Neighborly Peacekeepers

Abstract:For the first fifty years of military peacekeeping, peacekeepers came far from the sites where they were deployed, the better to be impartial. That has changed dramatically over the last several decades, and nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where the largest and longest-running United Nations peacekeeping missions are now staffed primarily by Africans, often from neighboring countries. Simultaneously, peacekeepers have been tasked with more-aggressive operations than was previously the case. This essay explores what these shifts look like on a human level, in terms of the interactions, relationships, and possibilities that emerge out of neighbor-peacekeepers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Rwandan soldiers deployed as UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic (CAR), I argue that relationships between Rwandan peacekeepers and civilians are both familiar and awkward. Neighborliness can, however, be overturned when well-armed people — whether Central Africans or peacekeepers — act aggressively toward each other. This is the conflicted heart of the relationships that go into African peacekeeping in Africa: familiarity and friendliness can coexist with capacity to kill.