Abstract
This article provides a heuristic study of three cases where participation in peacekeeping operations prompted military rule in the peacekeeper-contributing state. These three atypical cases contradict the theory of diversionary peace, which claims that contributing to peacekeeping operations abroad should stimulate democracy at home. The experience of these three countries also calls into question the conventional wisdom that strongly associates peacekeeping with liberal democratic institutions, outcomes and practices. Via triangulation across literature, reports, elite interviews and WikiLeaks cables, these cases are examined in order to identify more generalisable observations regarding how participation in peacekeeping may enhance the role of the military at the expense of democratic order and civilian rule in the contributing state. The theory of diversionary peace is shown to suffer from serious conceptual flaws. Some preliminary efforts are made to generalise the findings, with Ghana and Uruguay identified as warranting further investigation. A number of variables are identified as offering scope for generalisation, namely, revenue, leadership and military size. Several promising areas for further research are also identified: how military dependence on peacekeeping may make political systems more permeable to outside influence, how far the United Nations (UN) can politically influence its contributor states and how peacebuilding may affect peacekeepers’ understanding of their role in their own countries. By examining the feedback effects of peacekeeping on peacekeeper-contributing states, the article reverses the conventional focus of peacekeeping scholarship and contributes to the growing literature examining the wider ramifications and unintended consequences of liberal conflict management.
Introduction
The legitimacy and viability of using force for liberal ends – protecting peace agreements, reducing lawless violence, defending human rights, relieving human suffering, spreading democracy – has stoked fierce controversy since the end of the Cold War. 1 Yet what is often forgotten in debates regarding the use of force for liberal ends is that such questions are confronted not only by the world’s leading liberal democracies but also by some of its poorest and youngest. Through participation in United Nations (UN) and regional peacekeeping operations, many developing countries have also confronted these questions. Indeed, since US President Barack Obama’s drawing down of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global deployment of UN peacekeepers now exceeds that of US forces deployed to combat zones, with the overwhelming majority of these peacekeepers coming from developing countries rather than the global democratic core of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states. 2
While there has been plenty of literature discussing the effects of peacekeeping on the countries in which peacekeepers are deployed, the effects of prolonged and repeated peacekeeping on the countries deploying the peacekeepers have been almost entirely ignored. One of the few candidates for this role is an influential strand of thought that I have dubbed ‘democratic diversionary peacekeeping’ (henceforward DDP). 3 This theory suggests that participation in peacekeeping stimulates democracy in peacekeeper-contributing states. 4 Guided by the logic of purposive sampling, this article offers an investigation of three cases that contradict this theory – namely, Bangladesh, Fiji and The Gambia. In all three cases, participation in UN and/or regional peacekeeping operations has been credited with contributing to the military seizure of power, specifically, in Bangladesh’s most recent bout of military government (2007–2008), in Fiji’s cycle of coups since 1987 and in instigating the regime of Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia (1994–2017).
Thus the puzzle motivating this article is to explore how the use of force for liberal internationalist purposes might have helped to produce illiberal and anti-democratic results in these three countries. The discussion in this article carries two overlapping aims. The first aim is to probe the limits of the theoretical association between peacekeeping and democracy through the examination of these three countries. The second aim is to deploy these extreme cases in heuristic fashion, in order to derive more generalisable insights and hypotheses regarding the possibly damaging recursive effects of military deployments abroad on developing democracies. The article finds plenty of grounds for scepticism regarding any putative link between peacekeeping abroad and democracy at home. It also finds that peacekeeping may render states more permeable to external influence and that peacekeeping may enable military forces to sustain their size and power in states making the journey from military rule.
Research design and methodological remarks
This article is organised around probing the limits of the association between peacekeeping and democracy through the selection of three theory-infirming case studies. In other words, I have explicitly selected on the extreme value of the dependent variable (namely, military rule resulting from undertaking peacekeeping operations abroad, the latter being the independent variable). As peacekeeping is already established as a cause of military rule in these cases, here the focus of investigation is on re-evaluating and cross-comparing the role played by peacekeeping in these outcomes.
