 Welcome everybody. We've got an audience here and we've also got an audience online. This is the modern hybrid way. So welcome to those of you in the room and those of you who are joining from various parts of the world for this evening's discussion. My name is Bill Clark. I'm a professor in the politics department here at SOAS and this evening's event is co-hosted by the African Politics Program in my department, the Center of African Studies and also the Royal African Society. So welcome on behalf of the three organizations. It's a real honor to have come back to us. A good friend of SOAS who we've benefited from from his insights a lot in recent years. I'm Jonathan Fisher, professor at global security at the University of Birmingham. And he's going to be speaking this evening about a book for which I've got the flyer and there are copies of the flyer over there. Please grab a copy. Please buy the book. Please help struggling academic authors. I think is the big message this evening. The book that Jonathan has co-authored with Nina Gillan is African Peacekeeping published by Cambridge Uni Press. It's a very timely book and tonight is very timely discussion looking at new trends in African peacekeeping. I think this is increasingly important and also complex terrain, particularly given the patchwork of peacekeeping formations that are becoming more complicated by the day across the continent. I think the book is also really important for looking at issues around civil and military relations. So not just peacekeeping as a military activity, but also as a political and as a social and economic force as well. Many of you will have seen the news this morning about that the East African regional force potentially taking over Monusco's mandate in East and Congo events this morning just reinforce how important this book in this presentation is. Just a little bit of background on Jonathan. He's written extensively on authoritarian regimes, issues of security and insecurity of particularly in East Africa. I think a really important book a few years ago, East Africa After Liberation Conflict Security in the State in the 1980s, also with CUP, a book that I use my own teaching and that I know many of you have consulted as well. Really, really important book about the politics, the post liberation politics of East Africa in the last 30 or 40 years. Jonathan's also, I think probably still recovering from his stint as the head of the International Development Department at Birmingham so he's definitely done his time in a senior university position there. And he's also just wrapped up his stint as the co-editor of Civil Wars, very prominent journal in peace and conflict studies. He's made a really big contribution I would say to the whole field of African politics but also conflict issues and it's very much in that vein that he's going to talk about his and Nina's new book this evening. So, Jonathan, delighted to have you here. Jonathan's going to speak for about 40, 45 minutes and there'll be lots of time to Q&A both with the people here in the room and for those of you online. When we get to the Q&A you'll be able to ask your questions either in the chat box or we'll be able to throw the floor open, you'll be able to ask your questions verbally as well. That's more than enough for me, Jonathan, over to you. Thanks very much. Okay, thank you very much, Bill. That's a really, really kind introduction, much appreciated. And thank you very much for inviting me to speak today as well. And indeed, to sow out some incentive African studies and all of them society for inviting and hosting me today. I'm hoping everyone online can hear me as they will, or rather can. So as Bill was saying, I'm going to be speaking about this book. Here's a copy of it so you know that it's real. It is co-authored by myself and Nina Gwynne, who's based at the University of Antwerp and the Egmont Institute in Brussels, where she is Africa director. She is not here, obviously, as you can tell, but she is currently in Niger, where she's doing some work out there. I believe that she is online somewhere that she may be able to join us in some of the Q&A to respond to anything which I can't respond to or don't respond to very well. And her work is, you know, also like my interested in peacekeeping, but she also focuses on post-conflict sort of reconstruction, gender and security. And she's also focused quite a lot in more recent years on the Sahel, although it's a Burundi and Congo where most of her work, all languages, was focused. So yes, they're taking through some of the highlights of the book. If it is a book that you think you still want to know anything about at the end of that presentation, then as Bill said, there are some flyers over there. You can get a 20% discount. So this is a hardback, but there is a paperback version as well, which is just under 20 quid. So it's not quite the normal extortion academic cost. And if you're online and you're interested in that, then I can send you the PDF of that and I wanted to send me an email after this. So in terms of setting up, so to try and give you a sense of why, why we have become interested in this topic of peacekeeping by African states. This is just a little bit yet to what your appetite and it's also something which, which we found very interesting indeed we start by talking about this particular episode. So back in 2018, when there was still a pretty devastating civil war underway in South Sudan, there was talk in the region about sending in a sort of peace support stabilization style force under the intergovernmental development of East Africa security block. And during those discussions, the Somali government said that it was interested in sending troops to help manage that situation in in South Sudan. And, you know, from some perspectives, this is quite an unusual or questionable thing for Somalia to be interested in for those of you who know Somalia is and was in 2018, the site itself of a peacekeeping operation, the African Union Mission Somalia or Amazon, which is the largest peacekeeping mission in the world and one of the longest, maybe even the longest running in there since 2007. So Somalia was actually the site of the peacekeeping operation itself. And in many respects the Somali government at the time, and to some extent it's still the case now was really able to maintain itself in operationally and physically in modern issue because of that peacekeeping mission in terms of the protection that it provided and the support to be able to govern the institutions. There's an interesting question about why would a state which in some respects is actually in a stage of conflict itself, and it's the host of the peacekeeping mission why would that state then also want to send troops outside of this force to keep the peace or rather engaging peace and conflict resolution elsewhere in the continent. Some other things which give us a pause to thought when it comes to these sorts of questions. I'm not sure both slides are moving across on the online. Yeah, so that's that. There's also an interesting phenomenon if you have a look at the major contributors to UN peacekeeping so this is not all peacekeeping operations of the world. And this is from 2021. So this is when we were actually putting the book together, and you can see here that African states appear prominently amongst the top 20 contributors to UN peacekeeping missions. And not only are they quite prominent. So I think about half of the top 20 are African states here, but they also appear quite near the top of the list as well. Number two, Ethiopia number three. Another thing to say about this is that if you look at just these countries on this list, we have countries all over the African continent. So there are different regional dynamics I think we can talk about when it comes to peacekeeping Africa, but even just this snapshot here you know we've got states from East Africa, Southern Africa, Central Africa, West Africa. There are all different types of political system. So we have, you know, places like Wanda, Ethiopia, which are amongst most authoritarian countries in Africa, but we also have South Africa, Ghana, Senegal is also a little bit in the middle of that list as well. The country's most sorry the continent's most democratic policies as well. So the whole range of different types of policies. This list has changed a little bit since 2021, which you can have a look at. But in, you know, some of the countries have gone down a little bit, but in other cases they've actually gone up South Africa being example of that. So this is still fairly, fairly representative of where things are at the moment. The African states are pretty prominent when it comes to UN peacekeeping operations. And that's before we even get to looking at non UN peacekeeping operations so peacekeeping which is undertaken by regional and other types of organization like the African Union. And if you look at some of those regional organizations and missions, we then start with other things coming in as well. So things like Uganda, Burundi, Nigeria, for example, that's dependent to participate in UN peacekeeping that much, at least by comparison to some of these other actors, but it's very prominent when it comes to regional peacekeeping, including through echelons. And importantly, some of these states have been contributing to peacekeeping for quite a long time. Ethiopia, for example, has been contributing to peacekeeping for a very long time. But in other places, African states have become peacekeepers fairly recently. This is just again a little snapshot but you know places like Rwanda, South Africa, and I'll talk a little bit about this in a moment, have become very significant peacekeepers in a very short space of time, particularly in the case of Rwanda. So there's a lot of different reasons why it's interesting to try and think about well what's going on here what explains this prominent involvement of African states of all different types and across the continent in peacekeeping operations both under the UN and the African Union and under regional organizations. And just to qualify the title of our book, which is African peacekeeping, what we mean by that is peacekeeping by African states and peoples. So what we're not trying to say in that