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In this article, internationally supported peacebuilding is conceptualized as a cross-cultural relational endeavour, with international and local actors engaged in multiple forms of interactions in a local everyday context. Using a cultural-relational approach, two cases of peacebuilding are presented: Bougainville and Sierra Leone, which are at opposite poles of the spectrum of international-local peacebuilding interaction. Peacebuilding on Bougainville has drawn relatively little attention; the international intervention there was modest and small in size, and locals had considerable control of the peace process. By contrast, Sierra Leone is one of the best-known cases of peacebuilding, with massive external engagement and comprehensive external control. Both cases are considered success stories, but they differ considerably due to the differences in local-international relations. This is explained by focusing on two interrelated core aspects of the local-international interface: building relationships and trust, and security provision. Furthermore, another generally underestimated dimension of peacebuilding is explored, namely culturally different understandings of the spiritual realm and their effects on peacebuilding interventions.

Coherence is a core objective in most multinational interventions and seems of particular relevance to UN peacekeeping missions with their increasing complexity and multidimensionality. Yet, coherence has rarely been studied empirically. We borrow the concept of 'fit' from organizational theory and use it to develop a conceptual framework to study coherence in peacekeeping operations. Fit is the degree of match between what is required by the mandate, on the one hand, and an institutional set-up and the implemented practices, on the other. We identify three relevant dimensions of fit to study coherence: strategic and organizational, cultural and human and operational fit. Our empirical material focuses on the UN mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and in particular on the interplay between the intelligence components and the rest of the mission. We draw upon a large empirical dataset containing over 120 semi-structured interviews, field observations and participation in pre-deployment exercises and evaluation sessions. Our empirical analysis suggests that low level of fit across several dimensions leads to inertial and widespread frictions in the practice of peacekeeping and could potentially undermine peacekeeping effectiveness. Building on existing scholarship on micro-level approaches to peacekeeping, we hope to further the debate on organizational dynamics within peace operations.

International peacebuilding is no longer dominated by Western actors and their liberal peace framework, neither there is a full-fledged alternative formulated by emerging peacebuilding actors. In this paper, I first establish the relationship between the liminality of emerging powers and their mimicry of the liberal peace. Secondly, I distinguish three forms of mimicry in peacebuilding that stem from emerging power liminality: a discursive mimicry, a complete mimicry and a substantive mimicry. In the case of the discursive mimicry, there is a liberal peacebuilding discourse which is rarely substantiated with policies. The complete mimicry is when both the liberal discourse and the policies are mimicked, and the substantive mimicry is a genuine adaptation of the liberal peacebuilding by the emerging power. The case of Turkish peacebuilding is analysed to illustrate the tripartite distinction. I demonstrate that Turkey mimics solely the discourse of the democratic peace thesis, while there is a complete mimicry of the Western model in security sector reform. However, the Turkish civil society peacebuilding and Turkey's approach to economic development substantively mimic their liberal peace counterparts. This article contributes to the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding by identifying the different forms of emerging actors' mimicry of the liberal peace.

Brazil's role in UN peacekeeping operations has been subject to increasing attention from academics and policy makers alike. While some authors praise Brazil's engagement in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) as a case of innovative South-South cooperation, others accuse Brazil of using Haiti as a 'testing ground' for repressive anti-gang tactics that have subsequently been introduced at home. This article challenges these two dominant views on Brazil's role in Haiti. Based on a period of six months of fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and interviews with key Brazilian actors, the article draws a parallel between MINUSTAH's military raids in gang-ruled neighbourhoods coupled with police reform in Haiti, on one hand, and the Pacifying Police Units (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora) plus the accompanying UPP Social in Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand. It is argued that Brazil's peacekeeping strategy, at home and abroad, is a mix of coercive and cooperative measures reminiscent of counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics already employed during the French colonial war in Algeria. Moreover, it is shown that policing techniques borrowed from the US are employed to ease the tension between carrots and sticks, notably so in the urban environment in which Brazilian peacekeeping is taking place.

