Peacekeeping Economy Research Articles

Love, sex, and Exchange in the Context of Peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT The narrow framing of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA) and the United Nations Zero-Tolerance Policy inadequately accounts for the range of sexual interactions in peacekeeping contexts and obscures the wider social contexts within which sexual decision making occurs. We draw on personal narratives from women who have had such sexual interactions, as well as community observers to demonstrate the complexity, multiple forms and ambiguities that characterize these relationships. We focus particularly on ‘love’ and long-term relationships. The complexities revealed cast doubt on the efficacy and appropriateness of the UN’s zero-tolerance policy and call for a modification of the concept of the peacekeeping economy to include consideration of intimacy, emotion and quests to fulfil expectations of gendered social roles in the contradictory landscape of peacekeeping.

\u201cIt was with my consent since he was providing me with money\u201d: a mixed methods study of adolescent perspectives on peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo

BackgroundThe United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) has been marred by widespread allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) of women and girls by UN peacekeepers. There is minimal research conducted on the perceptions of communities most affected by the SEA themselves, and even less about those below the age of 18.MethodsUsing mixed-methods data, we examined the perceptions of adolescents aged 13–17 on how the lives of women and girls have been affected by the presence of UN peacekeepers within the DRC. SenseMaker, a mixed-methods narrative capture tool, was used to survey participants around six United Nations bases across eastern DRC. Each participant shared a story about the experiences of Congolese women and girls in relation to MONUSCO personnel and interpreted their own stories by answering a series of questions. Patterns of adolescent perspectives (aged 13–17) were analyzed in comparison to all other age groups and emerging qualitative themes were mapped onto quantitative variables.ResultsQuantitative data showed that adolescents were more likely, in comparison to all other age groups, to perceive interactions between peacekeepers and women/girls as being initiated by the woman/girl, that the MONUSCO personnel was perceived to be able to offer protection, and that the interactions between local women/girls and peacekeepers were sexual in nature. Three qualitative themes emerged: poverty bringing peacekeepers and women/girls together, material/financial gain through transactional sex and sex work, and support-seeking actions of affected women/girls.ConclusionsOur mixed methods data illustrate the problematic finding that adolescents facing poverty may perceive SEA as protective through the monetary and material support gained. These findings contribute to the growing body of literature on peacekeeping economies and have implications for the prevention of, and response to, peacekeeper-perpetrated SEA.

Peacekeepers against Criminal Violence—Unintended Effects of Peacekeeping Operations?

AbstractResearch shows that peacekeepers reduce conflict intensity; however, effects of deployment on nonpolitical violence are unknown. This article focuses on criminal violence and proposes a twofold mechanism to explain why peacekeeping missions, even when effectively reducing conflict, can inadvertently increase criminal violence. First, less conflict opens up economic opportunities (so‐called peacekeeping economies) and provides operational security for organized crime, thus increasing violent competition among criminal groups. Second, demobilized combatants are vulnerable to turn to crime because of limited legal livelihood opportunities and their training in warfare. While UN troops may exacerbate these dynamics, UN police's peculiar role is likely to successfully contain criminal violence. Cross‐national and subnational empirical analyses show that large UN military deployments result in higher homicide rates, whereas UN police, overall, moderate this collateral effect.

Peacekeeping as Enterprise: Transaction, Consumption, and the Political Economy of Peace and Peacekeeping

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of peacekeeping as enterprise. It focuses on two dimensions of peacekeeping as enterprise: the first making a connection between peacekeeping as enterprise, via peacekeeping economies, to peace economies; the other focusing on the analytical utility of peacekeeping as enterprise, particularly in contrast to conceptualisations of peacekeeping as exceptional. It puts forth a conceptualisation of peacekeeping as (political-economic) exchange, rather than primarily a project of beneficence or, conversely, extraction. Such a conceptualisation deepens our understanding of how peacekeeping is lived and ‘works’ in practice, while also facilitating the study of how peace economies form and evolve.

Blue Helmet Havens: Peacekeeping as Bypassing in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

ABSTRACTIt is commonly argued that international peace interventions will work better and more empathetically if the prevailing separation between international interveners and local people is lessened. However, I argue that, outside the microeconomic interactions and transactional relationships that comprise the peacekeeping economy, peacekeeping is characterized by bypassing – intentional circumvention – or simple exclusion of the local. Drawing on fieldwork in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I argue that the rules and regulations, norms and architecture of UN peacekeeping all favour and are actively disposed to bypass or exclude. Accordingly, insofar as lessening the separation between internationals and locals is necessary to enable more effective and, ideally, empathetic peacekeeping, what is needed is systemic change that runs counter to the – mostly deliberate – policies that have been enacted to effectuate and retain this very separation over the past decade or more. The likelihood of such change is small.

