Description
In response to the changing and complicating conflict environment, partnership peacekeeping has increasingly become a norm in addressing peace and security challenges globally. The partnership between the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) is a highly institutionalised case of such contemporary strategy, with the hybrid mission in Darfur (UNAMID) being seen to epitomise the operationalisation of partnership peacekeeping. While recent studies focus on the partnership’s effectiveness, less attention has been paid to the legitimacy dynamics in play. These legitimacy dynamics are crucial in understanding the rationale for partnership peacekeeping, as well as the challenges it faces when navigating through different audiences. This paper in progress therefore aims to uncover the global, regional, and national dynamics of legitimacy in the AU-UN peacekeeping partnership. Drawing primarily on strategic documents and interviews, it argues that multi-level analysis is necessary to understand the relationships – whether complementary or conflictual – between legitimacies in partnership peacekeeping. It focuses on the case of UNAMID, less because of its uniqueness as a hybrid mission but more due to the complex interplay of legitimacy dimensions throughout the mission’s progress. In doing so, the paper proposes a largely unexplored analytical lens through which we can understand the multiplicity of audiences in contemporary peace operations and their interactions with the normative structure of international peacekeeping.