title or indeed in the book is that there is a single African approach to peacekeeping. Though what we do draw out throughout the book is various themes which we can, we can think about in terms of commonalities in different regions and across different types of polity. And we also have to keep in mind that many African peacekeeping operations and the sort of rationale behind those come from shared or notionally shared ideas about African solidarity and Africanism, African part share. But we're not suggesting that there's a single African approach to peacekeeping. We're not saying that peacekeeping is as significant or even a tall significant in every single state in the continent or to the same degree. It is very significant for some states and we're going to talk about a couple of those examples in a moment, but in some cases it's actually fairly insignificant. So if you look at a country like Angola or Mozambique, peacekeeping is not a particularly significant activity for those countries. But what's important to emphasize is that peacekeeping is nonetheless relevant in every single part of the continent. So this is not just the East African phenomenon or West African phenomenon. We see peacekeeping being undertaken by African states in every part of the continent and across every type of government. So the question that we're asking is this one. What are African states doing in this arena, the arena of peacekeeping? And what are the implications of that graph that there is continent and indeed for peacekeeping as a phenomenon as well. And that is the, if you like, the guiding question for. So we're not really interested in questions about effectiveness. A lot of the literature on peacekeeping focuses on questions of, you know, does peacekeeping work? Is this particular peacekeeping mission effective or not effective? There are different reasons why we don't really take that approach, partly because lots of people have done it already. And partly because, you know, when you start trying to unpack that question, does peacekeeping work? There's a whole load of assumptions that you then have to think about within that, you know, what does a successful peacekeeping mission even look like? Whose, you know, success are we talking about? So we're actually much more interested in what's going on in the states that are sending peacekeeping troops than in what's actually happening in terms of the effect of those missions on the ground. In terms of the sources that we use to get here, so this is in many respects the culmination of quite a lot of different research projects that Nina and I have undertaken over the last decade or so. And we sort of thought it was about 2015, 2016 when we sat down and thought actually there's lots of things that we have written about both together and separately, which we think can be pulled together into a much more comprehensive analysis of peacekeeping in Africa. So the green shaded countries here are countries where we have undertaken fieldwork, whether that's in the form of interviews or sort of attending or participating in different conferences or workshops, often sort of closed workshops, including military or security officials from different countries and from development partner countries in Europe and US and elsewhere. Field visits, including to African peacekeeping training centre in Ethiopia, for example, and in archival research that we've undertaken as well, including at the intergovernmental development in Djibouti, I've got a picture of that there and of course the African Union and Nina has done a lot of work on the African Union and peacekeeping in there as well. So that is what informs our research and you can see that obviously we haven't undertaken research in every single country that sends troops into peacekeeping missions in Africa. I think that would be almost impossible. But we have undertaken this work in every region of the continent in many different prominent peacekeeping states in order to get a sense of the different dynamics as well as some of the commonalities that we've seen. Just a quick note about the terminology here and actually I was just having this conversation immediately before this presentation. So we use the term peacekeeping as the title of the book, but actually peacekeeping is not a term that the African Union itself uses, the African Union uses peace support operations. The UN still uses peacekeeping. There's different reasons for this, but the reason that we take the approach of not really being absolutely definitive about what counts as peacekeeping, what counts as peace support operations, what counts as a stabilization mission or even a counter insurgency operation and some scholars have suggested that various peacekeeping operations or peace support operations in Africa more closely resemble counter insurgency operations and they do traditional UN style peacekeeping and indeed the Anasol mission Somalia is an example of that for some. So we don't we don't maintain this very clear distinction between definitions here because what we're trying to do is think about what's actually happening on the ground what's happening in reality. And often the official language obscures this as much as it reveals. So in many respects, peacekeeping is evolving quite rapidly in the African continent, and in the in terms of what African truth contributing companies are doing. And we don't want to draw clear distinctions around what this is a peacekeeping operation is the peace support operation, because actually things are involved very quickly in many missions including the one that Phil mentioned right at the start. So it's more resembling kind of one of the kinds of missions than actually something which is a standard model that you might get from the traditional UN operation. So we use peacekeeping in a kind of more general sense if you like then with a clear UN style definition. And the argument we make is is a broader one than as I said looking at effectiveness so we're not really focusing on peacekeeping as a kind of technical or practical practice. Often the literature will focus it on it in that regard so we'll sort of look at well, you know, as a kind of separate activity let's look at what is happening in peacekeeping and whether it's working or not. But actually what we argue is that peacekeeping is woven into the politics of many African politics and many regions of the country, not in exactly the same way not to the same degree in each part of the continent, but it's nonetheless a key part of politics. So we argue that it should be understood as part of a broader historical negotiation expansion and restructuring or even reinvention of African state authority and the identity over time. So we take a broad historical understanding of peacekeeping, and we see it as a key part of the way in which African domestic region on international politics is playing out and will continue to play out rather than a particular discreet activity that can be measured or set in number one. And we do this across a couple of different areas so I'll talk about some of these in a bit more depth in a second. So we look for example the ways in which peacekeeping in some parts of Africa has been used or incrementalized or fed into the construction and maintenance of militarized states, particularly authoritarian states, something we see in particular in East Africa, but also parts of Central Africa as well if you would like to chat. The role that peacekeeping has come to play in its international relations, the significance that peacekeeping has in a range of different states in terms of nation building and identity building or rebuilding. And linked to that the role that peacekeeping has come to play in situations of post conflict reconstruction. So my example I get the beginning is maybe an extreme example of this, but we see the peacekeeping becoming quite important factor in the ways in which different states seek to renegotiate statehood and authority and identity, and indeed the management of different armed forces that are now coming together into a post conflict national army. Peacekeeping can be super important in those processes. So two areas that we maintain a key focus on throughout the book. First of all the importance of history. So a lot of the time, when people write, if you like the traditional story of African peacekeeping, it tends to start in the 1950s or the 1960s with the establishment of the organization of African unity and some of the early peacekeeping that was thought to undertake in Chad, but also the broader history of peacekeeping globally with the United Nations and so forth. And this picture here is, is the Ethiopian troops he gave it was from contributed to the UN command mission and career during the 1950s so that's a long, long history in peacekeeping. But we think it's also important when thinking about peacekeeping by African states to consider the context and the legacies of colonialism, European colonialism. And we don't, in this regard, go down very far down the sort of imperial peacekeeping roots. There's sort of stranded literature which essentially argues that peacekeeping is intrinsically imperialist and colonialist. And we don't try and make that argument in terms of comparing what, you know, European colonization and imperialism and peacekeeping to what African states themselves doing in the continent with regard to peace, peace and conflict resolution. But we do seek to trace some of the continuity and echoes that we've seen from the colonial period to the present day, because we think that those continue to be relevant and important and indeed our critical for understanding some of the dynamics here. So one key element of that would be the, the continued prominence of military and the police in the governance of African states in many cases, and in the maintenance of authority, which we can trace back to the colonial era where there's obviously an enormous amount of investment in the sort of violent extracted forces of the colonial state in terms of, you know, state building and governance at the expense of supporting and building civility structures of governance and that has had a legacy and and echoes in a range of African states today. Examples, we think about the nature and the relationships and