on arms races between industrialised states with sophisticated weapons systems, on the dynamics of military and nuclear strategy. For realists, international peace is only ever a temporary reprieve and one produced by shifting alliances of mutual convenience and interest calibrated by the balance of power. The most important political actors in this framework are states. By contrast, the study and practice of peacekeeping is vested in solidifying peace through co-operation, which is structured by international organisations and agreements. In its more ambitious incarnations such as conflict transformation and peacebuilding, peacekeepers aim even to transform the context of conflict through crafting peace settlements. They might also engage in extensive social and political reforms that aim to suppress violent conflict through fostering economic growth, overseeing new judicial systems, protecting individual human rights, disarming militias, and even establishing systems of multi-party political competition. All of this is to be sustained through the moral authority and expertise provided by the supranational political authority of regional organisations or, in its most august incarnation, the UN. The actors involved in peacekeeping are not only states but also international and regional organisations. That these actors may intensively intervene in other states as part of peacekeeping has important conceptual implications, as this effectively turns the units of conventional realist theorising – states – inside-out.

Yet on the other hand, the study of peacekeeping and the realist analysis of world politics clearly share basic and important affinities. Realist analysis and the study of peacekeeping are both concerned with the fundamental questions of war, peace, and order in the international arena. The study of peacekeeping is a sub-field of the wider discipline of international relations whereas realism is a major school of thought about international politics as a whole. Thus, given that peacekeeping concerns war and conflict, one might expect realist analyses to be strongly manifest in the field of peacekeeping studies. Yet, despite the fact that peacekeeping concerns the most fundamental questions of international order – peace and war, the legitimate use of force by the state, the question of state authority and power – this conceptual closeness of subject matter has not provoked any sustained interest from realist thinkers or those open to realist approaches. What is it then that keeps realist analysis and the study of peacekeeping so far apart?

Part of the reason for this continuing intellectual separateness might be the growth of middle-range theories in IR which have tended to crowd out studies directly inspired by realism (Mearsheimer and Walt 2013). It is also partly a question of scale. Whereas realism is focused on questions of peace and war in the competition between great powers in which the very shape of the international order itself may be at stake, peacekeeping is focused on smaller-scale wars and conflicts. While these ‘small wars’ may be terribly violent and destructive in terms of the overall levels of bloodshed (e.g. the conflicts that have persistently plagued Zaïre, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, since the 1990s), they do not fundamentally alter or affect relations between great powers – and therefore never reach the realm of ‘high politics’ that tends to concern realists. Peacekeeping has traditionally been seen as an answer to the domestic anarchy of state collapse, ethnic conflict, and warlordism in poor and marginal areas of the international order. Peacekeeping was never intended to provide an answer to the systemic anarchy of the international order itself. Indeed, those peacekeeping operations that aim at extending the authority of the state, such as the UN missions in Mali and Lebanon, are precisely intended to restore functioning government to conflict zones within the country. By contrast, the predicate of modern-day realism is, of course, the permanent absence of a global government able to suppress conflict.

Unsurprisingly then, the theoretical underpinnings of the study and practice of peacekeeping have been broadly liberal. The study of peacekeeping has also drawn in what are effectively functionalist analyses of international public goods and radical variants of conflict transformation theories (e.g. Gaibulloev et al. 2009, and Richmond and Mac Ginty 2015, respectively). Yet I want to argue in this chapter that there are plenty of reasons why the study of peacekeeping would be improved by drawing on realist theorising. Equally I want to assert that peacekeeping might provide some useful opportunities for empirical testing, consolidation and extension of realist theorising. Part of the conceptual problem here is the changing character of international politics and questions of classification. Given the extensive overlap between low-intensity or counter-insurgency-style military operations and peacekeeping, and given the sheer numbers of military personnel that, in global terms, now routinely deploy in peacekeeping operations, the question arises: how should we classify peacekeeping?

Definitions are generated from theories in interaction with empirical observation, and perhaps the strong association of peacekeeping with liberal internationalism due to its historical association with the UN is overblown. For example, the range of French military operations across the Sahel and former French West Africa since the end of the Cold War – Operation Licorne, Operation Serval, Operation Barkhane, Operation Sangaris – have been tightly bound to UN deployments (UNOCI, MINUSMA, MINURCAT, respectively) and with UN authorisation. French interventions could plausibly be classified as traditional military interventions to secure uranium deposits, to support allied and client states in the region, and/or to maintain order within a ‘backyard’ or neocolonial sphere of French influence. If this is true, then how should we consider the UN operations that co-deploy with French military operations? Should we see them as appendages of French military operations, or should we see peacekeeping operations as primary in conceptual terms, that is, French military operations deploying in support of supranational efforts? The answer goes beyond the scope of this chapter, but underlying this definitional issue is the larger question of changes in international order – changes by which traditional military interventions have had to be garbed as altruistic and co-operative, and legitimated by invoking supranational authority in a way that would have been far less common in even the recent past (Zolo 1997). In what follows, I first consider the status of realist theorising in peacekeeping, before considering what realism has to offer, with specific reference to three broad realist schools – classical, structural, and neoclassical.

