Broadening the Understanding of United Nations Peace Operations: A Cultural Approach to the Issue.

Abstract

United Nations (UN) Peace Operations currently represents the largest deployed force in the world, with almost 120,000 military and civilian personnel coming from 123 contributing countries and currently serving in 16 missions on 4 different continents.

Several studies in the IR and political science fields have attempted to address the question of their effectiveness, frequently highlighting the great failures in Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia and Darfur, to illustrate how difficult it is to mediate and restore peace in complex and often unknown environments. While most of the researchers and findings focused on the organizational and strategic difficulties encountered by personnel deployed in the field or rather on the financial restraints or unrealistic recommendations of the Organization, it is the intent of this research to use a different approach to the issue.

The purpose of this dissertation is to broaden the study of contemporary UN Peace Operations looking at them through the lens of culture and to understand how and why this concept plays a fundamental role both in the definition of missions and in their outcome. Cultural considerations have in fact proven to be essential in fathoming the intrinsic difficulties of the UN in relation to its peace missions, as it shows that they are conceptually based on deep cultural contradictions that put their legitimacy, standing and authority at risk. Furthermore, the analysis of some of the above-mentioned failures have shown that cultural-clashes arising inside missions between peacekeepers and local populations and within different components of personnel deployed represent a sizable obstacle to the effectiveness of the UN action.

Clashes emerging within missions and the lack of a clear and transparent image of UN peacekeeping and peacekeepers surely pose major challenges to the UN, demonstrating a critical need for in-depth considerations on the cultural dimension of peace operations and for a more culturally sensitive approach to the issue. However, they also open up opportunities for peacekeeping to reinvent itself, elevating cultural-awareness and strategic communication as the key tools for a new era of UN Peace Operations.