the role of militaries and police forces in places like Nigeria, even Ghana to a certain extent, which I'll talk about in a moment, Malawi, Kenya, and some other African states as well. There are of course examples where post-colonial African states sought to actively unravel some of those legacies, Tanzania would be an important example of that, but that is not universally the case. So we can trace one of those, those continuities. And as I mentioned, Ghana is, if not one we traditionally would focus on in this regard, but we do think that's important lessons to be held even for a country like Ghana. So Ghana, the Ghanaian police force is a range of scholars have written about, so people like Bestas Orvin or Justice, and Cabe, have essentially argued that the Ghanaian police force has not been fundamentally reoriented since the colonial colonial rule, in terms of things like accountability and relationships with the civilian or with citizens and so forth, the swamp sickness. So as Cabe had written about policing in Ghana, as it was during colonial rule, and contemporary rule continues to be characterized by abuse, violence, intimidation, and widespread corruption. So these are the same police that are also participating in peacekeeping in various different ways in different parts of Africa by sent by the Ghanaian state. And one of the things which we also point to in this regard is the blurring that we see in a range of cases between domestic policing and, you know, governance and international peacekeeping. And then the Burikurang, who is based at the peacekeeping training center in Ghana, has written some very interesting work, has focused a bit on the so-called formed police units of Ghana, which on the one hand are being deployed to peacekeeping missions in places like Somalia, on the other hand, are also being used for domestic sort of counter various different military style operations domestically, including Operation Cowlurg and various other notional operations to deal with notional criminality in other areas. So there's a blurring of domestic law and order operations, public order management, and peacekeeping, using in many cases some of the same people, which is not to say that the peacekeeping forces when they are sent to other countries behave in the same way as they do domestically. And in fact, in the case of Ghana and others, we see actually they behave quite differently. Nonetheless, this blurring of the lines between the domestic and the international. And that brings me to the second theme that runs throughout what we're writing about, which is a recognition that Africa's place in the international system is linked in many ways to any state role in peacekeeping. Certainly that we've written about myself and Nina before in lots of different articles and so forth. And so we don't we don't shy away from making arguments around ways in which international actors, particularly in the West, particularly in the context of counterterrorism and so forth, instrumentalize or seek to incrementalize African states and peacekeeping is often prominent there. International actors again, particularly Western active but increasingly not Western powers are also very significant. In many cases critical for the kind of financial and in some operational basis of peacekeeping operations they tend to be the main people, main actors, financing training financing, kind of some of the actual salaries of missions and so forth. At the same time, we don't want to try and suggest that Africa is simply a passive actor when it comes to peacekeeping and the international system is in different ways to pulling the strings for what's going on. That's in many respects the opposite of what we argue in the book, because peacekeeping is also a key sphere in which African states exercise agency at a global level agency in the sense of lots of different actions and carving out states and different arenas and I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment, but also agency in sort of changing and reframing the ways in which peacekeeping itself is understood, because the fact is that so many African states are involved in peacekeeping that they're involved in that is coming to reshape the kind of notion of what peacekeeping is meant to be and some of the ideational impacts about it as well. And it's also important to underscore that the international system, Western powers are not the only or necessarily the principal audience or actor for many African states and elites and troops themselves when it comes to peacekeeping. I mentioned already ideas of African identity, solidarity partnership, at least in theory, are often called to ways in which African states say troops think about their role in peacekeeping. So we have to try and avoid this idea that the international system is in some way, you know, controlling what's happening in this sphere. It's not something that can be dismissed, but it's also not something that should be overemphasized at the expense of understanding African agency in this sphere. So I don't know how much time I've got there. But what I plan on doing is just taking you through three examples of how we build some of these arguments. So we kind of have a chapter on on each of these three different points. And then there are various other points as well. So I'm going to talk firstly about the role of peacekeeping plays in terms of national identity and regional identity. Then a little bit about peacekeeping's role in undergirding authoritarian rule in some respects. And finally peacekeeping's relationship to regionalism in Africa. And also identity. Peacekeeping is, is, is significant because it has a kind of fundamentally normative character. So as opposed, you know, if you're a state and you invade or intervene in another country, or sort of, you know, notional self interest or other other other reasons that's often seen as being problematic, or at least very much about geopolitics state , the peacekeeping is often tied to the moral sphere. There's an explicit international responsibility that comes with engaging into peacekeeping and states that intervene through a peacekeeping operation. Then take that issue out of the realm of, you know, strategy and self interest, at least, you know, supposedly and reposition it within the realm of the morally good. So peacekeeping can be a very important activity for the identity of different states and actors involved within it. An important example of this is the case of Rwanda, which is a poorly emphasized as very significant in UN peacekeeping operations in particular. But Rwanda first became involved in peacekeeping in the sort of early 2000s in the context of the African Union mission in Sudan. And critically that mission was very much framed in terms of trying to prevent genocide happening in Darfur. And this really aligned very strongly with the Rwanda government's kind of emerging sense of its own continental and global identity as a force that was there to try and prevent genocide happening. This really happened in Rwanda, international system, including the UN had not done enough to prevent that. And so the kind of identity of trying to arrest genocide and prevent genocide became very much a key part of Rwanda's regional and international identity. And so some research has been done on this focuses on the ways in which Rwanda has not only kind of focused its peacekeeping role on on this particular mission, but also for taking a leadership role kind of above and beyond the UN. And indeed, focusing on engaging in sort of anti genocide or counter genocide operations as a means of sort of reconciliation or forgiveness or healing to the way the language which is often used by the Rwandan state when it talks about being involved in peacekeeping is, as Josephine Cooner-Larsen quotes here, we will not provide by UN rules, we come to help, come to play in UN, what happened, the Rwanda genocide is similar to what's happening in Darfur. We're trying to behave as if we are in Rwanda, as if we're helping someone in our own country. So it's very much a kind of sense of identity about sort of transporting a sense of responsibility domestically to the wider region as well. And so peacekeepers become quite important in Rwanda from the perspective of identity around genocide and the experience of genocide in Rwanda. A rather different example when we're talking about peacekeeping and identity comes in the case of South Africa. And as I mentioned, South Africa has become a much more prominent peacekeeper in the aftermath of apartheid and the beginning of democracy in South Africa. And the origins of this will partly around the Mandela government feeling again a sense that South Africa couldn't be a kind of island of stability in a region and continent ratified conflict and it had a kind of global continental responsibility. Now that it was a leader of the continent, opposed to apartheid era, to contribute in green peace to the rest of Africa in lots of different ways. So white paper that was published in 1999 kind of made this explicit in linking peacekeeping to South Africa's sense of identity, emerging sense of identity. And it says since the advent of democracy in 1994, domestic and international expectations have certainly grown regarding South Africa's role as a responsible and respected member of the international community. These expectations have included a hope that South Africa will play a leading role in international peace missions to alleviate the plight of other peoples who are struggling to hold similar conflicts. So again, like in Rwanda, you can see a linking of its South Africa's responsibility or sense of responsibility to its own experiences. But importantly, in the case of South Africa, there's also a sense of hegemony as well, that South Africa as part of South Africa's role as a major player in the African continent should be linked to peace and conflict resolution rather than just, you know, economics and economic model. So those are some examples of the ways in which peacekeeping and identity, particularly in a kind of post conflict situation can take shape. I'm going to move on now to the second of the three areas I was going to mention, which is the link between peacekeeping and authoritarianism. So going back to that list of