Reforming 21st Century Peacekeeping Operations: Governmentalities of Security, Protection, and Police

149 Pages·2017·3.813 MB·English

by  Marc. G Doucet

Reforming 21st Century
Peacekeeping Operations
This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific
focus on analyzing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping opera-
tions led by the United Nations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and
Foucauldian-inspired approaches in the field of International Relations, it high-
lights how interventions can be viewed through the lens of governmentality and
its key attendant concepts. The book draws from these approaches in order to
explore how international interventions are increasingly informed by governmen-
tal rationalities of security and policing.
Two specific cases are examined: the UN’s Security Sector Reform (SSR)
approach and the UN’s Protection of Civilians (PoC) agenda. Focusing on the
governmental rationalities that are at work in these two central frameworks that
have come to guide contemporary UN-led peacekeeping efforts in recent years,
the book considers:
• The use in IR of governmentality and its attendant notions of biopower and
sovereign power
• The recent discussion regarding the concept and practice of international
policing and police reform
• The rise of security as a rationality of government and the manner in which
security and police rationalities interconnect and have increasingly come to
inform peacekeeping efforts
• The Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework for peacebuilding and the rise
of the UN’s Protection of Civilians (PoC) agenda.
This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations,
security studies, critical theory, and conflict and intervention.
Marc G. Doucet is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s University, Canada. He
is the co-editor of Security and Global Governmentality and has published articles
in Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding; Security Dialogue; Theory & Event;
Contemporary Political Theory; Millennium; Alternatives; and Global Society.
Interventions
Edited by Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and
Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick
The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that
engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psycho-
analytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In
our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.
We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working
within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their inter-
ventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the
series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other
disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in inter-
national politics.
We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just con-
tact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly
to the Series Editors:
• Jenny Edkins ([email protected]) and
• Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected]).
“As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for under-
standing; it is made for cutting.’ In this spirit The Edkins - Vaughan-Williams
Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge main-
stream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute
post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the
world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.”
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA
The Political Afterlife of Sites of Monumental Destruction
Reconstructing Affect in Mostar and New York
Andrea Connor
Biopolitical Disaster
Edited by Jennifer Leigh Lawrence & Sarah Marie Wiebe
Reforming 21st Century Peacekeeping Operations
Governmentalities of Security, Protection, and Police
Marc G. Doucet
Politics of Visibility and Belonging
From Russia’s “Homosexual Propaganda” Laws to the Ukraine War
Emil Edenborg
Reforming 21st Century
Peacekeeping Operations
Governmentalities of Security,
Protection, and Police
Marc G. Doucet
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Marc G. Doucet
The right of Marc G. Doucet to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-93726-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67559-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Reforming 21st century peacekeeping operations:
governmentalities of security, protection, and police 1
Notes 9
References 10
2 Governmentality, sovereign power, and contemporary
international peacekeeping operations 13
Introduction 13
The mentality of government 13
Governmentalizing the state 18
Sovereign power, biopower, and state sovereignty 22
Sovereign power and states of emergency 29
Conclusion 35
Notes 36
References 37
3 Police, security, and resilience 42
Introduction 42
International police and international policing 43
Police as a figuration of sovereign power 47
Police as regulation mania 52
Security and police 58
The police-security project of resilience 63
Conclusion 66
Notes 67
References 68
vi Contents
4 Local ownership: the police-security project of Security
Sector Reform (SSR) 74
Introduction 74
Security Sector Reform (SSR): A summary 76
The governmentality of SSR 79
Operationalizing resilience through local ownership 82
Conclusion 91
Notes 91
References 92
5 The UN’s protection of civilians agenda 98
Introduction 98
Civilis 101
Civilis legalis 102
The new lawfare of protecting civilians 104
The UN’s PoC agenda 108
Rationalizing protection at its point of application 111
The necropolitics of protection 118
Conclusion 121
