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It is Not About Peace: UN Peacekeeping and Perpetual War

UN peacekeeping is, or should be, obviously, about something called ‘peace’. The purpose of peacekeeping thus vaguely settled, research is often contented to issues of effectiveness in keeping, or at times in making, building, or imposing, the ‘peace’. One needs to know about the effects and limits of UN peacekeeping practices, mechanisms, processes and procedures, especially if one is concerned about ending conflict or atrocities. Yet, such matters can hardly tell us much about the political purposes of UN peacekeeping beyond imprecise references to ‘peace’. To argue that UN peacekeeping is about ‘peace’ is an analytical dead-end, but it will also and always be a strong normative position that is easily defended on moral, humanitarian or legal ground. No matter how strong such normative standpoints can be, or appear to be, they demand critical engagements in order to determine ‘whose peace’ is being kept and under what conditions, which are essential questions for any critical analysis of the international politics of peacekeeping. The characteristics of the ‘peace’ to be kept, built or imposed are rarely shared beyond a few states, as UN member states do not necessarily pursue the same goals. Interrogating the meaning of ‘peace’ can reveal and underline its violent attributes and its contribution to a militarized politics. Consensus on the purposes of UN peacekeeping will obviously be hard to come by, and the product of ad hoc context-specific compromises, given that the mechanisms of UN peacekeeping will always reflect international power politics. Yet, the political struggles to define ‘peace’, to interrogate ‘whose peace’ UN peacekeeping promotes, are intertwined with the disputes to answer another question: what are the tolerable limits to the use of force? Conceived as a (unique) tool for conflict management, UN peacekeeping constitutes and performs the historical processes and time and space relations that enact and enable the tolerable limits to the use of force in international affairs. Put another way, UN peacekeeping is also about making some wars possible. UN peacekeeping is said to be in a state of ‘existential crisis’ and the UN, arguably, ‘at war’. This newest crisis is only partly about the UN’s inability to bring or keep the ‘peace’ and to protect civilians. Mostly, it is about the limits to the