While interesting in and of themselves, what is more important is that these extreme cases have a heuristic potential to generate insights regarding the possible collateral effects of peacekeeping on peacekeeper-contributing states. After all, the domestic political costs of military deployments abroad might be burdensome and damaging even if they fall short of outright military rule. By studying extreme cases, we may be able to identify warning signs regarding the risk of the military skewing democratic political functioning as a result of participation in multinational missions abroad. Thus, although the case selection involves a most different systems design, the function of the comparison is ‘less to simulate experiment than to stimulate imagination’, using it as ‘a system for questioning, not answering’. 5 The stakes of this investigation should not therefore be seen as being restricted to these countries, or indeed merely to identifying the potential for regression from democracy to military rule as a result of deploying security forces abroad. Rather the investigation may help us better understand the possibility for ‘illiberal statebuilding’ emerging even in democratic and democratising regimes as a result of a country’s security relationships with external actors and institutions. 6 The findings should also contribute to the literature on the diversionary use of force in general. 7
The article does this by conducting a literature-assessing study of peacekeeping and military rule in these three cases, which is then followed by bringing these literatures into dialogue with each other, alongside analysis of primary sources (primarily WikiLeaks documents) supplemented with expert and elite interviews.
Scope and contribution
As has already been noted above, while there are many studies of the outcomes of peace operations in ‘post-conflict’ countries, there are far fewer considering the possible impact of such efforts on peacekeeper-contributing states. 8 This investigation therefore helps to expand the study of the unintended consequences of peacekeeping from the impact on the ‘peacekept’ to possible feedback effects on the peacekeepers themselves. It is also important to clarify what the article is not trying to do. This article does not seek to explain the role of peacekeeping in instigating coups in general, or the impact of military operations abroad on democratic institutions in general, or even the impact of participating in peacekeeping on domestic institutions. Rather, the aim is to (1) establish how significant (and in what way significant) peacekeeping participation was in instigating military rule in Bangladesh, Fiji and The Gambia; (2) to see whether any common patterns emerge from these three cases; and (3) to consider what the potential implications of these findings are in terms of possible negative feedback effects of peacekeeping on peacekeeper-contributor states. Before embarking on the investigation, it is worth noting that this article assumes that the depredations of military as opposed to democratic rule are sufficiently well established as not to require recounting. 9
Outline
The article proceeds as follows. We begin by considering the putative relationship between peacekeeping and democracy, and move to consider the strengths and weaknesses of DDP, and the variables through which it is supposed to function. The lack of systematic conceptual elaboration within the theory is noted. We then turn to consider the link between peacekeeping and military interference in politics, working through the cases of Bangladesh and Fiji before turning to The Gambia. The next section distils common patterns from the cases, before moving in the penultimate section of the article to identify several variables that might carry negative feedback effects from peacekeeping abroad back to the home state, providing the basis for possible generalisation further afield.
Democratic diversion through peacekeeping
Participation in peacekeeping is strongly associated with liberal democracy in the scholarly literature. Military sociologist Charles Moskos holds that participation in peacekeeping helps to engender and solidify liberal democratic norms within nations’ military forces. International Relations (IR) theorists have hailed peacekeeping as paradigmatic of a new model of ‘cosmopolitan law-enforcement’ based on global policing of human rights rather than traditional strategic pursuit of national interests by military means. 10 Other scholars have found participation in peacekeeping operations strongly associated with liberal democracy and human rights observance in the peacekeeper-contributing states. 11 Arturo Sotomayor calls this interlocking structure of conceptual linkages and empirical claims across peacebuilding, peacekeeper contribution and democratisation efforts the ‘democratic peacekeeping hypothesis’. 12
DDP is best seen as a subsidiary claim built into the structure of this larger ‘democratic peacekeeping hypothesis’. 13 DDP theory can be rendered thus: sending troops abroad to participate in peacekeeping can be a type of governing strategy through which democratising elites in transitional states and/or youthful democracies seek to strengthen democratic rule by deflecting the military through involving them in multinational operations abroad. Grand claims in both theory and policy have been made for diversionary peace: ‘participation in peacekeeping operations can form an integral part of a nation’s transition to democracy and efforts to bring a formerly autonomous military under civilian control’ (e.g. Argentina). 14 Deploying on peacekeeping missions has been touted as a means of ‘taming’ militaries in extant dictatorships (The Gambia), as well as those militaries accused of rampaging in on-going conflicts (Mexico). 15 DDP has also underpinned decisions on significant quantities of military aid (Nigeria). 16 At its grandest, diversionary peace could even be seen as a form of ‘global DDR’ – that is, demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration not only for ex-belligerents in post-conflict countries but also for troublesome armies from peacekeeper-contributing countries too, through the process of exporting them to conflict zones and thereby absorbing them into liberal structures of global conflict management. 17 Given this range of claims, let us examine the conceptual structure of the theory in more detail.
