 the area of international relations and peacekeeping, all of us working on peacekeeping, we felt that this field, I mean international peace and security should be and peacekeeping as part subset of that, should really be a field where there was a lot of scrutiny by different IR theories as it is one of the more important subsets of international relations. However, at least historically, that hadn't been the case. In the more recent years though, there has been a lot more research coming out with explicit different theoretical perspectives on peacekeeping and we thought it could be very helpful both to try to have a look at how different international relations theories could be applied to peacekeeping, as well as see how peacekeeping as an empirical field could bring more new perspectives on IR theory. And so this, what could you say, interaction between disciplines has been very fruitful over the last years, a decade or so. And there hasn't been a book that explicitly took this as a subject. So we felt that there was a niche here that could be filled and could be of use both to scholars in the field as well as new students coming to the field. So that's really the rationale and background for why we wanted to do this book. And of course, we hope that it's going to be useful and of interest to scholars and students alike out there. It has chapters on realism, on liberal institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism, constructivism, practice theories, critical security studies, feminist institutionalism and complexity theory. So quite a broad set of theoretical perspectives on peacekeeping. I won't say very much more. I think it would be much better to spend the time we have to have a discussion and to let those that have written individual chapters present some of their work. I would also like, would be great, Mats is one of our contributors and he has written an excellent concluding chapter drawing the long lines being a scholar that hasn't been in this field much longer than us. It would be great if he could also share some of his thoughts as we move on during this discussion. Finally, I would also like to say happy birthday, Mats. Thank you. Thank you very much, John for presenting the podium. Thank you very much, Mats for presenting our event and our project and I would also like to say happy birthday, Mats. I know it's very strange to have all these events virtually, but this is the world we live in. And I of course would like to thank everyone who has joined our seminar, our book launch for tuning in to learn more about UN peacekeeping and international relations series. And I have a presentation which I hope will be more interesting than looking at my face. Here we go. So I'm sharing my screen now and you should be able to see my presentation. I'm going to talk about my chapter or rather our chapter co-authored with Professor Carla Montalione from the University of Palermo and it's the second chapter of our volume and it's devoted to liberal institutionalism. And I myself am a research associate in the work studies department at King's College London. So in terms of liberal institutionalism, the central concept for this international relations theory is that of an international institution. And when we think about international institutions, we very often think about formal international organizations. We think about the UN, the European Union, the World Bank, the World Health Organization. But in addition to formal international organizations, there are also informal international institutions, specific sets of norms, rules, practices that shape international interactions. And in United Nations peacekeeping, we do have a combination of formal and informal aspects of peacekeeping as an institution. And in general in our volume, we wanted to look at United Nations peacekeeping as an international institution, not only from the perspective of liberal institutionalism, but also from all the other international relations perspectives. In terms of specifically liberal institutionalism, there are some core assumptions of this international relations theory. And many of those assumptions are shared with, for example, realism. Both realism and international and liberal institutionalism assume that states are self-interested actors. They want to advance their own interest, they want to maximize their utility. And in that sense, they're rational players that seek games. But at the same time, unlike realism, liberal institutionalism assumes that cooperation is possible, and states can achieve more through cooperation than competition. So international relations are not a zero sum game. So as a country, my loss is not my opponent's game necessarily. Sometimes when we have international conflicts, when we have breakdowns of security, everybody loses. So it makes sense for states to cooperate to advance those collective outcomes. And international institutions like the UN are very helpful for promoting cooperation. And one more assumption of liberal institutionalism is that domestic publics, domestic actors, ranging from NGOs to industry groups, can have inputs in international negotiations by pressuring their governments to do something. And I'll quickly discuss how it applies to United Nations peacekeeping. In general, one would assume that liberal institutionalism would be quite a dominant perspective on United Nations peacekeeping, because it's about cooperation, it's about international organization like the UN, it's about mutually beneficial outcomes. But we have found when writing this chapter that those applications were not as widespread as we would imagine. At the same time, in comparative politics that looks at United Nations peacekeeping, there are some applications of this theory of some concepts from liberal institutionalism. For example, peacekeeping has been analyzed as a signal that parties to the conflict consent to each other. So when parties to the conflict invite peacekeepers, it can send a signal to their opponents that they're committed to peace, they're committed to the implementation of particular peace agreements that they're committed to the peace process. So in that sense, peacekeeping can be seen as a signal. It has also been analyzed as a way of international influence, because when international actors such as the UN come in and try to mediate a particular conflict, try to shape a specific peace process, they need to have leverage over the parties to the conflict and they can offer incentives or they can place constraints on those parties to make sure there is no breakdown of the peace process. And finally, sometimes peacekeeping has been used as a bargaining chip in negotiations. For example, one of the rare vetoes on a peacekeeping resolution was when China decided to veto the extension of the UN preventative deployment in Macedonia after Macedonia decided to recognize Taiwan. So in that case, peacekeeping was used in international relations, international affairs as a bargaining chip. So these are the applications that we don't look at very closely in our chapter, because we think that they do not speak to this idea of peacekeeping as an institution. But when we think about peacekeeping as an institution, a very important area is troop contributions. As you probably know, the UN doesn't have a standing army, so it relies on member states to provide peacekeepers, both military and police, for its operations. And it does offer reimbursements to those countries for peacekeeping deployments. But very often those reimbursements do not cover the cost of deployment, especially for those countries with very advanced militaries. So countries have various motivations for contributing troops to United Nations peacekeeping, which can be both material and normative. It can be about commitment to peace. It can be about prestige. But specifically, liberal institutionalists would look at peacekeeping as a public good. And the public good is something from which all countries in the world benefit. And if we think, if we hope that United Nations peacekeeping is effective in maintaining international peace and security, then we would expect all countries to try to contribute to this public good. But at the same time, public goods suffer from specific problems, such as free-riding. And there is some interesting research that looks at the number of countries that contribute to peacekeeping, to a peacekeeping operation, and the shortfall in their personnel contributions. Because many peacekeeping missions do not have enough peacekeepers. So the Security Council would authorize a certain size of a peacekeeping mission, but sometimes a secretariat wouldn't be able to find enough contributors. And it happens when there are many contributors to a peacekeeping mission. Another perspective on troop contributions would look at externalities. And this perspective would essentially think of peacekeeping not as a public good, but as a club good. So certain countries