Suchergebnisse

Klappentext: Im Sommer 2021 verließen die NATO-Truppen nach fast zwei Jahrzehnten Afghanistan. Am 15. August desselben Jahres übernahmen die Taliban die Macht. Seitdem wird über die Frage diskutiert, ob und inwiefern das internationale humanitäre, politische und militärische Engagement in Afghanistan gescheitert ist. Dieses Buch zieht Bilanz. Es versammelt Beiträge deutschsprachiger Sozial- und Rechtswissenschaftler:innen, die in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten über und in Afghanistan geforscht haben. Es stellt auf den Prüfstand, welches Wissen der Intervention zugrunde lag und welche Vorstellungen gegenwärtige Diskussionen über deren Scheitern prägen. Die Beiträge verdeutlichen, mit welch vielfältigen und oft widersprüchlichen Ansprüchen und Motivationen die Interventionsakteure agierten. Sie zeichnen nach, wie Afghaninnen und Afghanen die Entwicklungen erlebten. Und sie heben die Bedeutung der Afghanistan-Einsätze innerhalb der intervenierenden Gesellschaften hervor. So wird deutlich, dass die Frage nach der Bilanz vor allem eine Frage der Perspektive ist und das Vermächtnis der Intervention über deren militärisches Scheitern hinausgeht.

Klappentext: Im Sommer 2021 verließen die NATO-Truppen nach fast zwei Jahrzehnten Afghanistan. Am 15. August desselben Jahres übernahmen die Taliban die Macht. Seitdem wird über die Frage diskutiert, ob und inwiefern das internationale humanitäre, politische und militärische Engagement in Afghanistan gescheitert ist. Dieses Buch zieht Bilanz. Es versammelt Beiträge deutschsprachiger Sozial- und Rechtswissenschaftler:innen, die in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten über und in Afghanistan geforscht haben. Es stellt auf den Prüfstand, welches Wissen der Intervention zugrunde lag und welche Vorstellungen gegenwärtige Diskussionen über deren Scheitern prägen. Die Beiträge verdeutlichen, mit welch vielfältigen und oft widersprüchlichen Ansprüchen und Motivationen die Interventionsakteure agierten. Sie zeichnen nach, wie Afghaninnen und Afghanen die Entwicklungen erlebten. Und sie heben die Bedeutung der Afghanistan-Einsätze innerhalb der intervenierenden Gesellschaften hervor. So wird deutlich, dass die Frage nach der Bilanz vor allem eine Frage der Perspektive ist und das Vermächtnis der Intervention über deren militärisches Scheitern hinausgeht.

In an increasingly complex world, it is more crucial than ever to have a full picture of how international peacekeeping can be a force for good, but can also have potentially negative impacts on host communities. After thirteen years of presence in Haiti, the highly controversial United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti has now withdrawn. The UN's legacy in Haiti is not all negative, but it does include sexual scandals, the divisive use of force to 'clean up' difficult neighbourhoods as well as a cholera epidemic, brought inadvertently by Nepalese peacekeepers that killed more than 8,000 Haitians and infected more than 600,000. This book presents a unique multi-disciplinary analysis of the legacy of the mission for Haiti. It presents an innovative account of contemporary international peacekeeping law and practice, arguing for a new model of accountability, going beyond the outdated immunity mechanisms to foreground human rights.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the United Nations peace operations in Africa with a focus on civil-military coordination and state-building. With case studies from Sudan, South Sudan, and Congo, it examines themes like the colonization of Africa and long-term conflicts; United Nations peace operations in Africa from 1956-1964; and United Nations' return to Africa in the 1990s and 2000s. The author investigates how modern civil-military coordination gradually becomes an effective tool to assist in national-level state-building in conflict-ridden countries. The volume also discusses the organizational culture of civilian and military entities as well as civil-military cooperation in health, agriculture, energy, sports, and education to showcase the strategic direction for long-term peace in the region.

This article engages specifically with the local turn in UN peace operations by looking at local engagement and empowerment in the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire. After the closure of a long-serving UN peace operation it is important to take stock of the activities pursued under the mandate and reflect on how the mission has contributed to peacekeeping practice. UN peace operations have increasingly undertaken peacebuilding activities at the local level with current literature emphasising the need to involve local actors in decision-making and reconciliation activities. In seeking to uncover how the UN understands the need to involve local actors, the mission activities of unoci are broken down into a number of themes looking at how the local are engaged, given agency and empowered, and also where the UN recognises specific vulnerabilities of persons. The article shows how the UN portrays its activities and where it has either expressly or impliedly sought to demonstrate a concern for the local in Côte d'Ivoire.

In the face of the repeated failure of international peacebuilding to build peace, one strand of the literature argues that failure can only be understood by 'zooming in' – by focusing on peacebuilders, the local populations they purport to help, and the relationship between them. This article draws on the insights of this literature to argue that international peacebuilding should be understood as an instance of structural injustice. Studies of the encounter between international interveners and local populations tend to focus on the differences between these groups and their problematic relationship. I argue that 'zooming in' reveals much more than the differences between interveners and locals: it uncovers how their relationship presents parallels and similarities with others, such as the relation between colonizers and colonized. The relationship between internationals and locals is problematic not because of each group's characteristics and their difference, but because of the social positions they relate from. These hierarchical social positions give some groups the power to intervene in the lives of others. The article argues that the encounter between internationals and locals should be 'de-exoticized' and that hierarchy, rather than difference, should be at the centre of the critical peacebuilding literature.

