Am I My Brother’s Peacekeeper?: Strategic Cultures and Change Among Major Troop Contributors to United Nations Peacekeeping

Abstract

With 16 ongoing peacekeeping operations currently deploying almost 100,000 troops, United Nations peacekeeping is the largest single source of multilateral military intervention in conflict zones. Because UN peacekeeping is entirely dependent on voluntary contributions from Member States, there a pressing need to better understand why nations contribute peacekeeping troops in the first place. Individual national rationales for peacekeeping contribution vary significantly, and incentives may include regional hegemonic aspirations, positive economic benefits from peacekeeping, desiring a seat at the Security Council, or a combination of any number of incentives. This has made it difficult to provide a generalized explanation about why states provide peacekeepers. This thesis proposes a model for understanding the peacekeeping contribution issue under the lens of strategic culture. The strategic culture approach focuses on elite beliefs about the objectives of the use of force, with national factors such a geography, history, domestic politics, and bureaucracy forming into cohesive and competing norms about the purpose of the military. Drawing on the fourth generation of strategic culture literature, this dissertation argues that strategic culture serves as an intermediary variable that can be measured by discourse analysis to help understand changes in specific strategic behaviour, such as military peacekeeping contributions. By understanding the dynamic way that a country views the use of force – in short, by understanding how a country views its military as being useful in achieving policy goals -- we work towards a better understanding of why a country may contribute troops to United Nations peacekeeping.