Realism in peacekeeping

The limited influence of theoretical realism in peacekeeping not only reflects the role and purpose of peacekeeping being at odds with the concerns of realist theorising but also reflects the internal intellectual development of peacekeeping studies – which, as Roland Paris argued some time ago, was conducive to microtheorising, with the result that generalisation in peacekeeping studies failed to connect with larger questions of world order and major debates within IR theory (Paris 2000). This trend has continued, despite the fact that peacekeeping operations have grown and proliferated to such a scale that they no longer need to be studied on a case-by-case basis, as if they were an exotic sub-species of international politics. Yet within the field generalisation continues to be largely internally oriented, considering peacekeeping within its own terms and dynamics rather than connecting it to larger questions of world order. Critical theoretical approaches to ‘hybrid peace’, for example, consider peacekeeping practice largely on its own terms, whilst quantitative studies of peacekeeping too rarely compare peacekeeping to other kinds of similar activities, such as counter-insurgency campaigns and other forms of military intervention. The original danger identified by Paris remains – that of a conceptual collapse into self-referentiality. Peacekeeping thus still tends to be studied as a sui generis phenomenon, even if on a larger scale and depicted on a larger canvas. Unsurprisingly then, there seem to be few conceptual bridges that would connect the study and practice of peacekeeping to realism, understood as a quintessential IR theory oriented towards basic questions of world order and power-political competition.

At most, realism has existed as a foil in studies of peacekeeping, in which realism was to be exposed as failing to account in a satisfactory manner for the global development of peacekeeping since the end of the Cold War. The degree of sustained international co-operation needed to mount and sustain post-Cold War peacekeeping seems to make irrelevant conventional realist assumptions about narrowly egotistical states chary of co-operating. Thus realism in peacekeeping mostly stood as a synonym for crude self-interest, at best perhaps a corrective to the grandiloquent and classically idealist rhetoric that attached itself to peacekeeping at different periods.

Where realism has been applied to the study of peacekeeping, it has been done in a limited manner. In the latter case, Alan James's detailed empirical examination of peacekeeping was a nominally realist study in that James kept a firm grasp on questions of state interest and power in examining the formation and conduct of a wide variety of peacekeeping and para-peacekeeping operations (James 1990). Norrie MacQueen's study declared itself to be realist, yet it hinged part of the analysis around concepts such as failed states and globalisation, neither of which is easily assimilated into consistently neorealist theoretical frameworks (MacQueen 2006). Similarly Laura Neack used realism as a synonym for ‘egoism’ as opposed to ‘altruism’ in theorising middle-power participation in peacekeeping (Neack 1995). Nor was there any particular effort in these studies consistently to unpack and clearly differentiate distinct levels of analysis – such as unit-level (state behaviour) versus system-level (international order effects).

Nonetheless, the fact that applications of realism have been limited or patchy does not mean that they have been without insight. Neack, for instance, drew attention to the fact that Scandinavian peacekeeping states were also prolific arms exporters. Thus, counterintuitively Norway and Sweden were exporting both blue berets and military hardware to the same conflict-prone region: at the time of writing, the Middle East (Neack 1995: 188). This apparent paradox could be at once contained and made interesting within the context of a realist analysis, which could contextualise peacekeeping as one policy among others pursued by power-seeking and self-interested states. Such a contradiction would be difficult meaningfully to accommodate within large-n studies of peacekeeping that may nominally account for ‘self-interest’ in explaining peacekeeping behaviour, but fail to contextualise it among other kinds of state activities (e.g. Bove and Elia 2011). Similarly, MacQueen had the important insight that the growth of peacekeeping was driven by the collapse of geopolitical spheres of influence and contested battle zones stemming from the Cold War. Peacekeeping thus became possible in areas from which it would have been hitherto excluded such as Afghanistan, Central America, South-East Asia and southern Africa (MacQueen 2006: 14, passim). Such insight could come only from the macropolitical perspective offered by a global view on international order and peacekeeping. Alan James was also alert to the question of how sph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• United Nations peace operations and International Relations theory: An introduction
• 1 Realism
• 2 Liberal institutionalism
• 3 Rational choice institutionalism
• 4 Sociological institutionalism
• 5 Constructivism
• 6 Practice theories
• 7 Critical security studies
• 8 Feminist institutionalism
• 9 Complexity theory
• Concluding reflections: International Relations theory and the study of UN peace operations
• Index