benefit from peacekeeping more than other countries. Because, for example, small island states might be completely unaffected by conflict in South Sudan. But the neighborhood, the countries in the region, would be deeply affected. They would experience refugee flows, they would experience conflict spillover. And for the trees, they might be more motivated to contribute to peacekeeping, to promote primarily their own security. And during the Cold War, it was considered inappropriate for great powers and neighboring countries to contribute peacekeeping troops. But this has changed and now many neighbors participate very actively through peacekeeping contributions in promoting regional security. So this is one of the perspectives where liberal institutionalism has been applied quite widely. One more aspect of peacekeeping decision-making would look at the effect of domestic publics. And you might have heard this phrase called the CNN effect, which presupposes that media drives peacekeeping decision-making. And when people see terrible suffering, when people see famine, when people see civilian victims on the screens, they start pressuring their government to do something about a conflict. And sometimes this pressure can, of course, be productive, but it can also be counterproductive. When there are no conditions for peacekeeping deployment, when a country is not really committed to a particular peace process or conflict, then it can lead to difficult situations. And the mission in Somalia in the 1990s is usually held up as an example of US intervention under the pressure from the media, from the public, but it lacked staying power and the conditions were not right for a peacekeeping mission. And of course, it's linked to this idea of popular mobilization that civil society can mobilize to try and pressure their governments into a peacekeeping deployment. And here a more recent example is the mission in Darfur, where in the US there was a very unique domestic coalition that tried to pressure the US to intervene. And the coalition included both Christians and African Americans because, of course, the conflict is in Africa and it was perceived that the Christians were being targeted. So that coalition essentially pressured the US into trying to deploy a UN mission. Of course, the US itself didn't participate, but it played a significant role in essentially persuading China to put pressure on Sudan government to allow the transition from an African Union to a United Nations peacekeeping mission. But at the same time, the effectiveness of the mission is disputed because the government of Sudan wasn't really willing to allow the mission to do what it was supposed to do. So those are some of the ways in which domestic inputs into foreign policy, into international negotiations can shape peacekeeping. Of course, the most natural sphere of application of liberal institutionalism would be United Nations Security Council decision-making, UN Security Council negotiations. Because this is an arena for member states bargaining where they try to realize cooperative outcomes and it's shaped by formal rules such as veto and informal rules as well. And in terms of veto, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council can block any resolution, including any peacekeeping resolution. And normally for research purposes, liberal institutionalists would often look at the voting record of international organizations. In the EU, for example, it's quite useful. One can see how countries form coalitions when they vote against proposals, when they support proposals. But in terms of United Nations Security Council decision-making, the number of vetoes does not necessarily represent the level of cooperation or discord in this institution. And as we can see on this graph, the numbers of negative votes of vetoes are relatively low. And of course, now we're in the more unchartered territory. Now we have less cooperative council. We can see that for the last five years, the number of vetoes has increased. While in the 90s, it was, you know, from one to three vetoes per year. So it was quite cooperative. But still, when we think about six, seven vetoes, and we think about the number of resolutions that the council passes every year, which can be 60 or 70, we can see that a veto is quite an extreme event. And for this reason, we need to look for other tools for studying United Nations Security Council decision making. Because very often, peacekeeping resolutions are passed by consensus, even when member states would explain their vote, and they would say, well, we actually don't agree with this peacekeeping resolution. But hey, we're going to go along with it. And for this reason, my co-author and I have looked at a particular informal practice. And this is a practice of sponsoring peacekeeping resolutions. So every resolution in the Security Council has to be moved by a particular member state or a coalition of member states. And we have noticed a very interesting pattern in terms of change in this informal decision making practices. For example, in the early 2010s, there was a coalition that would normally propose or sponsor peacekeeping resolutions. And that coalition would be centered on the three western permanent members, the US, the UK, and France, but would also very often include other transatlantic partners or would include African members. If we look, for example, at the resolution on the mission in Liberia that was passed in 2013, it was sponsored by the US, the UK, France, Morocco, Toga, and Wanda. And the resolution on the peacekeeping mission in Mali, which was actually the decision to deploy the mission in Mali. Besides the US, the UK, France, we also had Luxembourg and Australia that were the co-sponsors of that resolution. And we also had the three African countries, Morocco, Rwanda, and Toga. So we can see that the sponsorship of peacekeeping resolutions was a collective endeavor, a collective practice, which has really changed. And in the recent years, we can see that many resolutions on peacekeeping are proposed by only one member. And usually it's a permanent member. And this practice is called penholdership. So every permanent member would hold the pen on a particular conflict and would draft resolutions on that country. And this practice is less cooperative and probably there are less inputs by other council members into peacekeeping resolutions drafting process. And here we can see, for example, how the three permanent Western members divided their responsibilities for different conflicts that the council is addressing. And essentially we argue that it's important to look both at formal practices and informal practices, informal rules, norms, informal institutions that shape peacekeeping decision making. And now we're going to move on to another chapter, which also looks at an aspect of peacekeeping as an institution, but looks more at the United Nations peacekeeping bureaucracy. So I'm going to give the floor to Sarah. Okay. Hi, everyone. I am just pulling up my slides. Bear with me one moment. Okay. So first of all, I can't say anything before I wish Matt a very happy birthday. I think we're fully embarrassing you now, but luckily we've got your camera and your sound off. So anyway, I hope it's a wonderful day and we are very grateful that you're taking some time on your birthday to chair this session. I'd also like to just say a quick thanks to John and Sonja, who were fantastic editors for this volume all the way back from that workshop in Cardiff many years ago to having an actual copy of a book in our hands, which is great. So my chapter looks at sociological institutionalism and UN peacekeeping. And this is a slightly different take than a lot of the scholarship on peacekeeping because it looks internally at the UN as an organization. So I'll start by just saying a little bit more about what sociological institutionalism as a theory is. It draws heavily on sociology and on organization studies. And it's starting premise is that the institutional environment that is socially constructed institutional structures, rules, norms, symbols and images have a very powerful influence on observed political outcomes. Specifically, it argues that the institutional environment does two things. The first is that it socializes political actors into particular roles and so it constitutes them. And the second is that it causes them to internalize the norms associated with those roles. And so it influences their self perceptions and their behavior. And this in turn reinforces the norms and rules of the environment. So we're in a sort of cyclical pattern. So put slightly differently, actors and institutions are mutually constituted and mutually constituting. And institutions determine what is kind of possible and conceivable and meaningful in social life. So the institutional environment doesn't just produce identities and self images for actors, but it also delineates which actions are legitimate and