Conceptual components of diversionary peace
Trevor Findlay provides the most succinct statement of DDP:
States in which the military is not entirely under civilian control … may view peacekeeping as a means of keeping their armed forces occupied outside the country rather than meddling in domestic affairs and of helping to rehabilitate them after an authoritarian era in which their integrity and professionalism were compromised.
18
There are several elements worth stressing in this statement. First, Findlay identifies not merely ex-military dictatorships as the subject of the claim, but the wider category of states with civil-military relations skewed to the advantage of the military. Second, DDP is not primarily addressed to explaining the effects of peacekeeping participation on peacekeeper-contributing states, but rather seeks to explain why states contribute to peacekeeping – but this explanation is offered by reference to the recursive effects of participation in peacekeeping. Third, Findlay assumes that it is a civilian and democratically elected government pursuing greater military involvement in peacekeeping in order to benefit from these recursive effects. Finally, Findlay offers two types of distinct – but not necessarily mutually exclusive – explanatory mechanisms as powering these recursive effects. We can term these entanglement (‘keeping their armed forces occupied outside the country’) and socialisation (‘helping to rehabilitate them’).
Findlay suggests Argentina as an example of the entanglement mechanism. 19 Post–Cold War democratisation in Pakistan has also been linked via diversionary peace to peacekeeping: ‘the political leadership [desires] to keep the army purposefully busy in peace operations abroad, so that the fledging constitutional and democratic order is allowed legitimate space’. 20 Aning echoes these claims with regard to Ghana, arguing that the country’s extensive peacekeeping ‘helps keep [the Ghanaian Armed Forces] “on track” and away from potential domestic mutinies’. 21 Several commentators have suggested similar effects at work in Bangladesh, with deployments to the UN mission in newly independent South Sudan in 2014 being credited with preventing a recurrence of the 2006–2007 military-imposed state of emergency. 22 Implicit in this idea of entanglement is the subsidiary idea of refocusing – that is, orienting a military outwards rather than inwards, a factor heavily stressed by Katherine Worboys in her study of diversionary peace in Argentina: ‘an unoccupied military, with no external threat to address, would be most likely to interfere in domestic politics’. 23
With socialisation, participation in peacekeeping serves as a means of ‘taming’ praetorian security forces. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the UN’s longest serving Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping, argues that ‘Service with UN peacekeeping … [exposes] militaries to key international norms and standards including human rights training, gender parity, support for elections and a doctrine of civilian control’. 24 US diplomats credit the ‘positive macro and micro impact of UN peacekeeping’ with helping to create a Bangladeshi military that is ‘in many ways far superior to its civilian counterparts’ as a result of the ‘international exposure and significant economic benefits’ accruing from peacekeeping participation. 25 In the words of former Argentinean defence minister Oscar Camilión, participation in peacekeeping helps to foster ‘an international outlook which is very much helping to consolidate the military as a pillar of the constitutional system’. 26 Worboys credits peacekeeping with having created ‘an entirely new identity’ for the Argentinean armed forces (particularly its senior officers) – an institution hitherto known for murdering 30,000 of their own people during the rule of the junta across 1976–1983. 27 Brazil, Chile, Guatemala and Nigeria have all been cited as examples of countries engaging in peacekeeping in order deliberately to remould the military’s identity. 28 Such claims clearly intersect with theories of cosmopolitan peacekeeping and the hope that peacekeeping might ‘make young officers more cosmopolitan, less nationalistic, and more resistant to calls for military “salvation” via coup …’ 29
A third factor that recurs implicitly in the literature as part of DDP is control. That is, that governments push reluctant militaries into peacekeeping as a means of extending civilian control over state security agencies and bureaucracies. 30 The final element identified in DDP accounts of peacekeeping is resources; that is, UN hard currency reimbursement flowing from participation in its peacekeeping operations helps to mollify a military securing a diminishing proportion of a national budget or seeking to weather a domestic economic crisis. Argentina is again cited as an example of the latter. 31 It is important to note that the various factors identified above – entanglement, socialisation, control, resources – are rarely disentangled and/or are seen to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Having examined the theoretical architecture of DDP, let us turn to examine the three cases that seem to flout the tenets of the theory.
