Motivation for Participation in Peace Support Operations: Initial Findings among Slovenian Soldiers

Abstract

The question of why soldiers, policemen, civil servants, or members of civil society are motivated to participate in efforts dedicated to keeping, enforcing, building, or making peace is old as the peacekeeping efforts of the global community, and at least conditionally connected with the phenomenon of “willingness to fight” in classical military operations. The term “willing to fight” should be, within the scope of peace endeavors, redefined into “willing to pacify, but without fighting” because, in the majority of peace operations that have taken place after the Second World War, the given mandates were very limited in terms of allowing the use of weapons. In most cases, participants had light armament, if any. If morale, motivation, and cohesion are the core concepts that guide the actions of military combatants, can we use them to explain the behavior of the peacekeepers (the same soldiers in both cases) as well? The dilemma derives from the tendency to understand soldiers as schizophrenic employees, who have to possess highly-tuned combat readiness in case the peace mission turns into war-fighting, (which happens, although very rarely), and, at the same time, they have to achieve the goals of their missions with the minimal use of force, if not completely without the resort to arms. The theatre for peace operations differs in important ways from the classical military front. Although soldiers are deployed in military formations, their mandate is fully different (with some exceptions) from what they learned during their basic military training. Their police-like activities push them into the role of negotiator, intelligence gatherer, mediator, observer, listener, humanitarian worker, helper, and social worker. It is questionable to what extent they still need the heroism, high fighting morale, or developed will to fight that basic military training strives to inculcate. Gabriel argued that modern war-fighting activities put soldiers into stressful situations, with a resulting