The assumption that peacekeeping requires soldiers carrying weapons is widespread; 35 years of successful peacekeeping by unarmed civilians is often overlooked. The original definition of peacekeeping is being confused with peace enforcement and peace operations. Limited interest has led to underfunding of unarmed civilian peacekeeping (UCP) with fewer resources for both study and praxis. Marginalization of civilian peacekeeping has restricted the options for complex interventions; this reduced vision of peacekeeping is open to challenge in the light of evidence from the field. This paper first examines what is meant by peacekeeping and UCP. The relationship of UCP to nonviolence, feminism, and peace studies is considered. The constraints and limits of peacekeeping by armed military personnel during, or after, violent conflict are outlined. The core tasks of peacekeeping are analysed, and evidence from the field is presented to show that these core tasks can be (and have been) successfully undertaken by unarmed civilians for three decades, world-wide. The argument that armed military personnel are necessary, even essential, for peacekeeping is not supported by the evidence of civilian success in undertaking the core tasks. The paper ends with conclusions and a call for a new paradigm for peacekeeping.

Applying a Bourdieusian feminist practice theory approach to the study of norm implementation, this article introduces a fourth level of analysis, the embodied subject who is expected to be governed by peacekeeping norms. It does so by examining the training experiences of Rwandan tactical-level female military peacekeepers deployed in mix-gender contingents to UNAMID. It is argued that the pre-deployment training space is a field of norm contestation and negotiation, wherein gendered peacekeeper subject positions and gendered peacekeeping labouring practices are constructed and performed. The research findings suggest that by partially complying with the UN's gender mainstreaming norms, the Rwanda Defence Force strengthens the military's gender protection norms and establishes the sexual division of labour of the mission area. Trained to perform a scripted Rwandan female subject position, some women find they are not adequately prepared for the more challenging situations they find themselves in when working in multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations and devise alternative, informal training practices to better equip themselves prior to deployment. The case study draws on 65 depth-interviews with Rwandan military personnel, trainers and external consultants and non-participatory observations of field exercises.

Peace operations now conduct a wide range of different missions, but much of the scholarship has focused only on one mission at a time, and most often this is the task of monitoring cease-fires. This article draws attention to the phenomena of multiple missions within peace operations, and discusses some of the hurdles to understanding how such missions influence one another. We begin by providing a descriptive analysis of 11 different peace missions carried out by UN operations over the 1948–2015 period. Following a review of multiple-mission studies to date, we call attention to several problems with approaches taken for understanding peacekeeping outcomes. We then elucidate seven considerations or challenges in understanding how missions interact with one another and influence each other's success, providing guidelines for how to analyse them.

The UN Secretariat's role in the expansion of peacekeeping after the cold war is debated. Different theoretical accounts offer competing interpretations: principal–agent models and sociological institutionalism tend to emphasize the Secretariat's risk-averse behaviour; organizational learning scholarship and international political sociology find evidence of the Secretariat's activism; constructivism analyses instances of both. I argue that the UN Secretariat can be both enthusiastic and cautious about new tasks depending on the circumstances and the issue area. For example, UN officials have been the driving force behind the development of public information campaigns by peacekeeping missions aimed at the local population. During the cold war, it was not regarded as necessary for UN missions to communicate with the public in the area of operation: their interlocutors were parties to the conflict and the diplomatic community. With the deployment of the first multidimensional missions in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, UN staff realized the need to explain the organization's role to the local population and provide information about UN-supported elections. In promoting this innovation, they played the role of policy entrepreneurs. The institutionalization of this innovation, however, was not an automatic process and required continuous advocacy by UN information staff.

This study introduces the TUBAKOV dataset, which offers extensive data on 57 peacekeeping operations (PKOs) that Turkey has contributed to between the years 1988–2015. TUBAKOV improves existing data in several ways. First, it draws data from governmental resources that have not been previously used. Second, Turkey's contributions for each PKO are presented both at the levels of PKO and PKO-contribution year format. The website of the dataset also allows access to qualitative data such as primary text sources, hence facilitating qualitative and multi-method research on peacekeeping. Preliminary analyses indicate that the frequency, nature and the geographic focus of Turkey's contributions to peacekeeping operations demonstrate a significant shift with the new millennium. Preliminary findings offer interesting insights to the changing characteristics of Turkey's PKO involvements relating to the content, geography and timing of these contributions over the time period covered by this dataset.

