Readers of this blog know that I tend to approach international relations from a realist perspective by default unless there is a reason to apply an alternative theoretical approach.  Readers also know that I am working on my PhD and researching the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars.  As part of my research I recently read Philip Cunliffe’s Legions of Peace, since I am into my literature review of adjacencies, in this case on why troop contributing countries (TCCs) contribute.  I have a few remarks on the book.

First, I am blown away by the quality of the argument.  The book is based on Cunliffe’s PhD dissertation at King’s College London and I am really impressed with the quality of the research. I hope to deliver research of like quality as I finish my PhD in approximately 2020.

Second, I normally dismiss research in the social sciences labeled Critical with a capital C.  Usually such research is merely a cornucopia of tautologies, non sequiturs and trivialities couched in impenetrable jargon-laden prose.  Legions of Peace is an exception.  It is Critical without the baggage of high-Frankfurt School navel gazing.  It is empirical, concise, and pleasantly lacking in jargon.

Third, I finished it mostly agreeing with the main points of the book.  The basic argument of the book is that international peacekeeping since the end of the Cold War has become the “highest form of imperialism.”  It is a form of non-territorial imperialism exercised by the Western powers as a tool for maintaining the existing international order.   The United Nations itself has the second largest deployment of troops abroad after the United States, the current global hegemonic power.  The UN is supposed to be quintessentially anti-colonial, yet has troops in formally independent countries all over the globe.  The UN’s deployments are authorized by the United Nations Security Council, and therefore reflects the interests of the P-5 members.  That is evidence for the imperial nature of the institution.

The issue that Cunliffe addresses is why it is that, if PKOs reflect the interests of Western powers, most of the peacekeepers deployed come from the Global South and are deployed mostly to other countries in the Global South.  Why is it that former colonized powers behave as tools of imperialism?  Is there no Third World solidarity?  For pecuniary reasons, the Western powers use the United Nations and lesser developed TCCs as a way to execute a strategy of imperial policing on the cheap.  Under empire, the European metropole raised colonial armies and deployment around the empire to provide security an quell unrest–e.g., the King’s African Rifles and British Indian Army.  In a similar vein, the Western powers outsource the maintenance of order in the Global South to the UN that recruits its own sepoys and askaris to police the disorder from India, Pakistan, et al.  Cunliffe surveys the reasons why TCCs work as modern-day sepoys and askaris, and finds them inadequate on their own, but a constellation of factors that influence participation at the national level, such as idealpolitik, civil-military relations, mercenary capacity building, diversionary campaigning, plus the most important: status and leverage within the UN, which is seen as an important protector and guarantor of sovereignty in the Third World.  Contributing to millenarian democracy promotion is the highest good within the UN.  Democratic peace theory is an article of faith and the ground of legitimacy in UN use of illiberal means to achieve liberal ends.

Leslie Gelb had an article in Foreign Affairs called Quelling the Teacup Wars in which he made the case for intervention in the civil wars of the Third World, which he cleverly calls “wars of national debilitation,” playing on “wars of national liberation.”  In the interest of maintaining order as a platform to promote national interests and promote the betterment of humanity, he says:

The main strategic challenge for the United States is to develop plans for multilateral action to stem civil wars without drowning in them, and to do what it reasonably can to give victims of these wars a chance to live in peace without making them permanent wards.

Gelb was writing in 1994.  Legions of Peace explains how that new strategy was executed since.

I highly recommend the book to both academics and the interested lay reader.  Its eminent readability makes it appropriate for readers of middle-brow publications, like The Atlantic and Economist.