it provides what sociological institutionalists call scripts and templates that enable them to respond to events and take action. Within organizations specifically, this behavior has been depicted as action that's taken according to a logic of appropriateness as opposed to a logic of expected consequences. That's a dichotomy many of you have heard of. Efficiency is only one of many considerations when organization staff adopt policies and respond to events. And social legitimacy so that alignment I was describing with organizational identities and norms and values is often at least as if not more important. Now many have pointed out that this can of course lead to irrational or inefficient or even self defeating policy choices in organizations, what some people call organizational dysfunction. However, I think it's important to realize that a logic of appropriateness doesn't imply that actors aren't goal oriented or that they behave irrationally. According to sociological institutionalism, rationality is socially constructed and so it's contingent on the organization environment. So rationality isn't just about utility maximization, but it's about defining goals and measuring success in ways that are valued within the organizational environment. Scholars have described this kind of rationality as imperfect or bounded or garbage can rationality. But basically the idea is that the logic of expected consequences is embedded in a larger logic of appropriateness and sort of norm guided behavior. And so because of this sociological institutionalism provides a really useful frame for understanding what appears to be contradictory and inefficient behavior in organizations where alignment with norms and more utilitarian objectives of efficiency or outputs clash. Organization staff are often going to look for and adopt kind of contradictory policies. They're going to say one thing and do another in order to remain compliant with the expectations of the organizational environment. Bronson has famously called this organizational hypocrisy and he helpfully points out that the demands of institutional norms and the demands for efficiency and effectiveness in organizations are both sources of legitimacy in the organization. Before I apply all of this to peacekeeping I just want to say a few words about organizational change because I think it's really important when we're thinking theoretically about peacekeeping to consider how it evolves over time. So according to sociological institutionalism organizations will adopt a new practice because it enhances social legitimacy in that context not because or not only because it augments their efficiency. So change can increase efficiency but only if that is something that is valued within that organization's institutional environment and also if it doesn't contradict other valued norms and standards. So in this way organizational culture you know frames norms and values those set the scope for organizational learning and change and according to Benner and his colleagues this means that organizational learning will usually take the form of a sort of competitive process of internal negotiation and bargaining where different actors within an organization are trying to make convincing claims about how their proposed change is the most closely aligned with the existing norms and rules of the organization and it also implies that any change that seeks to actually shift or eliminate or add new norms and rules are extremely contested and usually very very slow to be accepted if at all because they challenge that sort of fundamental self image of organization staff and when you see a slow pace of reform in most organizations including the UN this seems to be borne out by reality. I mean every few years there's another attempt to reform peacekeeping or the UN and these things don't tend to to make huge huge differences. So now a little bit about peacekeeping and sociological institutionalism. So this theory has really only been applied sporadically to UN peacekeeping and this is part of what I sort of think of as a kind of two-way intellectual neglect. Sociological institutionalists tend not to include international organizations like the UN into their empirical studies and studies of peacekeeping tend to study peacekeeping as a policy not as an institution and so they neglect the organizational side of things you know in other words we look at actors we look at decision-making procedures effectiveness impact outcomes all that kind of stuff but we tend to treat the institutional environment as kind of epiphenomenal. There are some exceptions to this where scholars have kind of turned the lens inward to identify and understand the institutional characteristics that give rise to behavior contradictory behavior and efficiency failures that kind of thing. So you know there's a few few names on the board that most of you are probably familiar with Barnett and Finnemore. Lipson has worked on this better I already mentioned Lee's Howard and Savile Nauticea and my own recent work has been sort of in this direction but I would say that most of this work remains sort of disparate from one another and it doesn't really form a cohesive body of scholarship on peacekeeping and sociological institutionalism and so it's remained a kind of secondary theory and approaches to studying peacekeeping which of course I think we should all change. So to do that I'm going to just focus on one sort of single case study of how this can be applied to usefully to peacekeeping and specifically I'm going to look at the question of local ownership in UN peacekeeping and this is based on several years of research I've done on this topic and a lot of interviews with UN staff as well as actually my own experience working for the UN previously this is the kind of stuff we used to think about. So most of you all have heard of local ownership and know that the UN has persistently emphasized local ownership sort of over the past 20 years or so it's become ubiquitous in UN discourse about peacekeeping and it is now actually included as a kind of key principle of peacekeeping on the peacekeeping website along with the sort of long-standing troika of consent impartiality and the non-use of force and in fact there are a number of documents including security council documents that call local ownership a moral imperative. So why all this enthusiasm for local ownership? Well local ownership is valued in peacekeeping because UN staff consider peacekeeping processes that are locally owned to be more legitimate. Why? Peacekeeping as an activity necessitates deep deep intrusion into lots of different local and national processes in host countries and those are processes that are not normally open to external interference but in order to bring about sort of meaningful conflict transformation you have to intrude quite deeply. Now that intrusion however contravenes very highly valued norms relating to self-determination, non-imposition and non-interference within the UN. These are principles that are enshrined in the organization's founding charter. So staff are put in this position where they sort of have to violate their stated principles in order to achieve their stated goals and this kind of directly goes against the self-image that UN peacekeeping staff have of themselves as kind of standard bearers for the principles of appropriate and legitimate behavior in the international system. So as a result peacekeeping staff seek out policies and approaches to peacekeeping that enable them to remain aligned with the principles and norms of the organizational environment even if those policies and approaches are inefficient or unlikely to lead to success and local ownership is one of those it's perceived to lessen intrusion and to ensure that actions aren't imposed but instead they're jointly agreed upon and this makes them more appropriate within the institutional bounds of the UN and I'll just read you one quote from an interview to illustrate this. There's a deep-seated political bias in the UN that the UN stands for self-determination rather than externally imposed neo-imperial forms of governance. Local ownership fits that view nicely. This is an important part of the UN's self-perception. So in this quote you can see this person is thinking about how this helps UN staff perceive themselves it's not so much about whether it's efficient or whether it's going to make peacekeeping more successful and more broadly it enables staff to kind of reconcile these contradictions between their operational obligations and the institutional norms and values that exist within the UN and it sort of allows them to be true to their organizational identities and importantly as I just said this is the case even if local ownership is actually inefficient in a particular context or weakens the chances of success or slows the delivery of outputs and interestingly in my interviews with UN staff that's pretty much exactly what everybody