Jasmine-Kim Westendorf's discomforting book investigates sexual misconduct by military peacekeepers and abuses perpetrated by civilian peacekeepers and non-UN civilian interveners. Based on extensive field research in Bosnia, Timor-Leste, and with the UN and humanitarian communities, Violating Peace uncovers a brutal truth about peacebuilding as Westendorf investigates how such behaviors affect the capacity of the international community to achieve its goals related to stability and peacebuilding, and its legitimacy in the eyes of local and global populations. As Violating Peace shows, when interveners perpetrate sexual exploitation and abuse, they undermine the operational capacity of the international community to effectively build peace after civil wars and to alleviate human suffering in crises. Furthermore, sexual misconduct by interveners poses a significant risk to the perceived legitimacy of the multilateral peacekeeping project, and the UN more generally, with ramifications for the nature and dynamics of UN in future peace operations. Westendorf illustrates how sexual exploitation and abuse relates to other challenges facing UN peacekeeping, and shows how such misconduct is deeply linked to the broader cultures and structures within which peacekeepers work, and which shape their perceptions of and interactions with local communities. Effectively preventing such behaviors is crucial to global peace, order, and justice. Violating Peace thus identifies how policies might be improved in the future, based on an account of why they have failed to date.

This history of colonial legacies in UN peacekeeping operations from 1945-1971 reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Margot Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945.

In 2011, South Sudan was welcomed into the United Nations as the world's newest nation. Celebrations on the ground reflected palpable relief after more than 20 years of violent struggle. With unprecedented goodwill and optimism, the UN deployed 7,000 soldiers and another 2,000 police and civilian peacekeepers to the country to support its transition to independence. However, the mission failed and within less than three years South Sudan was plunged into a catastrophic civil war. Using firsthand accounts from senior UN officials and referencing hitherto unseen UN documents, this book explores the role of the peacekeeping mission in that failure. It challenges the resignation with which many in academia and the media greeted the underperformance of the peacekeepers. It suggests that, even while under-resourced, they could have done much more to prevent bloodshed in the new country and protected civilians from the chaos of the first years of the conflict. The UN has thus far avoided a thorough and public examination of its actions in South Sudan. It has avoided accountability and instead rewarded failed decision-makers. This book is an attempt to re-assess the legacy of that mission and to detail how its many mistakes can and should be avoided in the future.

Public opinion in postconflict societies toward international missions is widely believed to be important. We offer a theory that local satisfaction critically depends on an individual's perception of whether the mission is furthering the wartime political agenda of his or her social group. To test this theory and competing hypotheses, we examine Kosovo Albanian satisfaction with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). We use data from seventeen different representative surveys conducted in Kosovo from 2002 to 2007 as well as focus group and other primary and secondary sources. Consistent with our theory, we find that aggregate satisfaction over time reflected UNMIK's growing acceptance of Kosovo's independence and individuals with more radical views tended to be less satisfied with UNMIK. Our analysis implies that missions can achieve greater local satisfaction by doing what is possible to be responsive to, or at a minimum recognize, the wartime political agendas of the key social groups.

U.N. peacekeeping missions succeed in preventing the resumption of conflict and saving lives. At the same time, a series of sexual exploitation and abuse scandals since the early 2000s has raised concerns about the conduct of peacekeepers. We examine a related, but generally overlooked, potential negative externality of peacekeeping missions: the forced trafficking of sex workers. We argue that U.N. peacekeepers increase demand for sex work and that this demand may be met through human trafficking for forced prostitution. Using data on U.N. peacekeeping missions between 2001 and 2011, we evaluate the effect of a peacekeeper presence on human sex trafficking in and around the host state. We find that the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces correlates positively with a state being cited as a destination for forced prostitution. This has important implications for the future deployment of peacekeeping forces around the world.

While recent research focuses on why conflict parties attack peacekeepers, little attention has been given to other types of resistance against peacekeeping missions, such as intimidation and obstruction. It is argued in this article that one reason why peacekeepers are obstructed and intimidated is that armed actors that target civilians want to maintain the operational space to carry out attacks against civilians and want to prevent peacekeepers from monitoring human rights violations. A spatially and temporally disaggregated analysis on resistance against peacekeepers in Darfur between January 2008 and April 2009 indeed suggests that the intimidation and obstruction of peacekeepers is more likely to take place in areas with higher levels of violence against civilians. The findings hold when taking into account the non-random occurrence of violence against civilians through matching the data. Finally, anecdotal evidence from other sites of armed conflict than Darfur suggests that resistance against peacekeepers in these cases is also likely to be related to the targeting of civilians. This suggest that in order to be effective in protecting civilians, peace missions should not only be robust as highlighted in previous research, but peace missions should also develop an effective strategy to deal with armed groups that try to prevent peacekeepers from fulfilling their mandate.

This paper examines the participation of human rights-abusing countries in UN peacekeeping operations. This seemingly growing occurrence raises questions given the UN's emphasis in recent decades on protecting the physical integrity of civilians. How extensive are the contributions of human rights-violators in UN peacekeeping operations? And, what explains this phenomenon? I posit that peacekeeping provision serves two important functions for human rights abusers. First, committing large numbers of peacekeeping personnel helps states to whitewash poor domestic human rights records. Second, by contributing to the provision of an underprovided public good, human rights abusers can extort the international community to prevent interference in their domestic activities. Analysis of data from 1991–2011 shows that human rights abusers make substantially greater contributions to peacekeeping operations, even when holding constant variables such as regime type and wealth. These findings have significant implications for the protection of human rights, both in states that host and contribute peacekeepers.