Peacekeeping Economies in a Sub-Regional Context: The Paradigmatic Cases of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire

One conflict zone that has experienced multiple but differentiated impacts of peacekeeping economies is the Mano River Union (MRU) area. Comprising Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire, it provides the empirical evidence for the analysis in this article. Two major questions form the basis of the discussions. First, how do the mandate, size, and composition of a peacekeeping operation affect the evolution of the peacekeeping economy? Secondly, how do these peacekeeping economies serve as channels of inclusion and exclusion in host societies? This article argues that the peacekeeping economies that emerged in these three states created new hierarchies of inclusion for those who managed to engage with the new economic realities and opportunities, and exclusion of those who lost out on the opportunities. Specifically, the article argues that—while peacekeeping economies mean increased income, mobility and opportunity for some locals (women in particular) among the lower-waged—the peacekeeping economy ‘system’ is set up to reward those who already have the most.

Transactions and Interactions: Everyday Life in the Peacekeeping Economy

This article introduces and justifies the concept of the peacekeeping economy. The peacekeeping economy refers to economic activity that either would not occur, or would occur at a much lower scale and pay-rate, without the international presence. In particular, the concern is with the formal and informal economic activity that directly links the international presence with the local individual. The approach thus foregrounds empirical research that relies on sources missing from most work on peacekeeping and peacebuilding, such as sex workers; domestic workers; security guards; drivers; service workers; others in the informal sector; subcontracted workers; and UN national staff—in addition to international personnel and local elites. The article argues that this approach allows certain aspects of peacekeeping missions to be observed that would not otherwise be seen: the practice and politics of the ‘everyday life’ of those involved in a peacekeeping mission, and those living with and alongside these missions. The article also introduces the various contributions to this special issue in light of some of the most pertinent themes and issues raised by the peacekeeping economy approach.

Life in a ‘Peace-kept’ City: Encounters with the Peacekeeping Economy

The concept of the peacekeeping economy encompasses a range of actors typically marginalized from studies of peacekeeping, but whose activities, services, and interaction with peacekeepers are far from marginal. This article aims to deepen the understanding of the peacekeeping economy by showing how different groups of people negotiate within and profit from it. Based on fieldwork in Liberia and the DRC, it is argued that the peacekeeping economy helps make visible an array of connections, activities, motivations, and understandings that cumulatively help explain some of the reactions that peacekeeping provokes locally. I also suggest that in places with robust peacekeeping economies, locals’ experience of the mission is more akin to peacekeeping-as-enterprise than it is to the preferred narrative of peacekeeping-as-protection.

Parades, Parties and Pests: Contradictions of Everyday Life in Peacekeeping Economies

Based on research studies conducted in the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia in 2006, 2012 and 2013, this article argues that peacekeepers’ everyday experiences reflect a series of contradictory identities and performances with regard to nation, work and gender. Peacekeepers straddle paradoxical worlds simultaneously and manage oppositional demands and obligations, although it is often assumed that they inhabit peacekeeping economies in homogenous ways. Importantly, the experiences provide opportunities for peacekeepers to invest in, accumulate and deploy military capital; to consolidate their military identities; and to favourably and tactically position themselves as deserving and useful subjects within the peacekeeping landscape.

The Real Effects of Military Spending on Security

AbstractThe indirect effects of military spending on security are stronger and more important than its direct effects, and its long run impact more telling than its short run impact. In the short run, military spending can be a source of both physical security and economic stimulus. In the long run, it can be counterproductive in terms of physical security and will be a dead weight on the economy. How a society’s productive resources are deployed, as between military spending and more economically productive activities, sets it on a long-term course with powerful implications for the ability of its economy to do what it is supposed to do – provide for the material well-being of the population as a whole. The mechanism by which the extensive and extended diversion of productive economic resources to economically unproductive military spending drags an economy down is analyzed. Furthermore, it is possible to use properly structured international and domestic economic relationships in place of threats or use of military force to increase national and international security, while at the same time enhancing, rather than degrading, economic wellbeing. Three principles for structuring such a “peacekeeping economy” are set forth.