Peacekeepers to praetorians: Bangladesh, Fiji and The Gambia
For all their many differences, peacekeeping is something that all these three countries share. Fiji has long been a stalwart of both UN and non-UN peacekeeping going back to the 1980s, while The Gambia has maintained persistent involvement in regional peacekeeping, dating right back to the ill-fated Economic Community of West African States Ceasefire Monitoring Group deployed to Liberia (Ecomog, 1990–1997). Bangladesh also began sending peacekeepers abroad at the end of the Cold War and has become one of the predominant post–Cold War peacekeepers. In these three countries, peacekeeping is commonly credited with an important role in the military subversion of democracy. The Economist gave peacekeeping such a prominent role in Fiji’s pattern of military coups that the then UN Under-Secretary General of Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guéhenno accused the Economist of ‘inaccurately’ implying ‘that service with UN peacekeeping forces encourages an attitude of impunity and exceptionalism within national military structures’. 32 So what is the alleged link between coups and participation in peacekeeping in these three cases? We begin by considering what happened in each of these cases, before moving inductively to a more general level of analysis in the subsequent section, where we assess how the cases align with the expectations of DDP.
Bangladesh: ‘This is not a coup’ 33
As we saw above, heavy Bangladeshi contribution to peacekeeping has frequently been explained by reference to the pro-democratic effects of diversionary peace. Bangladeshi peacekeeping did indeed coincide with early post–Cold War democratisation, beginning with the UN mission that oversaw the end of the 1980–1989 Iran–Iraq war. 34 General Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s rule ended in 1990 and the country enjoyed regular, if fraught, elections until 2007. Bangladesh consistently appears in the top three peacekeeper- contributing nations every year since the turn of the century. Bangladeshi peacekeepers have played such significant peacekeeping roles in Africa’s conflicts that Sierra Leone even declared Bengali the second language of the country as a token of gratitude to the efforts of Bangladeshi blue helmets. 35
Less propitiously, peacekeeping was also implicated in the 2007–2008 state of emergency following the so-called ‘soft coup’ in early 2007. The role played by peacekeeping in the ‘soft coup’ was made manifest in a threat issued on 11 January 2007 by the UN chief representative in the country, Renata Lok Dessallien, to shut Bangladesh out of UN peacekeeping if the military allowed disputed elections to go ahead in the face of a boycott by the then opposition Awami League. 36 Of this episode, the Economist observed, ‘The intervention [by the UN resident representative] was strange on the face of it, because the UN is not known to go around inciting army takeovers’. 37 The military placed the country under a state of emergency the very same day as the Dessallien statement was issued. The significance of the UN involvement can be gauged by the fact that it was Dessallien’s public statement that military officers carried with them when they went to the incumbent President Iajuddin Ahmed’s office, physically assaulted the president’s adviser and acting minister of state, Mukhles Chowdhury, before they forced Ahmed to resign – at gunpoint, according to Chowdhury. 38
The UN later threatened the military’s access to peacekeeping again, this time to mould the progress of the military regime by inducing it to hold the suspended elections. 39 In more recent elections, speculation has been rife in Bangladesh as to whether the UN would intervene in the political process by once again using the tool of peacekeeping to manipulate the military. 40 Peacekeeping thus provided leverage to external actors to intervene in the Bangladeshi democratic process through the medium of the UN and the military. The questions that follow then are how and why did peacekeeping provide leverage, and to what end?
