Read more
This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific focus on analyzing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping operations led by the United Nations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian-inspired approaches in the field of International Relations, it highlights how interventions can be viewed through the lens of governmentality and its key attendant concepts. The book draws from these approaches in order to explore how international interventions are increasingly informed by governmental rationalities of security and policing.
Two specific cases are examined: the UN's Security Sector Reform (SSR) approach and the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda. Focusing on the governmental rationalities that are at work in these two central frameworks that have come to guide contemporary UN-led peacekeeping efforts in recent years, the book considers:
The use in IR of governmentality and its attendant notions of biopower and sovereign power
The recent discussion regarding the concept and practice of international policing and police reform
The rise of security as a rationality of government and the manner in which security and police rationalities interconnect and have increasingly come to inform peacekeeping efforts
The Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework for peacebuilding and the rise of the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda.
This book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, security studies, critical theory, and conflict and intervention.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Reforming 21st-century peacekeeping operations: governmentalities of security, protection, and police
Chapter 2: Governmentality, sovereign Power, and contemporary international peacekeeping operations
Introduction
The mentality of government
Governmentalizing the state
Sovereign power, biopower, and state sovereignty
Sovereign power and states of emergency
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Police, security, and resilience
Introduction
International police and international policing
Police as a figuration of sovereign power
Police as regulation mania
Security and police
The police-security project of resilience
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Local ownership: the police-security project of security sector reform (SSR)
Introduction
Security Sector Reform (SSR): a summary
The governmentality of SSR
Operationalizing resilience through local ownership
Conclusion
Chapter 5: The UN’s protection of civilians agenda
Introduction
Civilis
Civilis legalis
The new lawfare of protecting civilians
The UN’s PoC agenda
Rationalizing protection at its point of application
The necropolitics of protection
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Conclusion: reforming UN peacekeeping operations: security, protection, and police
About the author
Marc G. Doucet is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s University, Canada. He is the co-editor of Security and Global Governmentality and has published articles in Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding; Security Dialogue; Theory & Event; Contemporary Political Theory; Millennium; Alternatives; and Global Society.
Summary
This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific focus on analysing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping operations led by the United Nations.
