Description
While we know that peacekeeping is key to keep the peace and protect civilians, we know less about how it works to achieve those aims. Notwithstanding a growing recognition that mandates alone do not directly determine what actually happens in the field, we still know little about how- once deployed- units translate an ambiguous mandate into action, even though the broader literature on military sociology and security studies points out the importance of translating ambiguous mandates into action even beyond the context of peacekeeping. We focus on one dimension of peacekeepers' behaviour that has become increasingly important, namely how peacekeepers relate to other military units with whom they are supposed to implement their mandate. In this paper, we systematically document how mandate interpretations emerge and how they influence peacekeepers’ understanding of other troops they work with. We borrow the concept of meaning making from the military sociological literature, which refers to the human and common process through which individuals give meaning to their surrounding context. Drawing on unique ethnographic data and nearly 120 interviews with peacekeepers deployed to the UN mission in Mali (2014-2018), we inductively identify three different ways by which peacekeepers interpret their mandate and interact with other contingents: “Voltaire’s garden”; “building bridges” and “othering”. Acknowledging peacekeepers’ agency and the social dimension of peacekeeping has important implications for both scholarly and policy debates.