In terms of the how, the dependence of the Bangladeshi military on peacekeeping gave the UN leverage over the single most powerful actor in Bangladeshi politics – powerful because armed and well-versed in political interference. 41 In terms of why peacekeeping could provide leverage, all agree that peacekeeping constitutes a significant revenue stream for the Bangladeshi military. 42 One study estimates annual Bangladeshi net income from peacekeeping rising from roughly US$23m to US$110m over the course of the last decade, while Zaman and Biswas estimate Bangladeshi earnings from peacekeeping as constituting 8 per cent of total Bangladeshi remittances across the 2008–2011 period. 43 According to the Bangladeshi army’s own internal documents, gross compensation across 2001–2010 amounted to US$1.28b. 44 Moreover, there is good evidence to suggest that peacekeeping continues to constitute a substantial source of revenue for individuals within the Bangladeshi military despite – and perhaps even because of – significant economic growth. 45 Citing ‘a representative Bangladeshi peacekeeper’, the Economist notes that the officer in question netted savings of 2 million taka (US$30,000 – enough to buy two plots of land in Bangladesh) from a 1-year tour in Côte d’Ivoire: ‘He describes the tour as his pension fund, a reward for 15 years of service’. 46 Earnings from peacekeeping can also be parlayed into ‘venture capital’ for military-sponsored economic projects. 47
While the UN role appears to have been decisive, there is little reason to think that it was the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) itself that was driving the coup. After all, if electoral instability in Bangladesh was so threatening to the global reputation of UN peacekeeping, then DPKO could hardly credibly have threatened to slash its Bangladeshi peacekeepers as a means of inducing stability in the country. 48 Whether or not the coup leaders thought the UN threat credible, they clearly felt Dessallien’s statement necessary to justify the seizure of power. WikiLeaks cables suggest that the military leadership was sufficiently reluctant to intervene that they were soliciting public statements from the UN representative in Bangladesh, warning that military non-intervention in the electoral process would threaten Bangladeshi peacekeeping. 49 Evidently, the coup leaders felt UN threats, however credible, were necessary. The possibility of being barred from peacekeeping allegedly played an important role in swaying the military rank and file to support the insurgent coup leaders. 50
WikiLeaks cables show Dessallien took significant individual initiative in intensifying international pressure on Bangladesh, with the connivance of major Western states. 51 Although the coup itself seems to have taken Western states by surprise, 52 they gave significant support to the military regime for its duration, perhaps facilitated by the fact that the ‘state of emergency’ nominally avoided extra-constitutional dictatorship – (against which Western diplomats repeatedly warned military leaders in discussions prior to the coup). 53 Emergency rule in Bangladesh never drew the kind of public criticism that the 2014 coup in Thailand has for instance despite the fact that there were significant Western concerns attached to the 2007 elections. 54 The corruption of the incumbent government of Khaleda Zia, its perceived tolerance of Islamism and refusal to accommodate opposition demands were seen, respectively, to threaten donor nations’ ‘investments’ in Bangladeshi development, the war on terror in the wider region, and to raise the prospect of spiralling destabilisation and possible civil war. 55 Whatever the precise proximate causes and instigators of the coup, the dependence of the Bangladeshi military on peacekeeping facilitated the military seizure of power. The military’s dependence on peacekeeping facilitated the externally driven manipulation of Bangladeshi politics without recourse to more politically-costly forms of interference whose effect would only be felt over time (for example, slashing aid or having to overcome the resistance of multinational garment manufacturers in order to impose sanctions on the country).
