Reforming 21st Century Peacekeeping Operations: Governmentalities of Security, Protection, and Police

This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific focus on analyzing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping operations led by the United Nations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian-inspired approaches in the field of International Relations, it highlights how interventions can be viewed through the lens of governmentality and its key attendant concepts. The book draws from these approaches in order to explore how international interventions are increasingly informed by governmental rationalities of security and policing.

Two specific cases are examined: the UN’s Security Sector Reform (SSR) approach and the UN’s Protection of Civilians agenda. Focusing on the governmental rationalities that are at work in these two central frameworks that have come to guide contemporary UN-led peacekeeping efforts in recent years, the book considers:

The use in IR of governmentality and its attendant notions of biopower and sovereign power

The recent discussion regarding the concept and practice of international policing and police reform

The rise of security as a rationality of government and the manner in which security and police rationalities interconnect and have increasingly come to inform peacekeeping efforts

The Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework for peacebuilding and the rise of the UN’s Protection of Civilians agenda.

This book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, security studies, critical theory, and conflict and intervention.