Power in Peacekeeping

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

United Nations peacekeeping has proven remarkably effective at reducing
the death and destruction of civil wars. But how peacekeepers achieve their
ends remains under-explored. This book presents a typological theory of
how peacekeepers exercise power. If power is the ability of A to get B to
behave differently, peacekeepers convince the peacekept to stop fighting in
three basic ways: they persuade verbally; induce financially; and coerce
through surveillance and arrest, but not the offensive use of military
force. Based on more than two decades of study; interviews with peacekeepers;
unpublished records on Namibia; and ethnographic observation
of peacekeepers in Lebanon, DR Congo, and the Central African Republic,
this book explains how peacekeepers achieve their goals and differentiates
peacekeeping from its less effective cousin, counterinsurgency. It recommends
a new international division of labor, whereby actual military forces
hone their effective use of compellence, while UN peacekeepers build on their
strengths of persuasion, inducement, and coercion short of offensive force.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 19: International Security

Chair

• Lise Morje Howard Georgetown University

Presenters

• Michael N. Barnett George Washington University

• Marie-Joelle Zahar Universite de Montreal

• Andrea Ruggeri University of Oxford

• Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal Fordham University

• Robert A. Blair Brown University

• Mayesha Alam Yale University

• Andrew Bennett Georgetown University