Fiji: the ‘Bainimarama Republic’ 56
Fiji’s cycle of coups since the first one in 1987 (with seven more coups or attempted coups up until 2007) means that DDP has never been seen as applicable to Fiji.
57
Indeed, quite the opposite.
58
According to the literature, peacekeeping propelled the growth of the Fijian armed forces, the Royal Fijian Military Forces (RFMF, since renamed the Republic of Fiji’s Military Forces following Fiji’s post-coup expulsion from the Commonwealth in September 2009). Peacekeeping is a major foreign exchange earner for Fiji as well as a source of national pride for the military.
59
Stewart Frith and Jon Fraenkel summarise this:
Peacekeeping for the United Nations did most to stimulate the growth of the force. […]The overall effect has been to boost the morale of officers and troops – especially when they are on operational duty – and to professionalize the RFMF … Typically, Fiji’s leading military officers have been better educated and more articulate than many of Fiji’s civilian politicians.
60
Frith and Fraenkel estimated Fiji’s total earnings from peacekeeping across 1978–2009 as US$300m. 61 Fijians have also participated on non-UN peacekeeping missions in the Pacific as well as with the post–Camp David peacekeeping force in Sinai. 62 More recently, Fijians also provided elite troops for the ‘guards unit’ deployed to act as bodyguards for officials serving with the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). 63 Indeed, the DPKO was given forewarning of the military’s intention to seize power with the result that the UN encouraged the Fijian military to desist – to no avail. 64
The Bangladeshi military was familiar with the coup d’état long before they began peacekeeping. 65 In Fiji, peacekeeping is more intimately linked to that country’s tradition of putschism. On top of the link between peacekeeping and military size and revenue, Andrew Scobell identifies several other factors resulting from peacekeeping that fed into Fiji’s history of coups. Scobell argues that peacekeeping familiarised Fiji’s military with the concerns of Western militaries, notably with respect to fears of the spread of communism. Furthermore, Fiji’s peacekeepers’ experience of inter-communal strife in Lebanon gave them a new perspective on their own islands’ Melanesian and Indian ethnic rivalries (the army being predominantly Melanesian). The 1987 coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka consequently came to see the military ‘as the arbiter of governments and guardian of the constitution’. 66 Jone Baledrokadroka (himself an ex-Fijian officer and exile) emphasises how Fijian officers developed an identity based around supra-political authority as a result of their peacekeeping experience. This was down to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in particular, which accustomed them to arbitrating between various factions and parties in ethno-political disputes. Officers who have played key roles in the 1987, 2000 and 2006 coups d’état were all former commanders of the Fijian UN battalion in Lebanon. Moreover, according to Scobell, the 1987 coup was also motivated by fears that a foreign policy of Non-Alignment promised by the incoming government would have snapped the Fijian army’s links with Western states and slashed its size.
The Gambia: a ‘casualty’ of regional peacekeeping?
Although the literature on Gambian peacekeeping is sparse, there is a consensus that it was participation in peacekeeping that was a proximate cause of the 1994 coup in this country, respectively. Herbert M. Howe even described the Gambian coup as ‘another casualty’ of the 1989–1996 civil war in Liberia: 67 West Africa saw an intensive burst of regional coups in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. 68 The Gambia had hitherto been a state that had enjoyed a multiparty, democratic and stable political system for a protracted period, albeit one that had (as the coup itself showed) been hollowed out by clientelism, patronage and the monopolisation of power by Gambian independence leader Sir Dawda Jawara.
The role that peacekeeping played in the 1994 coup was very direct: a failure to recompense military forces for their peacekeeping duties in Liberia exacerbated resentment in the military against the government and fed popular perceptions of government corruption. A government attempt to pre-empt a coup precipitated the coup itself. According to ex-peacekeeper and coup leader Yahya Jammeh himself, it was the humiliating disarming of soldiers while awaiting the return of Jawara from a foreign visit that was the immediate trigger for the coup. 69 The Gambian military itself was a fractious and youthful institution. Less than 15 years old when it seized power, the military had been created (ironically enough) to forestall coups in the aftermath of a failed 1981 coup by the prior, paramilitary national security force.
