Janissaries of the New World Order?

: The ‘‘Next Stage’’ in Peace Operations Theory and developing country contributions to Peace Operations

Abstract

The far-flung overseas deployment of troops is one of the central charges laid against the United States by those critics who accuse the US of being a 'new empire'. But while the US may be a global hegemon, it is far from being the only country to deploy troops on a global scale. Consider the developing world’s contribution to UN peacekeeping operations. UN data show that the number of contributors to peacekeeping has exploded from the Cold War figure of twenty six to 100 as of mid-2004, the overwhelming majority of them developing countries. So how are we to conceptualise such a significant deployment of peacekeepers from the developing world, in a unipolar international order? I broach this question by scrutinising a nascent trend of critical theoretical scholarship in 'peace operations theory' – the 'next stage' literature. Advancing a 'subaltern realist' perspective (Ayoob, 1997), in this dissertation I shall argue that since the end of the Cold War, the advance of the notion of 'sovereignty as responsibility' has increasingly called the legitimacy of the non-Western state into question. This political pressure has consequently compelled developing countries into demonstrating their ability to project the coercive power of the state across borders. This trend has, in turn, reinforced the militarisation of post Cold War international relations – a trend from which developing countries can only stand to lose in the long-term. This dissertation should be seen as taking a step towards our ability to theorise the diversification of peacekeeping contribution, and through this, the broader practices of cross-border interventions in contemporary world politics

Date of Award	2004
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University