states, African states contributing to UN peacekeeping, you can see that of those 10 African states in the top 20 UN peacekeeping countries. And quite a lot of them are not considered to be democracies by freedom house and indeed by a range of other organizations and panelists as well. And indeed you have some of the most authoritarian countries in the entire continent on this list, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chad, Burkina Faso at the time, Cameroon. Indeed, if we look again at some of those other regional peacekeeping operations you bring in other states like Uganda, Burundi, and so forth. And what we argue in the book is that peacekeeping can be particularly significant in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states for regime maintenance purposes. So effectively undergirding the kind of backbone of the military security state, but also enabling authoritarian and militarized governments to secure and invest more heavily in that side of the state at the expense of other areas where there's more accountability or space for civilian governments. Uganda is a very important example of this. And indeed, I think Burundi as well. One of the things which is quite interesting about both of those cases we argue in the book is that peacekeeping has in some respects become fundamentally embedded in the regime maintenance strategies of those governments. By which we mean that we've gotten to the stage now in both of those cases where peacekeeping is an intrinsic part of how international support for the military comes in, but also for things like the circulation of military elites. In the case of Burundi, there's a sort of arrangement within the military which enables every single person in the Burundian military to at some point circulate into a peacekeeping mission. Lots of different reasons for that. There's prestige that comes with being part of a peacekeeping mission. The remuneration one receives is often almost invariably larger than you would get domestically. So there's lots of intrinsic reasons why people might want to participate in peacekeeping, but it's become effectively a core part of the way in which the circulation of the military works in Burundi. And it raises some difficult questions for some of these governments then about what happens when there is potentially no longer the opportunity to send troops to peacekeeping mission because you don't necessarily want if you're authoritarian regime to be bringing home lots of soldiers from various different theaters all at the same time. Unless they have anything more than it varies when they get there. So partly it's about the sort of structural ways of maintaining authoritarian regimes in terms of building institutions and securing support. Partly it's about more instrumental ways of rewarding different elite actors given a particular role within the military. And there's also a sort of attractiveness to being able to send soldiers abroad if you're worried about them creating problems at home. But of course that itself can also be a bit of an issue as well. There's been some really interesting work that we point to in the book by people like Maggie Dwyer who had looked at the ways in which those sending troops abroad for peacekeeping mission this mismanaged it can actually lead to situations where the government itself can be subject to challenge. So, particularly in cases where you have soldiers from multiple different countries always part of the same mission, but they discovered actually they're being paid different amounts of money by the African Union or the United Nations or the regional peacekeeping organization, because states often have the ability to skim off the money, so effectively they get paid for the soldiers by the African Union or whoever, and then they decide well we're going to skim off 20% for whatever reason, and then provide the rest to the soldiers. But the soldiers talk to each other, and if they discover that actually, and you know there's examples for example, you know where Burkina Bay and Mali and peacekeepers in particular missions found out they're being paid different amounts of money by their states being to the mutinies, the same as the case in Guinea-Bissau as well. So, peacekeeping can be very important for regime maintenance, but it can also be presented a challenge to the wallet that is mismanaged. And yet the final thing I was going to talk about in this regard was about regionalism. So, as Phil was sort of intimating at the beginning of today's session, there are lots of different regional organizations in Africa that play roles in peacekeeping. The African Union, which is meant to be the sort of continental umbrella for those different peacekeeping missions, but you also have lots of different regional organizations, I mentioned East Africa, you have ECOWAS in West Africa, SADF in Southern Africa, and lots of other different examples of that as well. And peacekeeping can become quite an interesting lens in which to try and understand how states position themselves with regard to their regional identity. Tanzania is quite an interesting example here. It's traditionally had a bit of an ambivalent view about its position in East Africa, and has, you know, in the last decade also contributed to peacekeeping through the Southern African development community rather than through East African regional organizations. As a sort of example of its weird kind of unresolved sense of where it sits between East and Southern Africa. But I think ECOWAS is particularly interesting in this regard if we turn to the case of Nigeria. So ECOWAS has a reputation for being probably the most comprehensive and if you like successful vehicle for peacekeeping at a regional level in Africa. And Nigeria has often focused its peacekeeping efforts around ECOWAS. I mentioned it doesn't tend to focus on the UN, it focuses on ECOWAS instead. And in part that's related to its sense of itself as a regional hedging that when it comes to peace and security affairs in West Africa, Nigeria should play the preeminent role. And we saw this in the 1990s during the Civil War in Liberia, where there was disagreement in the region about how to address that issue. And the Nigerian government was very driven in terms of wanting this to be a peacekeeping mission, a regional peacekeeping mission, wanting to play a role within that to sort of, you know, underline the status of regional hedging. So what's quite interesting is more recently where Nigeria has had concerns about Boko Haram in the in the region. It has avoided seeking to deal with that regional issue through ECOWAS, but through the at the time less than known Lake Chad Basin Commission, which was more of a kind of water and national resources organization as a sort of way to facilitate regional involvement with Boko Haram, partly because for domestic reasons, but also for, you know, it's somewhat embarrassing for the Nigerian state to have to go to ECOWAS, which was previously, you know, the institution which it dominated and was a vehicle of some respect of Nigerian hegemony to then ask ECOWAS to come and deal with a security problem that was affecting Nigeria itself, which in fact the Nigerian government was getting a lot of criticism for and continues to rightly so for its inaction over the crisis. So we see this happening in lots of different parts of the continent where states will engage in what's called in other parts of political science forum shopping that they'll decide that actually for this particular issue, we're not going to go to ECOWAS, we're going to go to the East African Union or we're going to go to some other organization for whatever regional or national or international reason that might explain that. So that's pretty much it for me. What I wanted to finish off with was just a couple of thoughts on the future of African peacekeeping. This is something which we reflect on a little bit in the book, but this is also a very fast changing phenomenon. And so whatever you say in a book could potentially be wrong. I think so far we've been born out right with this one, which is that increasingly we see this sort of breaking up of peacekeeping by African states moving away from the idea of continent wide operations or even if you like regionally sanctioned by no standby forces or whatever to these much more ad hoc bespoke stabilization style operations. So it is this will sometimes be at the invitation of a particular government as we saw recently in the case of Mozambique inviting Rwanda to intervene for peace support reasons, as was the rationale provided. And similarly with the Kenyan operation in Eastern Congo as well. That's through the East African Union, which is quite interesting because that was not really previously a military vehicle. But essentially we're seeing a move away from these more broad continent wide operations to more ad hoc stabilizations which are aimed at particular operations and particular constellation coalitions of state who are interested in resolving a particular issue and who will get together under whatever umbrella works best to that particular scenario to make it possible. And there's an open question about how far what's going on in some of these operations is even close to what we might understand as peacekeeping. And then that opens a question as to, well, does that mean the nature of peacekeeping itself is changing, which we mean something else like peacekeeping now that people thought we did turn 15 years ago. The other dimension of this, which I think is important, which we speak to quite a lot in the book as well, is the difference between and the emerging differences we see between peacekeeping by authoritarian and semi authoritarian states and peacekeeping by more open and Because there is a significant difference between peacekeeping by a country which has open and free media, which has open and critical debates in the national legislative in the public sphere. We see this in Ghana, we've seen this for 20 years or so in South Africa, that when things are perceived to be going wrong in peacekeeping, those issues that have become potentially a domestic issue for the government. They will maybe face a challenge in parliament as the Ghanaian government has in different occasions, so peacekeeping can become an aspect of domestic politics as well. Which is much less the case in more authoritarian states and there are a range of examples of this, for example, African Union peacekeeping, contributing countries, places like Uganda, where they just have not historically released information on even a number of Ugandan soldiers that have been killed in in peacekeeping operation. So that even that level of basic detail is not provided or hasn't been provided by the Ugandan government. So there's a different kind of scrutiny that you will see as a peacekeeping state, if you're a democracy versus a non-democracy, and that is likely to continue in both directions. So I'll finally just end with this point, which is, again, to re-interact the main argument, you make that peacekeeping in all of its various different forms has now become a practice that's woven into politics across Africa, national levels, regional levels and continental levels. And so if you want to try and understand the nature of African politics and national relations, then understanding peacekeeping is an essential part of that. Not exactly the same in every single region or in every single country, but nonetheless at the level of understanding politics. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Always the academic and heart and mouth, technological involvement. Fantastic. So much to discuss in that presentation. And as I said earlier, there will be scope of people online to ask a question either in the chat box or if you would like to verbalize your question which would be my preference for people online. If you just put your hand up, then I can throw it to you. But also the people here in the room. Let me throw it open to you maybe it's the first opportunity. If you do ask a question or make a comment, maybe just introduce yourself so that Jonathan knows exactly who he's engaging with. So, can I throw it open. Yeah, I just need to speak out. I'm going to ask who gets to define the model aspects of peacekeeping and how in terms of that, a federal individual agency of African population. And survivors and victims. And my second question is how and where are African women position in the African peacekeeping issues. Right Jonathan do you want to take those two questions and then that that'll give people a chance to get their thoughts together so let's start with those things. I wonder that because Nina's done a lot of work on on gender. And I wonder if she's there. Hi Nina. Yeah, can we draw you into this conversation as well. I'm just wondering if you could hear the question. I have, I had a little bit of difficulty hearing the question. And I just heard that it was about women in peacekeeping. It seems like I'm, I've lost you just just getting our volume sorted. Yeah, Jonathan, do you want to. Yeah, I'll do the first one. In that case. Yeah, I think it's a good question about who gets to define what's moral or not moral. I think often that that question is, there's an assumption around it rather than it being unpacked critically in the international system. I suppose part of it relates to the kind of legal architecture of the, of the international system whereby, you know, if, if something is sanctioned by the United Nations or a kind of subordinate body like one of the African Union, in subactors, the regional levels, then it's seen as being kind of legally okay in the international system in a way that unilateral intervention would not be. But I think there are also various other dimensions to how the morality of peacekeeping missions is understood and framed some of it relating to the protection of civilians, for example, the kind of the partiality or impartiality of the actors that are meant to be engaging, whether or not the state in question has invited the peacekeeping force in. But it does then raise a lot of interesting questions, and sometimes quite challenging questions about what's actually happening on the ground. There's some interesting research around some of the negative consequences of UN peacekeeping in different parts of the world, and the challenges that different organizations, governments, activists face in bringing the UN other actors to justice. I think we're in the early phases of seeing this in a variety of African led peacekeeping operations as well. Part of the challenge of this is the kind of being able to actually get a sense of what's happening in various different locations which are often very still very complex effective very difficult to undertake an independent scrutiny of so Somalia and the different kind of accusations and allegations that have been made against various treatment different trip contributing countries there would be a good example of that. So I think we're in the very early stages of that particular debate. I think that there's a broader international sense that peacekeeping is is morally better because it is there to keep the peace or to prevent violence rather than to engage actively in violence. But the problem is, as I said that increasingly we're seeing the direction of peacekeeping operations in Africa or led by African states at the very least. We're moving more into this blurred territory of counter insurgency, being invited by government to actively engage against a particular combatant or belligerent. So there is a kind of open question now which I think about, to what extent is peacekeeping, does it deserve that reputation of being morally different to any other kind of form of intervention, particularly because we've seen quite a few peacekeeping missions evolve into peacekeeping missions from what was originally a number of cases by lateral interventions so Kenya's involvement in Somalia, Ethiopia's involvement in Somalia. Those both started as unilateral interventions kind of invasions if you like, and they were then repackaged and re hatted as peacekeeping missions, which came with this sort of moral legitimacy but also resources and so forth as well. But as you said, it does raise the question about well, who is the judge of what makes that model. And I think that that is just not resolved at the moment. The situation is moving so quickly that debate is yet to take place. And can you remind me of your second question because I'm going to pose that to Nina. I think it's hard for people to hear from your audience. So can you just just remind me what it is? And then, are African women positioned in African peacekeeping? Yeah, so Nina, it's a question about how and where and what capacity are women positioned in African peacekeeping. And welcome Nina as well. Great to have you from Niger, I understand. So good to have you as part of this discussion as the co-author of the book. Thank you. Thank you for letting me participate remotely. Yes, so excellent question but also very difficult to answer how and when are women participating in African peacekeeping. It differs of course depending on the troop contributing states and also what type of mission it is. But if I'm going to draw out broader trends, it's pretty much the same across all peace operations that women are primarily tasked with, they're not in the combat branches. So if you're going to look at the majority of women that are deployed in peace operations, they're not in the combat branches of the operations. And there is also an overrepresentation of women in branches such as medical staff and administrative staff of missions. And I know for the South African army has a very high number of female participation in their peace operations with about 22% of their peace operations staff or the people deployed on peace operations, which is higher than many of the European peace contributions when it comes to female participation. And then of course it depends on the mission, but you can also see overall, and now I'm talking globally, there is a tendency to deploy women to missions that are considered safer. There is this sort of norm that women should still be protected in the sense that they are not sent to operations that are considered closer to combat operations than peacekeeping operations. And that's globally so that's not just on African peacekeeping. I don't know if that answered your question. Yeah, great. Thanks Nina. I can see a hand up from Mark Miller, Mark. And if you could introduce yourself as well before you ask a question, that'd be great. Hi Mark, can you hear us? Thank you very much for leaving his hand. Let me come back to the floor. Yeah, Mohammed. Thanks very much for doing the book. It's really important to the public. I just have a normative comment and comment about the function. My name is Mohammed, I am one of the teaching assistants in politics. The normative one, you didn't see that you would be accused that you're having a Western approach to peacekeeping, given that the word that you choose that peacekeeping versus the peace support operation could be a Western point of view. And the normative point is when you look at the word peacekeeping, you'll find that very, very loaded where peacekeeping might be misleading a little bit, because peacekeeping is not only a military intervention. What we saw on the public presentation is military intervention is not peacekeeping as such, but peacekeeping has got an appreciation of what would be done with the customary regional leaders. And it's very, very sophisticated and complicated process than just looking at it from military intervention. And when we look at the function, so I just struck it a little bit, but most of the one so-called peacekeeping operations in the continent are coming from a humanitarian point of view, as we saw in Rakhoura, as we saw in Wanda and so forth. And that's starting to understand where I should look at the humanitarian intervention in the regional or the humanitarian or the identity parts that we're talking about. I can see a group of hands. I want to take a group of questions if that's okay. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Thanks. Thank you for this talk. I haven't read the book, but I've read some of your articles and I'm very sympathetic to your approach to taking a look at these things. I want to ask you a question about, you mentioned at the beginning, your kind of skepticism of delving into the imperialism debate. And I understand that kind of the broad sense of terms because when you get sucked into the kind of imperialism theory, it kind of overtakes all the other dynamics and you can see some of the rich kind of there, created interest actors, et cetera play on, you know, especially the African actors, but I think it's not as important to bring out the agency of those of all. But I guess, so I, I, I just went to my PhD and so my focus is smaller, just coming to the smiley example. I'm just like, just thinking through the way like the, the kind of motivations of Ethiopia and Kenya in this dynamic. And I just can't see a way in which part of what they're doing is not to kind of, you can create a state that that's, that's, you know, secure for them, but literally to determine the internal politics for the long term, installing governments, making sure they have access to the courts in the sea. And this is both the case of Ethiopia, and then Kenya, the jubilant, pretty much their buffer zone, plus an area where they can kind of play claims to the oil and the sea. So these are kind of long term politics to kind of annex and control the part. I know that Somalia is kind of a far experiment of these cases. And the DRC is somewhat similar in some ways, which is being kind of exploited and harped up a bit. But yeah, just wondering why, why do I have any fit in that element and those kind of motives into the other three, which are also very convincing. Maybe there's enough there to deal with Jonathan and then we'll open up for another round. I think it's difficult for people online to hear the question. So let me just briefly summarise this. So my first question about peacekeeping being a loaded term. To what extent is there a kind of Western lens involved in even thinking about peacekeeping in these terms. And also, where do we situate peacekeeping as a kind of activity as a phenomenon? Is it in the humanitarian space to see a military space, that kind of thing. Then Matt's question here around, but there's an imperial logics, but coming from other African states within these regions, and you cited the example of Somalia potentially in this regard. So yeah, thanks Jonathan and Nina, you can sort of chip in as you feel fit as well. Maybe we'll start with Jonathan in the room. Yeah, sure. Thanks. Yeah, Nina, you can feel free to add anything as well. So I think that the term peacekeeping, we talked about this quite a lot. I mean one thing that I'll say for myself, the approach I take to research is to try and understand particular context, what people are saying, but I'm never going to be able to remove myself from being a Westerner, if you like. I was born in the UK, educated in the UK, etc. So we don't seek to pretend that this is a kind of decolonised approach to understanding peacekeeping. And I think that actually it's quite important to problematise that and recognise it because peacekeeping, the way it emerged was a principally Western led set of theories and practices and and logics and operations linked in some respects to colonialism, as well as to the situation after the first and the Second World War in particular. And so the term peacekeeping, we partly use it because this is a term that African states and elites use themselves in different in different situations. The UN uses the term peacekeeping and some of the states that I've mentioned are particularly prominent in that regard. I think there is another project to be done on trying to look and analyse different terms that are increasingly being used for what is going on in these different situations. I mean at some level in the social sciences you have to be able to use a concept which seeks to capture multiple different but related activities. And we feel that peacekeeping is is appropriate for that in the book, but we are I think getting to a situation where, you know, are some of the things that African states are doing either through regional organisations or through ad hoc stabilisation missions. Does it even make sense to talk about those in the sense of peacekeeping, because in fact in some cases African states themselves won't necessarily use that language so I think that it's a rapidly evolving and changing situation. So there's also the question about the extent to which African states are engaged in these activities tie what they're doing to the language and the architecture and the sort of policy literature if you like of western states and you know western heritage. There's some really interesting research done by actually a former PhD at SOAS Marco Jowell on peacekeeping training centres in Africa. So there's you know there's one in Ghana but there's also one in Ethiopia Rwanda, Kenya as well. And actually looking through their their syllabus is and what peacekeepers are actually taught in these centres, and part of his analysis and I want to, you know, miss characterise what he argues. I would just say that a lot of the material that they're looking at is very traditional Eurocentric understandings of peace and conflict studies in many cases we've done doesn't necessarily apply to many of the contexts in which African peacekeeping missions are taking place. It's not really a very clear answer, but I think that the point is that this is is there's so many different blurings of Western and Eurocentric understandings of what's going on here and African instrumentalisation of that engagement with that sort of acceptance of that challenging of that in the case of Rwanda. And of course you know in the case of Rwanda, the language of responsibility to protect has become a really important calling card of the Rwandan government internationally so I think it's more complicated than just western or non western concepts, because there's so so much intermingling of those issues in what's going on. It becomes almost impossible to disaggregate it. And I think that the point that you were asking about like imperial logics by different states I think is, is a really interesting and important one. Because I think you know we do talk quite a lot in the book about ideas of pan Africanism and African solidarity and so on and so forth. But you know a lot of the the logics that we see by some African elites engaging in peace building state building and so on and so forth are often, you know, fundamentally and intrinsically understood in a kind of Western centric lens so I wrote an article a few years ago about the different models of governance and authority that the different Amazon troop contributing countries were seeking to implement in Somalia. And if we look at for example what the Ugandan government says or to some extent what the Ethiopian government says the Kenyan government, particularly the Ugandan government. It's very much, you know, let's, let's get rid of this whole clannism thing and plans are sort of one of the basic forms of socio political authority in Somalia. In the government there's lots of ministers and MPs and president even saying that this clan thing is a problem we need to get rid of it and we need to build a parliament we need to build this we need to build this form institution that formal institution. So there is a there is a kind of understanding to some extent of what state building and peace building looks like which is in many respects, like they bury in Euro centric understanding of institutions. There's very much depth on on on the question of you know imperialism by African states for a huge range of different reasons. But we do look in quite a lot of depth at different motivations as well. And I think that the, there is, there is often sort of on, you can't sort of disentangle a neighboring state, engaging in a peacekeeping mission in another neighboring kind of long standing issues of you know international relations basically and Somalia is probably probably the hardest case because it's relationships with Ethiopia and Kenya and vice versa in terms of the legacies of colonial borders and so on and so forth. I think that that is a particularly concerning evolution of an African peacekeeping mission which has effectively rationalized and reified the status quo of you know semi annexing bits of the country in order to make good on, you know, an arrangement which would previously have been seen as illegal or problematic but because it's happening under the guise of peacekeeping has this international legitimacy to it. So I think I probably blabbered on long enough on those points, but I don't know whether. Because I can see Nina's hand. And I was just, I just wanted to add to a Jonathan already brought it up a little bit, but the definition of peacekeeping and who is shaping peacekeeping. And I don't think that there is any question that it's a Western concept from the beginning but today, over 70% of the troop contributing states come from Africa and Asia. So then you can also ask how. How is peacekeeping shaped and shaped by these con troop contributors today and we see that there are norms I've just done a study together with senior oxen oxen mitna on norms and rules how they are transferred between different organizations and, and sometimes these rules they come because something is happening in the field so you have bottom up approaches from officers or soldiers in the field. And these officers and soldiers are mostly African or Asian so the norms that are evolving from practices on the ground are coming from these troop contributing states and that's also shaping the peacekeeping doctrines that we're seeing today in terms of shaping the peacekeeping rules and the norms. And so I think that it's as Jonathan said it's it's much more complex than than west versus the rest or south southern states versus northern states, and today because it's constantly reshaped by different missions and missions and as Jonathan also said, we've seen so many different types of missions today we can see, I mean some completely different from Minusma which is also completely different from minusco. So, so we can't really generalize across the missions I think. I'll end it with that. Good, let's take another round of questions only come back to Mark online. Mark Miller. Yes, okay. Oh, amazing. Sorry, we've got hello in the end. So my name is Mark Miller I currently work for the UK Foreign Office but previously have worked in the peacekeeping world in South Sudan but also in the headquarters in New