said they basically everybody said local ownership is inefficient it delays it prevents it prevents us from being efficient because the UN has to share responsibility for decision-making and implementation with actors who might have weak capacities or illiberal or authoritarian objectives. So I'll just read you a couple more quotes to show how this how this came through. One UN official stated that involving local actors slowed everything down to no end another noted that local actors don't have the capacity or neutrality for implementation another one said that local ownership resulted in delaying and complicating the achievement of our objectives another one said well you know we have ownership in mind but we just do things for them sometimes because there's a pressure to deliver. Yet these exact same staff the ones who expressed these concerns about local ownership and whether it's an efficient policy also maintain wholeheartedly that it was the right thing to do and and indeed not only that it was the right thing to do sometimes but that it should always guide peacekeeping activities you know it's as I said before it's become a key principle of peacekeeping and as a principle it can't be appropriate only sometimes and in some places it has to always be appropriate and everywhere be appropriate. However and I think this is really critical as I mentioned before peacekeeping staff aren't only motivated by kind of compliance with norms they are also motivated by these sort of more utilitarian considerations of output and results because those are also social goods that are valued within the institutional environment of the UN. So rational behavior in the UN means both trying to comply with those institutional norms and realize goals and outputs and local ownership therefore becomes very problematic because it's largely considered to be hugely inefficient and to imperil the delivery of stated objectives. So as a result I think what we see is that local ownership has become primarily a discursive tool for UN staff it's something that allows them to portray their actions as locally owned even if in practice they're not so you hear a lot being said about local ownership and involvement and inclusion and these kinds of things but my research has shown that local ownership is very rarely actually implemented or only partly implemented and you know the UN has has actually done very little to sort of coherently define what local ownership is sort of issue concrete guidelines about how to do it in practice or to monitor whether local actors actually feel any sense of ownership and instead I think local ownership remains this kind of discursive tool as I mentioned it's one of these scripts and templates I described before that enables UN staff to legitimize their behavior and to convince themselves and others that they are actually behaving appropriately within the bounds of the UN's organizational culture. This invocation of local ownership without any heed to operational performance constitutes a form of what some scholars call decoupling so there are practices that are not helpful from an efficiency point of view but they're maintained because of their symbolic function they're decoupled from actual behavior so in other words staff use kind of talk about local ownership to reconcile these conflicting institutional imperatives but with the result that they end up saying one thing and doing another. So just to wrap up quickly I think local ownership illustrates nicely how peacekeeping staff are socialized by their environment their organizational environment to view certain policy choices as acceptable appropriate and necessary because they align with the organizational principles and values of the UN and I think it also shows how UN staff use templates and frames to explain and demonstrate how their behavior even contradictory behavior actually aligns with that institutional identity and I'll end there just to say to sort of end with a plea I suppose to give sociological institutionalism more room in our understanding of UN peacekeeping because I think it's really important to understand the UN as an organization in order to fully understand what it does and its activities so thank you very much. Well thank you very much I think it's back to me first of all thank you very much for those very substantive hang on a second I'll be with you there we are thank you very much for those very substantive contributions and also thank you of course for remembering my birthday I'm much appreciated and thoroughly embarrassed the thanking nonetheless John mentioned that I had contributed to this book and that I might say a few words about not so much my contribution but what I think about the book as a contribution to the study of of peacekeeping and to international relations theory and I might just say a few words a way of introduction to the actual discussion in the meantime if you have questions which I'm sure you will have just enter them in the chat box and I'll try to and I'll try to keep track just a couple of points that struck me and the first thing and this is what makes the study of peacekeeping so interesting is that if we accept that a broad definition of peacekeeping or peace operations as third-party intervention aimed at mitigating containing contributing to the resolution of conflict in the international system if we accept that as a broad definition then the institution of peacekeeping and peacekeeping as a set of activities by its very nature raises a whole set of issues that touch directly upon what is the the meat if you like of international relations conflict and cooperation sovereignty and intervention norms and norm diffusion the use and utility of military force the changing character of armed conflict all these issues that are central to the study of international relation international politics are automatically there if you engage with the study of peacekeeping and on the last point that Sarah make which I think is a very important one about organizations I mean it reminds me of the preface that Ines Claude the great scholar of international organization wrote to his I think fourth edition of his book on organizations where he said that to study international organizations intelligently is to study international politics and I think that in itself is something well worth remembering and just to illustrate this I mean when peacekeeping started out in the early 1950s it was in itself an adaptation of the organization to the particular circumstances of the cold war with the end of the cold war and the shift in normative boundaries the character of peacekeeping itself changes so I think that's an important connection between peacekeeping and the study of international relations it's not just that it's a sort of narrow field in which we can toilet in an interest but I think it raises these issues almost automatically when we look at them so that's the first general point I wanted to make that I wanted to just say a couple of words about the the themes covered in the book and they are excellent chapters and what they all do of course is to help cast some light on the way in which the scale and the scope and the focus of of UN peace operations had has evolved over time and that is clearly undeniable the vast majority of of peacekeeping operations at present and indeed since the early 1990s are focused on interstate conflict and indeed many large operations are deployed in the context of an ongoing war and the range of tasks undertaken by a peacekeeper of course is much greater than it used to be in the classical era and I think many of the chapters take for example the chapter on complexity theory by Charles Hunt throws some very very interesting light on how to understand the sheer complexity of these operation and also analyze their workings yet at the same time and something I wanted to focus and emphasize in my sort of concluding remarks to the book while we rightly focus attention on the element of change over time I think it is very important always to be mindful of the elements of continuity as well as discontinuity in the in the study of peacekeeping and also in the utility of theoretical frameworks for analyzing it and what do I mean by that let me just single out four elements of of of continuity and and that run alongside the changes since the early 90s the first is that this is a book about united nations peace operations and of course the defining characteristics of the UN as an organization specifically it's intergovernmental character it's deeply political nature and it's fragmented functionally fragmented character those those features remain fundamentally unchanged and given the UN's central role in authorizing and in mounting and sustaining operation that matters greatly and I think therefore Sarah's contribution sociological institutionalism is is very very opposite and very important and very interesting we need to look at the organization itself in a way that