The Gambian army had already endured disputes over pay prior to the peacekeeping mission to Liberia, resentment against Nigerian domination (the army was formed under the tutelage of senior Nigerian officers) all in the context of the increasingly fragile political structure of the country as a whole. 70 In this case, peacekeeping ignited an already combustible situation rather than structuring the context, as occurred in Bangladesh and Fiji.
Discussion of findings
Why did DDP breakdown in these three cases?
So what, if any, consistent patterns or striking findings emerge across these cases, and what do they tell us about DDP? There is no evidence from these countries to suggest that entanglement in peacekeeping abroad mitigates the capacity of the military either to seize power or to sustain functions of domestic repression. The three cases give us no reason to assume that military forces confront steep trade-offs between these options. These cases also provide evidence of how integration into the global machinery of international peacekeeping may strengthen the military. In the cases of both Fiji and Bangladesh, as we see from Table 1, greater peacekeeping duties correspond with growth in the size of the armed forces. As we have seen, dependence on peacekeeping revenue may give the military a stake in sustaining a pro-peacekeeping policy even to the extent of seizing power and ensuring that continued ‘entanglement’. We also saw that the ‘entanglement’ of the military in the apparatus of global peacekeeping effectively made the Bangladeshi political system more permeable to outside influences, correspondingly diminishing the power of the Bangladeshi demos. What these cases suggest is that entanglement is a weak predictor of positive feedback effects from participation in peacekeeping.
Diversionary peace in Bangladesh, Fiji and The Gambia.
Source: The Military Balance, the World Bank.
UN: United Nations.
Note that peacekeeping deployments exclude forces deployed on no fly zones, maritime deployments, logistics units and field hospitals. Armed forces include army, air force, navy and marines. Peacekeepers defined as soldiers, police and military observers on both UN and non-UN missions. Military size per capita is measured as 1 per 1000 head of population. Shaded cells show period of non-democratic rule.
What about socialisation? Inasmuch as socialisation is a function of positively transforming military identities, then to whatever extent it exists, it clearly did not succeed in these cases. In the case of the 1987 Fiji coup, exposure to ideas of anti-communism, suspicion of Non-Alignment and fears of ethnic conflict empowered peacekeepers to overthrow democracy. These views resulted from participating in and training for peacekeeping. While communism and Non-Alignment have both disappeared, the case of Fiji nonetheless suggests that any feedback effects resulting from ‘socialisation’ through peacekeeping are contingent on the wider normative environment in the international system, and the content of those norms. 71 Although anti-communism may no longer provide legitimacy for authoritarianism, the cases of both Fiji and Bangladesh suggest that the framework of international liberalism may still provide resources sufficient to motivate and justify military rule. The work of Maggie Dwyer on West African military deployments also shows that peacekeeping deployments provide socialisation experiences that can foster mutinies that can lead to military interference in politics, of which Gambia is an example. 72
Indeed, the scaling up of peacekeeping via peacebuilding into neo-trusteeship gives us no prima facie reason to think that peacekeeping eliminates praetorianism – if the latter is understood in Amos Perlmutter’s sense of a social institution that generates political leadership. 73 The justificatory discourse attached to the Bangladeshi and Fijian coups in particular strikingly echoes that of international peacebuilding. 74 Finally, it is also worth noting that the kind of activities that peacekeepers increasingly engage in are not dissimilar from the counter-insurgency tasks performed by military forces under repressive regimes. 75 Therefore we can safely say that, extreme as these cases are, they show that it would be naive to assume that liberal peacebuilding necessarily inoculates peacekeepers against praetorianism (on which, see further below regarding leadership as a potential variable). Nor do we have to assume corruption or criminal behaviour in the field to motivate these conclusions. As we saw with the case of Fiji, even peacekeepers who maintain impeccable standards on their deployments abroad may still develop praetorian instincts if these norms enable militaries to slip the leash of national decision-making structures.