York. And I've also written about sort of peacekeeping issues in the past. And so my question was about the UN, and where they fit into all of this and my experience in New York, particularly was very much that the UN was quite keen on this idea of other peacekeeping that were sprouting up in parts of Africa, it's, and then the language around it was couched in a sense of like localizing sort of responses to problems, you know, and putting in people who are better able to find ways to respond to the issues on the ground. I also felt so there was a dark side to that and as much as really much about the UN sort of stepping out of that arena, and really just, you know, not wanting to have those problems anymore. So my question is, what is the appropriate position for the UN in terms of if this, if this trend is going to continue if there's these other types of peacekeeping missions are going to go forward. What should the UN be doing, or should the UN just be allowed to sort of step out completely. All right, thanks Mark. It was a question here. Thank you. My name is Zimbabwe. You've partly answered my question, but I'm interested perhaps in your research and writing the book. Will you mention any successful African-speaking mission that you would say they achieved the objective of the UN? And secondly, you spoke also about the motivation of why it's becoming a very interesting area that African countries are getting into. Is it partly due to perhaps the lesser stringent room like human rights abuses? Looking at the new one, the East Africa, the regional forces, by the time they are doing the AU hasn't given them a political card yet. And we've seen in the G5 Sahara, if you don't give them the political card, they're likely would value all the multiple issues of human rights. So in that scenario, do you think that the little rights are specifically African countries are trying to fill Africa and the less fortunate in some of the areas that might give them? Good. So again, just for the audience here, I think you caught the first question from Mark and then there was a second set of questions here. Firstly, are there any successful peacekeeping cases that we can point to? And the second one is, should there be concerns about the kind of loose rules, some of the lack of scrutiny with some of these new African peacekeeping missions, you know, what do we make of that terrain? Jonathan, I'll come back to you on these and then we'll have time for one last round of questions. Yeah, thank you. Those are both really good questions. And I think in some respects, the answer to both are kind of linked, which is one of the things that we recount in the book is the kind of more recent history of Africa's involvement in peacekeeping, and the way in which a range of states have become much more prominent than they were previously or involved at all when they were never previously involved in the wider international context of the sort of the U.S. and Allied intervention in Somalia in the 1990s and how that was perceived to have gone extremely badly for the United States. And, you know, this feeling by U.S. President subsequently that they shouldn't be sending U.S. troops into these sorts of situations in the future. And, you know, linked to that, the Rwandan genocide and the feeling amongst lots of African countries that the international system had failed Rwanda. You know, I think that that that idea has been instrumentalised by different actors, both Rwanda and internationally, but it is also nonetheless is still a very, very powerful and real feeling. And there's a kind of rawness to that sense of that the international system let down Rwanda and should be relied upon to deal with those situations. And if that is for anything that it should have been to to prevent that happening. So I think we've got a kind of combination of both the kind of push and pull set of factors which have created the international space for African states to engage more in peacekeeping to take on more agency initiative, but also to secure critically international financing for these sorts of operations in a way which previously wasn't necessarily there. I mean, there have been, you know, explicit comments made by by people like Barack Obama, for example in 2015 2016, where he basically said, you know, the great thing about African countries contributing to peacekeeping is that we can deal with these situations that we find problematic and we want to sort out, but we don't have to put our own boots on the ground to deal with that. I think there is a there's a kind of, if you like a sort of satisfying model which has been developed over the last 1520 years where Western actors want to continue to engage for nefarious reasons or otherwise in various different conflict theaters in Africa, but don't want to be putting their own troops, you know, actively involved in those. And you have a range of different African states who want to engage in peacekeeping for these normative reasons but also for the whole range of financial political geo strategic and so forth other reasons that we talked about as well which has led to this situation. So I'm not really sure whether I would say it's, you know, thinking about the motivations your question whether it's the lack of scrutiny that's that's enabling these operations to take place. I think it's it's more the way in which the international system has shifted in the ways in which peacekeeping is understood or rationalized but also in some respects the legitimacy or the authority of the kind of traditional overseers of peacekeeping which would be, you know, the UN, Western powers, etc. And how that shifted over the last 1520 years or so for those actors to no longer have the authority or the credibility in that space that maybe they once had, if indeed they ever did. So I think there's there's partly that dimension as well and the evolution of this phenomenon is such that there is no longer the structure in place that would recognize this as peacekeeping or not peacekeeping. This is the last round of places and actually they've started flooding in on the screen here as well but let me start in the room and then and then we'll go to the screen. And if you can introduce yourself again. Hello. Hello. Nice. This presentation is quite impressive. In your presentation, you did mention that Nigeria, as one of the country's most current member countries, of F1, I mean of peacekeeping, played a vital role in years back. And now, even the internal program in Nigeria, I do not know what that means. Let me take you back. Most of the important role played by Nigeria in peacekeeping within African countries in the 90s. The region was under the region. It was headed by a military leader. Then I could remember our side. General Sana'a. Immediately after the return to democracy after the election, when democratically elected, so it is, things are going to change. What do you think what matters responsible for that same part? Don't you think maybe there was a political orientation of Nigeria in the region? Because from 23 years of military regime. Anybody who would imagine as a president of Nigeria, it ensured the top military position comes from his tribe, from the religion. The current president, he's an ordinary general, who has pushed back former military head of state. If you look at all these communities there. The police, the head of police, the head of the army, the navy, SSS and what I do, 10.7. And it seems you are not appointed based on this. You are appointed based on the interests of Mr. President. Don't you think these are some of the reasons why the current insecurity challenges that countries is difficult to be dealt with, particularly for assistance of other countries. Remember in 1970, a top government was restating under leadership of Nigeria. What's the interior of Nigeria? Where how much of the journey covered was restated after it was forwarded, but for a long time. Thank you. Thanks, Mustafa. It was a question here. Yeah. My name is Tan. I do have some great questions. I have a question about a private military company. I don't know if that's actually what the role of that is in terms of being able to do it. Great, thanks. So, so two questions from the floor. One from the staff about how much the change in domestic politics in Nigeria has changed Nigerian peacekeeping, particularly to the politicization of the military. I have a question from Hannah about where to private military companies fit into all of this. Now, just throw to you a couple of questions from the screen here. So we've got a couple of questions actually from Oscar. He wants to know the extent to which troop contributing countries in Africa have been effective or otherwise in tackling insurgencies, given that most of them have been prepared for more conventional warfare. And he's also interested in what's the impact of host country's social institutions and the success or failure of peacekeeping operations. And then finally, a question from Mike to putt, who's doing an MA in Japanese studies. So as my friends wanting to know to what extent you tackle Japanese positions on peacekeeping in Somalia where does Japan as a kind of thunder and organize with peacekeeping fit into into your picture. Okay, so unfortunately, I'm going to have to spend a lot of time saying we don't really look into that. It's not really where I'd hope to end up. But yeah, we don't tend, we haven't really looked very much at private military companies in the book. I don't know whether Nina would be able to speak to that from her experience in the Sahel. I guess it's going to be an increasingly significant issue with the growing role of Russia in the continent as well and we're already seeing that. But I'm afraid I haven't got much to say on that front, unfortunately, and the same goes really for the point on Japan as well. So apologies on that score as well. I think that the question about the domestic politics and peacekeeping is an important one I think you probably would be able to answer that question more articulately than me. Although I do have a kind of fairly good understanding of the, you know, changing dynamics of Nigerian politics over the last 20 years or so. I mean, I think Nigeria is a really complex case because on the one hand, there was this