JOHN GLEDHILL, RICHARD CAPLAN and MALINE MEISKE examine that relationship in an article titled ‘Developing peace: the evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping’, published in the journal Oxford Development Studies.
The authors do so by first considering whether concepts and principles that underpin peacekeeping and development cohere. They then combine original quantitative data with qualitative analyses in order to document the degree to which development goals and activities have been incorporated into UN peacekeeping operations since their inception over 70 years ago.
“While we observe a steady increase in the level of engagement of peacekeeping with development over time, we argue that short-term security goals have been prioritized over longer-term development objectives in a number of recent UN peacekeeping operations, as peacekeepers have been deployed to contexts of ongoing conflict.”
The authors propose that, just as the practice of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding has integrated diverse actors and goals, so too would the study of peacekeeping and peacebuilding benefit from integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives into a more ‘multidimensional’ approach.
As it stands, those who study peacekeeping ordinarily have a background in political science and international relations, and they publish in related field journals. While there was arguably a logic to this disciplinary focus when UN peacekeeping activities were primarily aimed at maintaining negative peace between states, that logic has weakened as peacekeeping has expanded and diversified its activities.
Indeed, given that peacekeeping now typically includes interventions that aim to foster human and economic development within conflict-affected states, it seems clear that academic fields that study development should also be integrated into efforts to analyse and assess peacekeeping – fields such as development studies, economics, anthropology, geography and beyond.
Cross-disciplinary cooperation and collaboration will likely face some of the same institutional, organizational, and ontological barriers that the UN has encountered when trying to foster cooperation and coherence among the diverse agencies and organizations that are involved in multidimensional, integrated peacekeeping.
However, if the UN has been able to make some headway on that front, then surely academics can also take further steps towards a more integrated approach to studying (development and) peacekeeping.
John Gledhill, Richard Caplan & Maline Meiske (2021) Developing peace: the evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping, Oxford Development Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2021.1924126