we often do not I think I make the point that certainly normally commentary on the UN tends to slip into the UN did this or the UN failed to do that and when you slip into that kind of language the actual workings of it as an organization the fact that it is a membership of organization shaped in a sociological sense sketched by by Sarah just now is often lost and I think it's important to recognize that and this for the study of peacekeeping is absolutely vital if we try to understand the attitude for example of true contributing countries to the fundamentals of peacekeeping we try to understand how the secretariat behaves in certain circumstances a focus on that is vital but here I think there is an element of continuity as well as discontinuity the second element I think of continuity which is interesting and has been much debated of course revolves around the question of the fundamental roles and functions of UN peacekeeping particularly it's defining characteristics as being that of consent of the parties the impartiality as the determinant of operational activity and minimum use of force except in self-defense now again undeniably the case and and Jan Karlsruhe has written about this extremely well elsewhere undeniably the case that consent has frequently proved partial and incomplete in many contempt permission settings and indeed that the UN has been applying force in a much more robust manner but even so member states including the security council for a mixture of I think principled and pragmatic reasons have been reluctant to reject the what we might call the essential character of peacekeeping as a third party activity that relies on a measure of consent impartiality and a minimum use of force so the whole discussion about the use of force to some extent revolves around this and you can see how this ties into issues such as as the question of protection of civilian of course which has become a very major and important mandate for UN operation and this brings me to the sort of third if you like element of continuity it ties into that that although we tend to speak of and the textbooks will tell you about traditional or classical or first generation peacekeeping I think the whole history of peacekeeping right back to its inception in the 1950s or even late 40s is richer and more varied than is often recognized there is a very important disjunction with the end of the Cold War no doubt about that but many operations during the Cold War particularly the Congo operation from 60 to 64 and also interestingly operations in Lebanon and Cyprus raised many of the issues and challenges faced by the inherent difficulties of inserting and operating any kind of outside civilian and military force in a third party capacity in the midst of an ongoing war and I think it is very useful to bear that original experience in mind young Karlsruhe joins us from from Oslo and we have spoken about this his institution the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs is a very long and distinguished history of studying peacekeeping and after the Congo operation in the 1960s they published a book which you'll find in the in the library hopefully it's still called the Oslo papers and the Oslo papers is a compilation of reflections really on the challenges the UN faced in the Congo and I looked at it early on when I started writing about peacekeeping and I found an extraordinary useful source both for reflection and insight into peacekeeping drawing from that particular experience and again this is not to say that there haven't been very very important changes but I think we need to be mindful of the element of continuity there as well and the final sort of source of I think I suppose continuity I think is in the nature of and the continuity is an international political system itself and the sources of state conduct specifically considerations of interest power and prestige continue to matter greater to states whatever we think about that as principal drivers of it and I think as as as is made clear in the chapter on realism in the book um UN peacekeeping simply can't be divorced from an appreciation of the continuing importance of power politics in international affairs the final point I simply want to make really concerns the sort of value of this particular book and the value of of theorizing I think what these different chapters do very very well is to to bring new perspectives and to analyze just as Sarah did dimensions which have been much neglected in the past the nature of the organization um the way the secretariat works to take that particular example and and by doing so opening new avenues for future research uh and I think there are many many areas which have been neglected there's a very interesting chapter on gendered power relations within institutions um which is well worth reading and thinking much more seriously about but what I think all these chapters also do and I feel that quite strongly is that they do bring out I think that that theorizing itself is necessarily an iterative process and that the value of these different theoretical lenses which is what the editors describe these as being rather than separate and self-contained paradigms if you like their value are tested or must be detested and refined in light of of rigorous empirical investigation of actual operations whether contemporary or historical um if you don't have that sort of element that iterative process of course there is always a danger that theories can become um isolated or self-referentially that are even worse than that and here I think we are fortunate in looking forward in that there is much increased availability and I spoke into Kisenia about this and she has taken advantage of this that is a great availability of what we might call sort of new primary sources um either done through rigorous field work and interviews but also things that have been released particularly from the operations in the 1990s and unsurprisingly the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and I think that material is enormously interesting as a sort of as a resource um with which many of these theoretical lenses can begin to can engage and I think the fact that we now have this kind of material to greater degree that that scholars and practitioners are willing to speak more openly about it ensures to my mind that this will continue to be a very fertile field of research both for theorists and an area for practitioners as well so those are the kinds of initial comments I wanted to make but I want to open up for for questions and I will do that straight away I hope that Aisha will tell me if everything is is working or not working perhaps you should tell me according to plan but let me see if I can turn to Anna Anna Maria can you hear me Anna let I can't hear Anna at the moment but let me just try to stick properly to my list Karen Karen Connolly do you want to ask your question unmuting your microphone Karen Connolly what I can do uh if the fellow panelists you can all nod if you can still hear me can you help me okay then I'll ask that I'll address the question to you and Karen asks whether uh my question is in peacekeeping mentioned that are short of participants do you the panel think it is the shape for private military contractors to pick up the slack so the role of private actors to fill the gap where the UN isn't able to to generate enough troops for a mission I don't know who wants to start okay I can start since this is a question about troop contributions and I have addressed it as part of my presentation of course it's a very big debate and we know that the UN doesn't rely as much on private military contractors as some national militaries that participate in stabilization operations we do know that the extent to which those companies were used in Iraq for example and to some extent Afghanistan is very different from from UN peacekeeping and of course with UN peacekeeping there are certain constraints and those constraints are also financial because the troop contributions by member states are often much cheaper for the UN than hiring a private military company and there are also questions of accountability since we know that some private military companies haven't behaved professionally in some of the conflicts where they were deployed so for the UN it's a huge reputational risk and also in terms of the legitimacy of UN peacekeeping as a practice as an institution it does rely on this multinational character of its forces in order to be more acceptable to all parties to the conflict and you know contributors come from Latin America from Asia from all over the place while private military companies are usually based in a specific number of western countries so I think there are many risks and constraints for the UN and I do not think that we are going to see an increase in the use of private military companies in peacekeeping but I mean of course those companies are private contractors are present in