transition from, you know, military to civilian. But on the other hand, a lot of the key actors were still the same or the military was was still prominent but more in terms of the role of individual senior figures. You know, I think this is this, this election next year was going to be the first one since, you know, the return of democracy when one of the leading candidates has not been a former military dictator. So I guess that that that shift presumably changed the ways in which some of those senior actors thought about their, their role within the wider Nigerian policy and focused themselves more on their domestic support base and political rather than being able to assume that they could do stuff on a regional level. But I think that the main thing that's happened over the last 10 years or so is just the fact that security in Nigeria is, is, is non-existent in, in the kind of the East and Northwest effectively parts of the country. And I talked a little bit about that in relation to Boko Haram and the Lake Chad basin, and it's just the, the, the ability and the credibility of the state to be able to play a prominent role in peacekeeping when it's unable to effectively deal with security issues in large swathes of its territory. You know, really, really challenging. And I think that's a position that Nigeria is in now. I mean it has tried to engage in regional peacekeeping aspects through these, these smaller coalitions. But because ECOWAS has been so associated with Nigerian hegemony and regional leadership, it's very difficult to use that institution to also try and deal with insecurity that itself is unable to control within its own territory. And I think with the question about insurgencies, I'm not sure whether, I think it really depends on the state and the country in question. I mean there are some African states that are prominent in peacekeeping which have got a, I don't necessarily want to say good record but an effective record when it comes to dealing with insurgencies, Uganda would be a good example of that. But there are others with more traditional armies which where you know that is not part of the fabric of their experience. We do talk a little bit about in the book, the different types of African militaries that we see in the continent so talking about militaries in general terms throughout the last hour or so. But actually there are lots of different kind of models of military in Africa there are some of the more kind of historic colonial force model which you see to a certain extent in places like Nigeria or Ghana or Malawi or Kenya, but then you also have states like Uganda or Rwanda or Ethiopia, where there's been a very radical transformation of the nature of the military, its relationship with the region and politics, who engage and have experiences which are very different so I think it really depends on drilling down into the context and experience of particular militaries. I'll use my role as chair and ask a final question. You mentioned the role of peacekeeping missions in post conflict reconstruction at one stage. You know, one of the things that strikes me that when I go back to that list of contributing countries that you had before their job was, you know, not only is there a large range of authoritarian and militarized African states. What strikes me is interesting is how many of these also post conflict African states, some of which have themselves had peacekeepers on their soil, who then end up sending their own post conflict militaries off to become peacekeepers in other places. What strikes me and I'm sure there's something you do in the books and I'm trying to tease out something I know you thought about, which is the role of these peacekeeping missions in post conflict reconstruction in the contributing countries themselves. And I'm thinking in particular the Great Lakes countries so you know Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi within their peacekeeping ranks all have integrated levels. And how much of these missions, amongst all of the other objectives that you've rightly ascribed to them. It's, how much is it also about a sense of unity reconciliation integration of rebellions at home. You know, where does that kind of domestic post conflict reconstruction agenda fit into these these missions. I'd be interested to to hear you talk about that. That's a really, really important point and it is something I didn't talk very much about in the presentation but as you say it does, it is something we focus on quite a lot in the book and we've got a chapter on that. I think Burundi is, and maybe Rwanda as well, even DRC to some extent are all good examples of kind of post conflicts if you want to call Congo post conflict states which have actually sought to use peacekeeping as a way to, you know, build a, not necessarily partnership but cohesion within the, within the military party because yeah I mean I guess in the case of somewhere like Burundi you have the former military of the state and then various rebel movements and it's one thing to have them, you know, acting domestically in a particular way but if you then deploy them abroad particularly on a kind of notion the normative mission and then that creates a sense of shared purpose and collective engagement so I think that's really, really critical. And I think that's part of the reason why we also see this circulation of the entire military in the case of Burundi is part of that. I mean the peacekeeping training centers are also an important kind of space for doing that as well. One of the questions that I continue to have about some of this though is how, because a lot of the discourse that you see from from governments in this area is about pan-Africanism, and particularly in the case of post conflict states, we went through a conflict, and we know what it's like to rebuild the state, so we want to basically go elsewhere and do this somewhere else so that's you know that was what Uganda said when it sent troops to Liberia in the 1990s it's what lots of different contributors to the some operation have been saying as well. But I think there's firstly the question about actually how true that is and how or how appropriate that is you know to what extent to just because you are an East African country to what extent does that mean that your experience has got lessons for country near the other side of the continent. Even in you know the example I gave of Somalia, Uganda and Somalia are in the same region if you like, but the lessons that the Ugandan leadership is taking about its own experience and seeking to apply to Somalia is not you know cognizant of local understandings of authority in Somalia. So I think that there is a lot to unpack when it comes to the transfer of lessons that different African peacekeeping states and contributors are making in these sorts of missions and going beyond the kind of normative ideational idea that we have a responsibility to do this. But as you were saying kind of looking in a little bit more depth about what is actually the lessons that they're trying to apply on the ground. And is that actually appropriate or meaningful in the context of another country I mean a lot of the more critical debates on peacekeeping and peacebuilding more broadly are about the problems of western actors in particular like applying lessons from their understanding of what works to context where that's completely inappropriate and where the you know frame to reference are entirely different. But I'm not sure how much we've we thought about whether that's also the case by some African states in peacekeeping missions in Africa, both positively and negatively. So yeah I think it's it's really significant and important and interesting. And I'll give the last word to Nina because I can see Nina's hand up here so thanks Nina. Thank you. Yeah, I actually yeah I just wanted to check that Jonathan doesn't blame all the folks on me. And that's why I'm also listening in. But it was also because the last question is really, really close to to my main research interest and obviously Jonathan's also but I've written quite a lot on how post conflict states use peacekeeping as a way to increase their status in international relations, especially as you pointed out Phil Rwanda and Beroondi who have become these new peak keepers over the past 10 years, not only because it has Marco Joel who we already cited has already written on Rwanda using peacekeeping and military operations as a way to form a more cohesive national army, but the same could be said about Beroondi which managed to slow down the demobilization of former combatants and from from the new Indian army by sending troops to different peace operations or actually with army some. And so I think that there is a really an important aspect of looking inside the states, which we're doing in this book, and especially then for the post conflict and looking at how I was comparing Beroondi and Rwanda's speeches at the UN General Assembly over the years since they first started contributing troops to peace operations. And there is a trend that they're consistently referring to their status as peacekeepers once they started to contribute states so basically in the book we're arguing that they're going from the peak kept status which is more of let's say victim or passive status to towards the more active status as a peacekeeper which of course is also gaining more leverage in international relations more broadly. So I'll end it on that. Yes, we do deal with it quite extensively in the book. I think the only thing that is left for me as chair to do is once again to remind you all to get a flyer, buy a copy of the book, because I think it's a really important book at a really important time. And also to say thank you both to Nina and to Jonathan for a really stimulating discussion here of bringing this content into SOAS. Delighted as well to hear you name check both Marco Jal and Emma Biracorat. So two people who recently got their PhDs out of SOAS and been writing on various things. Good to see some of their ideas flocking back into some of the halls where they were sort of created in the first place. So there's a nice circularity to come to all of that. But yeah, Nina and Jonathan, thanks so much for a fantastic event. Thanks for it. Thank you.