Complicity by UN military peacekeepers in sexual abuse and sexual exploitation ('SEA') has been in the lime light in academic, practice and policy circles for many years now. Recent scandals involving sexual violence and abuse by peacekeepers in the Central African Republic and failures to respond are proving the catalyst for major reforms being discussed and implemented currently at UN level. There are numerous legal complexities, difficulties and flaws with the legal framework, policies and systems presently in place. Less considered are the parallel regulatory frameworks operative, or not operative, in the context of peacekeeping done beyond the remit of the United Nations or by those not deployed under its command and control. The fact remains that SEA is also prevalent across these peace operations but very little focus has been placed on these by academics or practitioners alike. Increasingly the UN is likely to rely on regional bodies in conducting peace operations falling outside its SEA regulatory framework. This may leave local populations vulnerable to unregulated or poorly regulated acts of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers. This paper seeks to address a gap in the literature in examining this regulatory space, focusing on the African Union's ('AU's') policy and regulatory frameworks governing its personnel deployed to peace operation environments in so far as they appear to exist. In doing so, it will reflect on the relationship this has to the UN's Human Rights Due Diligence Policy on United Nations Support to Non-United Nations Security Forces, and the increasing reliance on AU regional peace operations, and re-hatting of forces.

Abstract: "While scholars and practitioners alike argue that the pursuit of sustainable peace in post-conflict developing countries requires international interventions to build state capacity, many debate the precise effects that external assistance has had on building peace in conflict-affected states. This paper seeks to clear conceptual ground by proposing a research agenda that disentangles statebuilding and peacebuilding from each other. Recent scholarship has made the case that the two endeavours are geared towards distinct sets of goals, yet few have subjected the causal mechanism underlying those processes or the relationship between them to sustained theoretical and empirical inquiry. Additionally, despite decades of mixed results from international interventions, we lack knowledge of the mechanisms by which external engagement leads to specific outcomes. To address these gaps, this paper offers a causal framework for understanding the effects of aid dynamics on state coherence and the depth of peace. It specifies the variables in that framework, with a view to establishing a new research agenda to advance our understanding of statebuilding and peacebuilding. Finally, it proposes that public service delivery in post-conflict countries offers fertile empirical ground to hypothesize about and test the relationship between state coherence and sustainable peace." (Seite 187)

In March 2008 the United Nations General assembly adopted Resolution 62/214, which promulgated the 'Comprehensive Strategy on Assistance and Support to Victims of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by United Nations Staff and Related Personnel'. Although reports on widespread sexual exploitation and sexual abuse emerged in the early 1990s, until 2008 there was no strategy specifically developed to assist women sexually exploited or abused by, and children fathered by, UN peacekeepers. In this sense, the Comprehensive Strategy is groundbreaking. However, we argue that UN policy fails to distinguish adequately between sexually exploitative and consensual relationships, which can create confusion for personnel as to what sexual conduct is permitted and what is prohibited. This paper will provide a critical analysis of the Comprehensive Strategy, examining its potential and obstacles to its implementation, with specific regard to children born to peacekeeping personnel engaged in consensual relationships with local women. This examination will be conducted within the context of the case study of Marko Susnja, born to a Bosnian peacekeeper father and East Timorese mother. Adapted from the source document.

This paper traces experiences of the Royal Thai Armed Forces in un peacekeeping missions. A relatively small troop contributor at first, Thailand later took a high-profile role in the un operations in East Timor during 1999–2005, and has continued since then to support several un peacekeeping forces. The paper first discusses the rationales, development, and current status of Thailand's contributions. It then goes on to explore how, and to what extent, tasks and duties assigned under the un peacekeeping framework to the dispatched forces, as well as experiences and lessons the Thai armed forces gained from their participation in missions, contribute to the diffusion of norms and the development of functional competencies relating to peacekeeping and human security protection within the Thai military. The paper finds that while the dispatched forces received invaluable benefits in terms of prestige, economic rewards and learning experiences from the peacekeeping operations under the un command, including approaches to humanitarian assistance during the time of acute conflict and monitoring human rights violations, the human security norm underlying these functional competencies has yet to be fully internalized by the military as an institution. Yet, there are some areas, especially in civil-military affairs where competencies developed from the internal security operations and international peacekeeping operations can be mutually reinforcing.

This paper investigates the zero tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and sexual abuse by United Nations peacekeepers as it relates to survival sex in peacekeeping economies. Understanding the policy as a form of discursive power, the analysis seeks to reveal the effects of zero tolerance by asking: what is obscured about survival sex in peacekeeping economies when it is viewed through the lens of zero tolerance, and to whose benefit? The argument is that zero tolerance is a poor policy framework to address peacekeeper engagement in survival sex because it fails to grapple with the complex set of economic circumstances that give rise to survival sex decision-making by girls and women in peacekeeping economies. In light of the failures of zero tolerance, a rights-based approach to survival sex in peacekeeping economies represents a more promising means of addressing the issue to the benefit of local girls and women.