Abstract
Recent policy developments reaffirm the importance of ensuring that military peacekeepers are trained and equipped with the necessary skills and abilities to respond effectively in complex and difficult peacekeeping environments. Three high-level reviews commissioned by the United Nations (UN) in 2014–2015 emphasized the requirement to ensure that local people are actively involved in decision-making at all levels of peacebuilding, while high-profile failures to protect civilians, humanitarian workers, and journalists such as during the crises in Malakal, South Sudan, in 2016, have increased the pressure on UN troop contributing countries (TCCs) to deploy adequately resourced military peacekeepers capable and willing to use force (UN HIPPO Report, 2015, p. x).
These distinct objectives, as scholars in the field of critical peacekeeping studies, military studies, and conflict resolution theory have argued, result in the articulation of two different types of peacekeeper: the warrior peacekeeper who employs traditional military skills to engage in robust peacekeeping and the cosmopolitan peacekeeper who uses softer skills for protection of civilian tasks and mission-specific peacebuilding projects. The challenge is knowing how to improve peacekeeping training, so that these divergent peacekeeping identities can be better reconciled. The rationale here is that training military peacekeepers as third-party interveners can help facilitate positive transformation of peacekeeping operations and improve the implementation of protection strategies.
These are the policy-relevant, empirical questions David Curran addresses in More than Fighting for Peace? Conflict Resolution, UN Peacekeeping and the Role of Training Military Personnel. He contends that structural limitations in the curriculum design contribute to the failure of contemporary multidimensional peacekeeping operations to evolve and identifies the challenges peacekeepers—and trainers—face in light of the UN’s evolving policy framework for addressing violent conflict. Theoretically, the book contributes to the field of conflict resolution studies by examining how conflict resolution techniques are used by tactical-level military peacekeepers. Drawing extensively on the relevant literature in critical peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and cosmopolitan studies, as well as training models developed by prominent scholars in the field of conflict resolution studies, Curran argues that current UN training packages and programs developed by the UN and delivered by TCCs do not recognize the role that tactical-level military peacekeepers play in managing conflict at the microlevel, and in informal, day-to-day interactions and routine activities that take effect outside of the mission’s formal conflict management processes and negotiation frameworks.
In doing so, Curran seeks to extend conflict resolution skills to include skills used when building civil–military relations. Thus, Curran challenges the normative assumption that tactical-level military peacekeepers operate solely to provide a safe space for UN staff engaged in managing conflict. Rather, tactical-level military peacekeepers are integral to conflict resolution because they “set the right conditions for peacebuilding,” in particular by establishing the “pre-negotiation stage” (p. 28).
The book is divided into three parts. Part I examines how policy trends in conflict resolution and peacekeeping training have evolved from the 1970s to the present day. It describes the pedagogic models developed by scholars in the field of conflict resolution studies and provides a literature review of the theoretical approaches toward conflict resolution, peacekeeping, and peacekeeping training. Part II presents an analysis of how conflict resolution skills for tactical-level military peacekeepers have been integrated into the UN’s predeployment training packages and draws on empirical research conducted at the UN Training School in Ireland to show how alternative pedagogical approaches might better reconcile traditional military skills with the softer skills required for peacebuilding. Part III further reflects on the future of peacekeeping training and the kinds of tactical-level military peacekeeper identities that are required if peacekeeping operations are to respond to the UN’s ideal of cosmopolitan peacekeeping.
This book offers a valuable contribution to the study of peacekeeping training practice. However, it may have been more fitting to include the discussion in Chapter 6 on warrior peacekeeper and soldier–diplomat identities in Part I in order to strengthen the theoretical framework of the book. The research methods used by Curran for the empirical case study include a discourse analysis of policies and training materials and nonparticipatory observations of one conflict resolution training program. Yet, an explanation and critique of the methodological approach adopted is not included. Although Curran draws on a range of reports on conflict resolution training produced by militaries in predominantly Western states, including Canada, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom as well as by regional security institutions such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the empirical case study could have been further expanded and strengthened by the inclusion of depth interviews with the trainers and trainees engaged in the program. Similarly, given the breadth of theories and conflict resolution training models discussed, a comparative analysis of two or three training programs would have allowed Curran to explore further whether training models developed by scholars of conflict resolution studies inform peacekeeping training practices.
That said, More than Fighting for Peace is the first comprehensive study that traces the evolution of predeployment training and the political and pedagogic issues that impact on how peacekeeping training curriculum is designed and delivered. In this respect, Curran’s book offers an important contribution to the field of conflict resolution studies, critical peacekeeping/peacebuilding studies, and critical military studies, in as much as peacekeeping training remains largely underresearched and undertheorized, despite recognition by policy makers, practitioners, and scholars that improving training is vital if peacekeeping operations are to progress toward the cosmopolitan model the UN promotes.