Description
This paper proposes to put into conversation the scholarship on consent in philosophy, feminist theory, IR and peacekeeping, and to examine the problem of consent in peacekeeping from an international practice perspective. This leads to theoretically approaching consent as a communicative social act, a socially constructed practice or set thereof, and one that is inherently normative and processual in nature. On this basis, I distinguish between practices of consent establishment (diplomatic negotiation, declaration, access enablement, facility provision), consent maintenance (reproduction, renegotiation, crisis prevention and management) and consent reduction and withdrawal (symbolic subjection, operational obstruction, declarative and/or coercive exclusion). Empirically, I examine how consent has affected the fate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) and its continuous ‘walking on a tightrope’ as one of the longest-lasting UN peacekeeping operations currently in place, and one operating in the context of a particularly protracted and intractable conflict. I specifically focus on relational tensions and two recent micro-crises associated to consent from the Western Sahara conflict’s two parties, upon the background of the current general ‘crisis of consent’ for UN peacekeeping operations: the 2016 expulsion of MINURSO civilian staff by Morocco, and the post-2020 restrictions to its freedom of movement and supplies by the Polisario Front. The analysis addresses three questions: To what purpose and how did the parties make these consent crises? How did MINURSO govern them, i.e. how did it practically renegotiate the consent in jeopardy and/or navigate the reduction thereof, reordering its relations with the parties? And what are the (disruptive or reproductive) effects of such micro-crises on the broader picture and relational order of the protracted macro-crisis that is the Western Sahara conflict?
