Description
In 2015, the “Report of the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations on Uniting Our Strengths for Peace, Politics, Partnership and People,” addressed several key issues pertaining to peacekeeping, particularly on questions of partnership and burden sharing. The report identified that “a stronger, more inclusive peace and security partnership is needed for the future.”1 Specifically, the report envisioned that the new adoption of burden sharing was to regulate peacekeeping partnerships between Troop Contributing Countries (TCC)s which were countries responsible for sending the peacekeeping troops, and financing countries, which were the donors funding the peacekeeping missions. While this was celebrated by several actors as a step in the right direction, literature shows that the partnership manifested itself through a particular trend where countries in the global south specifically tend to be TCCs while the funding remained the responsibility of global north countries. This paper focuses on analyzing the nature of the partnership. Particularly, it adopts the theoretical framework proposed by Albert Memmi in his
seminal and often overlooked text The Colonizer and The Colonized applying this analysis to the contemporary dynamic underlying the relationship between TCCs and financers. The paper answers the question To what extent does the postcolonial conceptualization of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, put forward by Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and The Colonized, explain key aspects of the contemporary relationship between global south TCCs and global north financing countries? The paper makes three contributions. First, it brings Memmi’s postcolonial text into conversation with contemporary literature on peacekeeping showing that his analysis transcends the borders of time and space. Second, the paper argues that Memmi’s text helps explain the tensions underlying this relationship but is unable to solely tackle some of
the nuances of the contemporary relationship without a turn to other texts that focus on microlevels of practice and partnership pathologies. Primarily, the paper suggests that Memmi’s The Colonizer and The Colonized can demonstrate how colonial hierarchy reincarnated itself, paradoxically yet complimentarily, subtly and explicitly into the contemporary peacekeeping
partnerships between TCCs and global north financing countries. The third contribution that the paper makes is suggesting that the peacekeeping reform discussed in the UN report will remain incomplete and counterproductive if it continues to gloss over the pervasiveness of the colonial structure and its systematic ability to reproduce the colonial relationship between the global south TCCs and the global north financing countries across time and institutions. Overall the paper contributes a postcolonial analysis of peacekeeping relationships as one of the essential
steps that research on peacekeeping might want to take into consideration in order to generate a more convoluted understanding of peacekeeping and ultimately a more transformative policy of
partnership for peace.
1 United Nations, “Report of the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations on uniting our strengths for peace: politics, partnership and people” June 2015, A/70/95-S/2015/446, page viii
