Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding
Two Micro-Histories of the UN Secretariat
from the Age of American Hegemony
This book traces the ‘microhistories’ of the two main UN departments in charge of peace missions—the Department of Political Affairs (DPA, today’s DPPA) and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO, today’s DPO)—to sketch a ‘macrohistory’ of peacekeeping, of peacebuilding, and ultimately of the UN Secretariat.
By reviewing how the ‘political affairs’ category has been used in New York, it argues that what is seen as ‘political’ at the UN is not fixed but depends on the issues and departments at stake. Four reasons for the notoriously difficult relationship between these two departments shed light on as many systemic problems surrounding peace operations, which years of reform—including recent ones—have not addressed:
- Bureaucratic politics, including the reciprocal contestation of administrative functions resulting from the expansion of peacekeeping and the ambiguity of the ‘political affairs’ category;
- Great power politics, including the influence exerted by the Permanent Members of the Security Council on DPA, on DPKO, and on the UN Secretariat more broadly;
- Normative confusion, including the increasingly blurred borders between peacekeeping and peacebuilding, and the administrative effects of this conceptual overlap;
- Individual agency, including leadership, the role of personalities, and the impact of professional rivalries and policy disagreements on the decision-making processes of UN officials.
Based on new archival materials—including confidential memos, private diaries, and elite interviews with senior UN officials—as well as on the author’s professional experience in the Secretariat, the book identifies the early and the late 1990s as two critical stages in the formation of a (contested) ‘UN polity’. This was also a time when the ‘ontological dilemma’ of the Secretariat emerged in tragic fashion: like all bureaucracies, the UN Secretariat must operate rationally and impartially—‘without regard for persons’, as Weber wrote—a bureaucratic ‘inhumanity’ that during the ‘New World Order’ grated against the supposedly ‘humanistic’ goals of the Organization and of ‘liberal peacebuilding’.
Far from being a sterile administrative hub, the Secretariat emerges from this project as inseparable from the ideas and practices of ‘power’: it is the expression of a ‘political community’ of sorts, but it is also a maker of it—a place where all UN actors (states, SGs, and bureaucrats) compete for power and influence, while trying to diminish the power and influence of the others.
This book project is under contract with
