Description
There is wide recognition that the shape and purpose of UN peace operations are a reflection of global politics. With a world order that is shifting from unipolarity to increasing multipolarity, major and emerging powers are redefining their roles on the international stage. Meanwhile, climate change and pandemics are affecting the world economy. In this context, we might legitimately expect that the role of peace operations in international relations will significantly alter. While there is increasing attention to what the exact consequences of these shifts and changes might be, there is less research into how these supposedly changed normative structures are actually translated by peacekeepers on the ground. This paper seeks to answer that question by analyzing whether or not the discourse of peace operations has shifted in previous major changes to peace operations, in particular the turn from the peace operations of the 2000s to the stabilization operations of the 2010s. How did peacekeepers talk about their mission in public communications? Did this change, and if so how? This paper will conduct a discourse analysis of the public communications of three peacekeeping missions between 2006-2016, as well as the Secretary-General reports for these missions as stored in the Peacekeeping Operations Corpus (PKOC). This analysis can tell us something about how peacekeepers’ self-understanding is affected by paradigm shifts in peace operations, offering insight into how further shifts in global politics might have their reflection in the future work of peace operations.