peacekeeping for various issues logistics transportation but in terms of like frontline fighting combat roles I think there are some risks and constraints I might just add to what Xenia has said thinking about it of course from a sort of organizational perspective there's a very strong kind of anti-mercenary norm within the UN I think there's even a working group on the use of mercenaries and essentially its job is to be critical of the practice and I think the non-use of kind of private military companies fits with the stated principles of the organization that it is intergovernmental that we are behaving in out of a sort of sense of doing good not out of a sense of earning profit which is what private companies are of course doing and then of course all the additional points that Xenia has already made about you know finances and accountability and so on but what's interesting here is that there are many instances in which one could argue that using a private military company would be more efficient you go in you get something done and you go out and so there is a bit of attention there because you know efficiency is also something that the UN is both aiming for and under pressure to to to realize so I think exactly will there will be a sort of balance reached where the private contractors are used for things like site security and logistics but not necessarily for actual frontline combat that's too high profile it's too sort of too much part of the the visible identity of the UN as a peacekeeping actor thank you very much I've not been instructed that I have to read out the question so I apologize for that let me do the next question there was that was the sort of we talked about the interaction of IR theory and peacekeeping but there was also a question of what unique features of if any of peacekeeping might serve as a lens to also illuminate IR theory I will just invite my panelists to answer that but I simply wanted to I sort of I think I hinted at it when I made a reference to the chapter on on realism I mean it is quite clear that peacekeeping and the practice of peacekeeping when we look at individual operations in details and how member states behave in terms of providing troops or their response to the rules and regulation governing very much have their own interests in mind as well as on higher calling about the way to produce I think in that sense it does confirm important elements of of of realist thinking and behavior but it doesn't exclude necessarily other insight that it brings to there and I sort of suggested that you know methodological pluralism is very useful in pointing to various aspects of peacekeeping but who wants to on my panel wants to come in there you know did you have I could start perhaps but yeah in my own work I've been trying to look at how informal alliances of actors within and outside of the event have advanced changed and in what I call linked ecologies and definitely I I when I did that work and I I thought of is as much as contributing to our theory as to contributing to the peacekeeping literature hopefully at least that was my ambition and my interests so okay if if I may go next I think it's very important question because we have indeed looked at how IR theory helps us understand peacekeeping but in terms of peacekeeping and its unique features for studying IR theory for me one of the most interesting aspects is this combination of unilateral policies and multilateral character of peacekeeping and this goes back to the fundamental question of IR to me which is power and how different actors project power and try to use it for their own gain or for collective gain and in peacekeeping we do really see that we know that you know big powers on the security council they try to authorize peacekeeping resolutions they try to keep control of the decision-making process very often in countries where they have national interests very often in their former colonies we see that France and some African conflicts where peacekeeping missions co-deploy with French unilateral military operations and there we have interesting dynamics so I think this tension between you know acting alone and acting collectively is very present in peacekeeping and I think it's one of those big questions for IR theory as well. I'll just add something very brief related to what Xenia has just said I think for me what's fascinating about peacekeeping is the sort of confluence of state actors and organizational actors and interestingly because the organizations are again made up of states and yet we tend to think of them as in tension with one another and so I it's a sort of very messy circular situation but I can't I can think of very few other phenomena in the study of international relations and politics where you have that and so I think there's a lot to learn for IR theory more broadly from peacekeeping in that regard thank you very much we have a question from now from Anna Maria Albulescu as your chapter focuses on analyzing domestic preferences for you in peacekeeping by looking at the role of states as part of UN Security Council negotiations do you see any additional role for the international civil service as well as individuals in shaping UN member states policies on peacekeeping related decisions? Yes thank you Anna Maria for this question it's a very important question and I think it has two parts one looks at the role of individuals and one looks at the role of civil service which I presume is the UN Secretariat and in terms of the role of individuals the chapter on practice theory does address the question of individual influence and individual social capital and how UN officials and Security Council ambassadors can draw on those resources to advance their own vision of peacekeeping so yes individuals do play a role and I think particularly practice theory is a useful lens and John's own work in terms of linked ecologies also looked at alliances between very often individual actors like for example civilian heads of peacekeeping missions special representatives of the secretary general force commanders individuals in important roles who can shape peacekeeping and in terms of the role of the UN Secretariat not as much as an implementer of peacekeeping mandates which is what Sarah has talked about but more about as a stakeholder in the decision-making process I think the secretariat has influence but it's very often limited because the Security Council doesn't have to take secretariat's advice into consideration and actually I and my co-author have an article coming out in global governance in spring which which compares a secretariat reports on peacekeeping that recommends peacekeeping options that recommend peacekeeping mandates with the actual resolutions and we can see that the secretariat advice does shape peacekeeping decision-making but very often the Security Council can ignore it we know for example that the mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the early zeros was given a much more forceful protection of civilians mandate and the secretariat was completely opposed in its 2002 report the secretariat said the mission doesn't have the capacity to protect civilians and Security Council nevertheless went on to authorize quite a proactive protection mandate so yes individuals and the secretariat have a role to play but it's often limited I just want to to to echo what Xenia said about the importance of that question I also think that one of the neglected areas perhaps of study of UN operations is the importance of of the role played by by individuals particularly those that run the missions and also indeed the the secretariat itself I mean there is a tendency and one reason for this is that when things to put it very crudely when things go badly wrong and in a mission and it has gone catastrophically wrong at times there is a tendency perhaps not surprising me for member states to blame to blame the the secretariat for not being up to it and likewise if you turn to the secretariat they will say that lack of political will there is very little we can do now there is a core of truth to that of course but it's not quite as simple as that there is a complex interaction between these two UNs if you like and and and what is fascinating to study and this is why I made reference to the availability of new prime resource material is precisely how that relationship plays out in individual missions I think if you look at some operations I think it's difficult to explain the trajectory of that operation whether it's successful or unsuccessful with that also an appreciation of the individual leaders that led that particular mission and I think here again the different perspectives in his book point to that and suggest that's an important thing and of course at the top of the pyramid of course within a secretary at the secretary general himself has potentially a very important role to play he is not just the chief administrative officer but also has a