Notes 122
References 125
6 Conclusion: reforming UN peacekeeping operations:
security, protection, and police 130
References 134
Index 135
Acknowledgements
At the risk of trampling on well-established conventions, I would like to begin
where most acknowledgments end, by thanking my family. To my partner, Kim,
and my sons, Alexandre, Nicolas, and Antoni, thank you for the quiet day-to-day
support and life nourishment that only one’s family can provide. It is a cliché
to say that family is what keeps one grounded, and yet it is a cliché for a very
sound reason. Over the three-year period that this book was written, the first of
which coincided with a sabbatical leave, my two eldest sons completed the final
years of high school and entered university. Family conversations often featured
questions on the day’s international political crises of which sadly there was no
shortage. These questions and conversations provided a much-needed correction
to any mounting despair about the timely completion of the manuscript and they
offered a friendly reminder that the labour of writing on one’s own ideas was a
luxury to be savoured and enjoyed at every turn. Remaining true to these ideas in
an effort to make sense of a political world which appears so often bereft of any
sign of common sense, as my sons often remarked, motivates my writing here
and elsewhere.
I also want to thank my colleagues Miguel de Larrinaga, Ben Muller, Samer
Abboud, Mark Salter, and Can Mutlu. Their friendship over the years is one that I
cherish. In particular, I owe a debt to Miguel for more than two decades of intel-
lectual exchange and friendship that has served as a constant compass for my place
in the academic world. I am grateful as well for the support that I have received
from my departmental colleagues Alexandra Dobrowolsky, Edna Keeble, Stella
Gaon, and Lyuba Zhyznomirska. They offered a constant and supportive work
environment that allowed me to complete the book even after I assumed the chair
of my department in September 2014. Amber McMunn and Laurel Sampson at
Saint Mary’s provided some editorial assistance at different stages of bringing the
manuscript to completion. Special thanks go to Nicola Parkin and Lydia de Cruz
at Routledge for their support and patience in the final stages of writing and to
Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams for their work as series editors.
Early drafts of chapters, sections, and themes of this book have been presented
at a number of conferences. Chapter Three was presented at the Annual Meeting
of the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) at the University of Alberta
in June 2016, and at the Atlantic Provinces Political Science Association (APPSA)
viii Acknowledgements
conference at Mount Saint Vincent University in September 2015. Many thanks
go to Ben Muller, Colleen Bell, and Maya Echler for their insightful comments
and suggestions. Chapter Five was presented at the 58th Annual Convention of the
International Studies Association (ISA) in Baltimore in February 2017. Thanks go
to Elizaveta Gaufman for her feedback.
1 Reforming 21st century
peacekeeping operations
Governmentalities of security,
protection, and police
The study of disease helps one understand a healthy body and the study of societies
that have broken up can give us some insights into how to keep societies together.
It is becoming more and more evident that one of the key strategic challenges of
the next twenty years actually will be how to help keep societies together, how to
prevent state failure and its potentially devastating consequences.
(Guéhenno, 2015: xv)
If one begins by asking for the ‘cause’ of the Gulag […] one makes the Gulag
appear as a sort of disease or abscess, an infection, degeneration or involution.
This is to think of the Gulag only negatively, a dysfunctioning to be rectified […].
The Gulag question has to be posed in positive terms. The problem of causes must
not be dissociated from that of function: what use is the Gulag, what functions does
it assure, in what strategies is it integrated?
(Foucault, 1980: 135–136. Emphasis added)1
The post-Cold War concern among academics, experts, and practitioners with
reforming international peacekeeping operations brings into to the domain of
thought and knowledge rationalizations of violent conflict as problems that can
find a measure of their resolution with the assistance of some form of international
intervention.2 The first of the two quotations above, taken from the prologue of
the mémoire of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the former Under-Secretary-General for
United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, captures what often animates this
rationality. Large-scale conflict, violence, and insecurity are akin to symptoms
of a disease that threatens the health and wellbeing of societies and their popu-
lations. Left unattended, these symptoms risk destroying the lives of innocent
people and cancel any prospect for socio-economic development. The possibility
that this destruction is contagious poses a strategic challenge to the international
community in general and the United Nations (UN) in particular. Different read-
ings with contending theoretical vantage points offer different diagnoses and pre-
scribe different remedies with a mix of more or less invasive therapies with goals
of stabilization, rehabilitation, and reform. Fundamental to these readings is the
starting point that the problem at hand is one of dysfunction. This dysfunction
can be seen as operating on multiple levels. From a peacekeeping or statebuilding