Description
Peacekeeping stands at a crossroads. Large, resource-intensive missions are being wound down, even as the demand for multilateral conflict management endures. Yet after decades of study, we still lack an adequate language for what peacekeepers and observers intuitively know: that peacekeeping is not simply implemented but enacted—brought into being through the dense, relational fabric of everyday practice. Across diverse literatures, scholars have already been studying this enactment without naming it as such: research on micro-interaction, organisational culture, affect, embodiment, performance, and field-level interpretation has all examined how mandates are lived and negotiated on the ground.
This article introduces Relational Peacekeeping as a framework that synthesises and elevates this dispersed body of work, positioning peace operations as dynamic, socially constituted fields rather than as technical instruments or institutional outputs. In doing so, it shifts the analytical question from whether peacekeeping works to how it comes to work—through the relationships, emotions, and interpretive practices that sustain authority and legitimacy in fluid political environments. Foregrounding a relational ontology illuminates what has remained hidden in plain sight: that peacekeeping endures not through the rigidity of mandates or structures but through the adaptive, negotiated, and affective ties that hold them together. Recognising peacekeeping as relationally enacted offers a theoretical bridge across divided research traditions and a practical lens for understanding how missions might still “keep peace” amid contraction, uncertainty, and change.