political role and again that role has been used in different ways by different secretaries there's been some very interesting reflections on for example Paris de Caire's role at that critical moment between 87 and 92 when the UN was very successful in helping to unwind various long-running cold war conflicts and I think it's been persuasively argued that wasn't simply a matter of you know the cold war coming to an end and of course they would agree he also played a very important role in making sure that the UN was able to facilitate and support the interests of member states so I think your question is a very pertinent one and I think it opens up better interesting avenues for future research I don't know if anyone else wants to add to that yeah I'll just I'll just say very quickly some more recent research that I'm working on with Xenia and a couple of other people including at King's in the field work that we've conducted the role of individual head submissions so the second special representative of the secretary general or SRSG has quite an influence in shaping sort of events on the ground in in terms of their own risk aversion in terms of the relations they're able to build with with national actors the relations they have with New York and those can actually end up having some fairly concrete consequences for how emissions position continues or doesn't continue in a particular country so again I would say it wasn't something we were actually even really investigating but it kept coming up in one interview after another one someone would say under this SRSG this happened but then it all changed when this person came along so I think there's actually a lot more scope for looking at what are the qualities that and characteristics of different heads of mission and how those influence what's happening on the ground thank you very much I will just echo that again for some of you in the audience I think took part in a in a in a live sort of Q&A we had with the head of the current mission in South Sudan two days ago SRSG or David Shearer and it was very clear from that talk just precisely what Sarah was saying now that although he's very very constrained by the mandate by the resources and other things that is also scope for him to interpret the situation the ground and take your initiative where he sees victim with the resources he's got and let me read out the next question Faraj asks there have been many debates regarding the possibility of using PMC's in peacekeeping missions instead of deploying military personnel from member states what are your thoughts on that and do you think it will be an effective tool so the use of private military companies or private military actors in peacekeeping as an alternative who wants to have a first go I'll just I mean I don't have that much more to add to what we said before when we had a somewhat similar question or a question on the same topic and I mean again I think I guess I would maybe pick on in a very academic when we pick on one of the words in the question which is whether this would be an effective tool it depends a little bit how you define effectiveness in peacekeeping whether it is simply a matter of going in and accomplishing some sort of combat mission then potentially yes you could argue that there is room for PMC's as an effective tool but I think in peacekeeping we need to think of effectiveness in very different ways it's not just about achieving a short-term objective and it's a much sort of more networked kind of effectiveness where there is a short-term objective but there's also keeping New York happy and there's also keeping national actors happy and there's keeping troop contributors happy and there's keeping the staff happy you know there's so many different layers to what constitutes a good tool and this is partly why I think it's very hard to be successful at peacekeeping but I think given that complexity using PMC's for for so frontline military instead of member states is probably not likely to happen because too many of those involved stakeholders would be unhappy about it the Joe did you say I want to say something I I was just trying to scroll through the other questions but I mean we have already touched upon this but of course PMC's or private military company or contractors security companies play a role in peacekeeping missions already and some papers are looking into that but and then try to contrast using this organized hypocrisy concept trying to contrast that to the mission goal but it's like we have already touched upon it's a matter of also what kind of tasks these actors are given in missions and probably it's not in the foreseeable future possible to kind of contemplate that these PMC's will have the frontline tasks and not much to add actually from my side yes I I just I think that's that's essentially being covered and in the obvious point being that you know PMC's come in many different shapes and sizes and guises I think you can imagine private actors and it has indeed been the case providing you know very basic but important enabling support functions for a mission but that's very different from what John described as a frontline role and I think there is also the fact many might think this is surprising still that that the UN just retains a greater degree of legitimacy in many of these settings by virtue of his universal character it is true that the UN flag has become an object of targeting itself in a way it didn't used to be before but there is still that sense in which and it's an advantage it holds even vis-a-vis some regional organization that it does represent as it were international community and that does buy it some some credibility and some legitimacy compared particularly perhaps to private actors where the suspicion of other motives will tend to come to the surface let me read the next question and I think this is for you Cassania you might see it as well it was said that a liberal institutionalism in simple terms is equivalent to cooperation it leads to gain and prosperity for the states who are involved in it so in the case of UN peacekeeping what would main permanent members of the UN gain from this peacekeeping peacemaking corporation their interest why the main permanent members of the UN be engaged in peacekeeping yeah this is of course a question that goes to the heart of liberal institutionalism that looks at how states cooperate and why states cooperate and I think every permanent member has their specific interests involved we see that China participates more and more in peacekeeping China is a large financial contributor now it also contributes troops to peacekeeping missions which is quite unique for the permanent member and China especially focuses on on Africa and we know that in Africa China has very important trade interests very important economic interests it also tries to project its soft power in Africa so it has a very specific regional focus so by participating in peacekeeping missions governments can build very important relations with host states and they can later on participate in economic reconstruction after the conflict so often they want to gain food hold in specific countries to realize their economic or security interests and when we look for example at the US for the US it's also a question of credibility since it often projects an image of the leader of the free world it also has a special responsibility to maintain international peace and security and in the case of France for example I've already I've already discussed how in Francophone Africa the French mission in New York is very active in shaping peacekeeping and I think another interesting trend in terms of permanent members and peacekeeping is the new focus on counterterrorism and I think John has written many excellent articles about this new consensus among the permanent members in terms of using peacekeeping for stabilization and counterterrorism perhaps I should pick up there well it is an interesting kind of convergence and what we talked about earlier is perhaps would be a more blatant way of using the UN for exactly the purposes you want to in a way using inserting PMCs into them but a more kind of a softer approach is of course to to instruct the UN to work closely with sub-regional organizations to give them logistical support and other things and and thus dragging the UN a bit into the areas of stabilization and counterterrorism and this is what we see some other places in Mali and elsewhere of course very challenging both for the people on the ground and more in terms of doctrine in terms of yeah legitimacy and so forth and for the the organization the larger part the larger the other parts of the organization so the humanitarian actors under the UN flag and so forth but I mean I want to talk very long about that here you have to unmute sorry just just want to add one one point to this I agree very much with what's been said but I think we often speak in terms of there being a