Service, sex, and security: Gendered peacekeeping economies in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

This article uses the concept of the peacekeeping economy to examine how peacekeepers – as individuals – and peacekeeping – as a complex of institutions, policy and practice – interact with, and inevitably shape, the societies in which they operate. It focuses on how peacekeeping economies are gendered, and the implications of this gendering. The article first examines three types of work characteristic of the peacekeeping economies in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – namely domestic service, sex work, and private security. The United Nation’s (UN’s) institutional responses to these sectors demonstrates the persistence of ‘traditional’ gendered ideologies in peacekeeping, in which the ‘private’, feminized sphere of the home – encompassing peacekeepers’ domestic and sexual arrangements – is marginalized, while the masculinized realm of security is prioritized and closely regulated. Furthermore, factoring in peacekeepers’ individual responses to service, sex, and security reveals a counter-narrative of the peacekeeper-as-vulnerable. This counter-narrative helps obscure the potential for exploitation of locals by peacekeepers. Yet it also upsets the subject position of both the peacekeeper and ‘the local’ in an unexpected manner, ultimately undermining the notion of the (masculine) UN protector. Such an understanding complicates popular notions of how gender ‘works’ in peacekeeping sites, and enables insights into the ramifications of peacekeeping’s (often) self-imposed limitations.

Unintended Impacts and the Gendered Consequences of Peacekeeping Economies in Liberia

Despite increased international attention to managing the potential impacts of peacekeeping on host countries, unintended consequences continue to emerge. This article focuses particularly on the alternative economies that peacekeeping operations generate and the differential economic impacts on individuals who come into contact with peacekeepers. Based on empirical evidence derived from fieldwork in Liberia, the article highlights the everyday lives of women whose livelihoods have been affected by the presence of peacekeeping missions. It also discusses how such economies adjust during the peacekeeping drawdown phase, and explores the dynamics that such economies have on specific segments of the Liberian population. The argument is that, while peacekeeping economies are critical in stimulating the local economy and providing livelihoods during and in the immediate aftermath of war, they have negative unintended impacts that need mitigation.

Unintended Consequences of Intimacy: Political Economies of Peacekeeping and Sex Tourism

This article assess whether peacekeeping economies are disposed to become sex tourism economies. It argues that, like sex tourism economies, peacekeeping economies are to a greater or lesser degree dependent on the exploitation of women's and girls’ sexual labour. The article examines some of the gendered roles and relations that are established or reinforced by peacekeeping economies, and whether these will likely continue beyond the life of the peacekeeping operation. It argues that the similarities between peacekeeping and sex tourism economies are indicative of a possible link between foreign military presence and sex tourism, but also that the UN's position as a political, humanitarian and development actor gives it a special responsibility to prevent this happening.

UN Peacekeeping Economies and Local Sex Industries: Connections and Implications

“Peacekeeping economies” have not been subject to much analysis of either their economic or socio-cultural and political impacts. This paper uses a gendered lens to explore some ramifications and lasting implications of peacekeeping economies, drawing on examples from four post-conflict countries with past or ongoing United Nations peacekeeping missions: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia, and Haiti. The paper is particularly concerned with the interplay between the peacekeeping economy and the sex industry. It examines some of the characteristics and impacts of peacekeeping economies, arguing that these are highly gendered – but that the “normalization” of peacekeeping economies allows these effects to be overlooked or obscured. It also contends that these gendered characteristics and impacts have (or are likely to have) broad and lasting consequences. Finally, the paper considers the initial impacts of UN efforts to tackle negative impacts of peacekeeping economies, particularly the zero-tolerance policy against sexual exploitation and the effort to “mainstream” gender and promote gender equality in and through peacekeeping. The paper suggests that the existence and potential longterm perpetuation of a highly gendered peacekeeping economy threatens to undermine the gender goals and objectives that are a component of most peace operations.

Engendering (In)security in Peace Support Operations

This article contributes towards ongoing debates on gender, security and post-conflict studies. Its focus is on the activities of male peace-keepers and their gendered relations with women and girls. Against the backdrop of the peacekeeping economies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, we focus on the consequencesof male peacekeepers’ construction and enactment of masculinity (and masculinities) on the security of local women. We concludeby suggesting that a deeper understanding of gender relations and security in peacekeeping contexts is necessary for any policy intervention in post-conflict settings.