Overview

United Nations peacekeeping has undergone radical transformation in the new millennium. Where it once was limited in scope and based firmly on consent of all parties, contemporary operations are now charged with penalizing spoilers of peace and protecting civilians from peril. Despite its more aggressive posture, practitioners and academics continue to affirm the vital importance of impartiality whilst stating that it no longer means what it once did. Taking Sides in Peacekeeping explores this transformation and its implications, in what is the first conceptual and empirical study of impartiality in UN peacekeeping.The book challenges dominant scholarly approaches that conceive of norms as linear and static, conceptualizing impartiality as a 'composite' norm, one that is not free-standing but an aggregate of other principles-each of which can change and is open to contestation. Drawing on a large body of primary evidence, it uses the composite norm to trace the evolution of impartiality, and to illuminate the macro-level politics surrounding its institutionalization at the UN, as well as the micro-level politics surrounding its implementation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of the largest and costliest peacekeeping mission in UN history. Taking Sides in Peacekeeping reveals that, despite a veneer of consensus, impartiality is in fact highly contested. As the collection of principles it refers to has expanded to include human rights and civilian protection, deep disagreements have arisen over what keeping peace impartially actually means. Beyond the semantics, the book shows how this contestation, together with the varying expectations and incentives created by the norm, has resulted in perverse and unintended consequences that have politicized peacekeeping and, in some cases, effectively converted UN forces into one warring party among many. Taking Sides in Peacekeeping assesses the implications of this radical transformation for the future of peacekeeping and for the UN's role as guarantor of international peace and security.

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9780198747246

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Reviews

Emily Paddon Rhoads book is timely and thought-provoking. It brings much needed clarity to the normative and operational challenges facing contemporary peacekeeping. A must-read for policy-makers and peace advocates alike. Louise Frechette, UN Deputy Secretary-General 1998-2006 This is an important and most impressive contribution to the burgeoning literature on UN peacekeeping and the challenges of third party intervention in civil wars. Taking Sides in Peacekeeping offers a timely, intellectually rigorous and highly persuasive critique of developments in UN peacekeeping since the turn of the century. Through its fine-grained analysis of the UNs troubled history of peacekeeping in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it shows, among other things, how the pursuit of robustness by UN peacekeepers in the absence of clarity on strategic and political objectives has had unintended and, at times, perverse consequences. In doing so it also raises much larger questions about the UNs role in international peace and security. It is an excellent book, deserving of a wide readership. Professor Mats Berdal, Department of War Studies, Kings College London Paddon Rhoads is a rare example of a political scientist who can shore up her insights on the quandaries of peacekeeping with deep, nuanced field research in the Congo and UN headquarters. As we enter a new era of peacekeeping, in which missions are increasingly deployed into conflict where there is little peace to keep, her examination of impartiality should become required reading for practitioners and academics. Jason Stearns, Director, Congo Research Group, New York University and author of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York: Public Affairs, 2011)

Author Information

Emily Paddon Rhoads is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. Her research analyses the increased prominence of human rights in the theory and practice of armed conflict. She focuses specifically on the politics and practices of United Nations peacekeeping, humanitarianism, and military intervention with a geographical emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. She is the former Rose Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Oxford and a European Research Council (ERC) Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Her PhD is from the University of Oxford, where she was a Trudeau Scholar.

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