tension or a direct conflict between principle on one hand and interest on the other and of course that exists and in many cases that will be acute but of course very often in terms of of the UN intervention the most successful one quote unquote everything is relative is where issues of principle and interest come together and particularly when a major power or one power is prepared to take the lead in orchestrating an operation partly for reasons of interest but also principle so I mean take East Timor for example where Australia decided to take the lead Haiti in 1994 where the Americans took the lead they were all powerful national interests to stake as they perceived them but also they served a wider purpose so there doesn't necessarily have to be a conflict always between the two but but nonetheless you're right and I think the whole counterterrorism issue is a very interesting one the way it has crept into mandates in the way that the high-level panel on peacekeeping operation from 2015 clearly thought would be a bad idea but members days as far as I can tell some of them has said well it might be a bad idea but that's what you should be getting on with let me take the next question peacekeeping has become a tool to project power it ties into this and this can be seen in Security Council resolution 1973 2011 in Libya and how China and Russia are vetoing Security Council resolutions to protect civilians in Syria and you suggest that this is discredited UN peacekeeping missions what do you think the UN can do to restore its international position okay I was going to challenge bits of the question but I let others do it as well perhaps if they want to yeah yeah it's an important question but I don't think that this question is necessarily about peacekeeping because peacekeeping has of course evolved and mods has talked about the difficult question of consent which can be you know partial it can be invited it can be coerced like in therefore but at the same time a fundamental feature of peacekeeping is the consent of the host government and obviously Syria is not willing to consent to a peacekeeping operation so this is really more a question about humanitarian well we don't call it humanitarian intervention anymore we call it responsibility to protect so this is a question about responsibility to protect whether countries are willing to override the host government and deploy troops even when they're not invited and I think it's a different debate a very important debate but we haven't really looked at it in our edited volume because we wanted to focus more on peacekeeping any other comments any other comments from our panelists on this as perhaps peacekeeping as a tool to project power I don't think like you said 1973 isn't really about peacekeeping operation nor is there a peacekeeping mission in Syria but I think the question of whether peacekeeping can be a tool to project power maybe there are comments on that or questions related to that well I would just I would my my question would be for whom to project power I mean I always hesitate so I have perhaps unpopular views on how we should conceive of the UN but I I waver between doing the member states as part of the UN and as something completely separate from the UN so when people talk about the Security Council I'm sometimes tempted to consider it an external body to the Secretariat I mean in many ways it is so when when I see a question like this I'm thinking well who exactly here is projecting power and it's this classic point that Mats made earlier about you know who should be discredited here if it's China and Russia who are who are vetoing does that discredit the UN or does it discredit them as member states in the Security Council with the power of the veto so I think there's a lot to untangle there that goes beyond peacekeeping itself that is more about power relations between between big countries between p5 members but I'm not sure whether I think in the popular imagination it discredits the UN potentially when there's the inability to reach a resolution on something but I but I do actually think that might be one of the moments when we need to think of the Security Council as something separate from the UN because the UN can only urge and encourage and lobby but ultimately it doesn't get to sit and vote in that in that Security Council chamber. Perhaps let me pick up there because in a way although I completely agree with Sara it also points to what an incredibly rich source of empirical material UN peacekeeping is with all its like we already touched upon but with all its levels of units of analysis from the Security Council to the UN that itself is you know many layered and has many different centers of agency between the the general assembly between secretariat the security council the field missions and all the interactions between different levels and the UN itself and member states it's a fantastic source of study so I think I'll just jump into to my kind of the final words and say that's also why it's such a good source for international relations theory you can you can study it from all kinds of angles with all kinds of theoretical instruments and methodological approaches and so forth so yeah very interesting material indeed great john you started the the rap wrapping up which is great so why don't we move on to Xenia would you like to to have a concluding paragraph or sentence or words yeah thank you very much much for chairing thank you sarah and john for joining us for this presentation and for the book project it's very I'm very happy to see it out and I hope that everybody who attended would also be interested in reading it it's available as an ebook as well as a printed book and you can read the introduction for free and research gate if you're interested in these issues and I think the questions were excellent so I'd like to thank everyone for those questions they have touched upon many many important aspects ranging from power politics to the idea of secretariat's influence to the notion of the role of individuals in peacekeeping to private contractors private actors in peacekeeping deployments so very very important questions and as you can see when we talk about peacekeeping we do discuss so many issues international corporations norms and their evolution we discuss ethics we discuss outcomes we discuss the role of international bureaucracies the role of decision-making bodies so yeah I would like to echo john and just say that UN peacekeeping is an amazing subject to study empirically theoretically and for policy and practical reasons sarah any concluding observations um yeah just very briefly um to first thank you and Xenia and john all for for bringing us here today and to everybody else who has come and asked really excellent rich questions and just to sort of pick up on a thought that's been kicking around in my mind as I've listened and responded I mean we've talked about different agents within the UN family the structure of the organization you know the role of private actors of individuals and it just makes me realize again it's not a new thought but I think it's an important one to remember from time to time that what what exactly peacekeeping is it is very blurred around the edges and you know once you start to think about it it leads you on to so many other other topics and and issues and it's it can be very hard to study in isolation because it is by definition a sort of linked into so many other things and networked into so many other things and I think that came through very very much in the questions that everybody asked um but it also I think is very exciting because it means there's a lot more that we can learn and and do and I hope that this book will be helpful to people who are trying to do just that so anyway thank you to everyone for coming in for all those great questions well thank you very much can I just ask um the editors about one practical question is uh you have any idea whether it will be a paperback edition of it so people can if they want to buy it or is that on the cards yet there is the paperback edition of it yet is that okay but hopefully hopefully before too long anyway um it's going to take me sometimes before I get used to this format zoom and hopefully by the time I get used to it we'll be out of this pandemic but who knows but it's been lovely to imagine you all out there and it's been very nice to see that my fellow panelists um and I'd like to thank all of you for for taking part in this in this seminar and I urge you to um get hold of a copy whether it's paperback hardback or or whether you borrow it from the library it's it's a very rich source to tap into that's what I was left with having read it and very fertile for ideas and be perhaps particularly useful for those of you who are thinking of of setting out on some kind of uh larger research project if focus at peacekeeping to get insights from it so thank you all very very much bye bye thank you bye