All of this leads to the conclusion that if peacekeeping deployments abroad are to help consolidate democratic transition at home, clearly some other conditions need to be met that are not specified in DDP. What the evidence of these cases suggests is that, at the very least, the claims made for DDP need to be put on firmer ground through conceptual clarification (how diversionary peace is supposed to or could work), identification of a wider range of intervening variables, and more systematic efforts at process-tracing the feedback effects of peacekeeping operations across various levels of the contributing state and society.
Further collateral effects of peacekeeper contribution
More broadly then, how might these cases help us identity the possible negative feedback effects of peacekeeping on contributor states? After all, indirect military influence in politics may be more pernicious than outright military rule because it would be more difficult to clarify political responsibility and to attribute political blame under such circumstances. In this section, I shall identify possible variables from these three cases that contributed to military rule. These variables are discussed in turn below, namely, revenue, leadership military size and leverage.
Revenue
As the cases of Bangladesh and Fiji indicate, significant revenue can be captured through peacekeeping. Malte Brosig sees in this the risk of ‘rentier peacekeeping’, in which rich donor countries effectively subsidise the militaries of developing states, with problematic consequences for their political systems. 76 As Fiji and Bangladesh indicate, ‘rentier peacekeeping’ need not be restricted to Africa. Although a quantitative measure, revenue is arguably the most difficult variable precisely to establish, given the difficulties in obtaining data or accurately measuring military expenditure as against (net) peacekeeping revenue. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is a question of proportion, and who secures access to the revenue. Estimating net earnings through peacekeeping, as proportion of total military expenditure or alternatively as proportion of hard currency remittances, is an important but limited (because fairly gross) way of capturing the financial significance of peacekeeping. Ultimately, the degree of a military’s financial dependence on peacekeeping is a contextual question that will vary across countries. There is unlikely to be any ratio of peacekeeping revenue to military expenditure/remittances at which we will see greater military interference across all countries. It would be then worthwhile estimating how the financial benefits of peacekeeping are distributed across the military hierarchy.
Additional questions here might include the following: how far do armed forces justify capital expenditure and arms purchases by reference to their peacekeeping activities? For example, in 2013 Bangladesh signed a US$1b agreement with Russia to buy combat helicopters, training aircraft and armoured personnel carriers, partially financed against excepted UN reimbursements. 77 How far might a military use its peacekeeping to seek out further extra-national revenue – such as military aid from donor nations and allies? How far does peacekeeping help to support a ‘peacekeeping-industrial complex’, given that large armed forces tend to constitute significant and potentially distorting concentrations of economic power? The effects here could be significant far short of military rule: a military that is dependent on extra-national sources of revenue might have a vested interest in perpetuating a particular pro-peacekeeping foreign policy independently of the choices of a civilian government, as we saw in Fiji. More broadly, a military that is able to capture peacekeeping rents will have greater financial independence from civilian and elected leaders, and thus may develop a corporate identity and interests separate from those of the nation and state.
Leadership
The next commonality to emerge from all three cases is that all the coup leaders have been peacekeepers. How far these individuals’ experience of peacekeeping influenced their decision-making and outlook warrants further research. There are other instances of ex-peacekeepers seizing power from democrats: General Pervez Musharraf – a veteran of the UN missions in Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – is perhaps the most notorious example. 78 Ghanaian strongman Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings would be another. But the wider significance of leadership as a variable would be to try and establish how far participation in peacekeeping may inculcate praetorianism within an officer corps. In the case of The Gambia for example, one possibility not suggested in the literature is that serving in a Nigerian-dominated peacekeeping operation sharpened the disgruntlement of junior officers whose youthful army was being formed under the tutelage of Nigerian senior officers. In the case of Fiji, Baledrokadroka suggests that specific operational tasks in complex peacekeeping – such as overseeing de-escalation between ethnonational factions – engender praetorian attitudes that were subsequently visible in the military behaviour during the 1987 seizure of power back in Fiji. Although the newly integrated mission structure of modern peacekeeping operations enshrines the primacy of civil authority, the operational imperatives of complex peacebuilding and horizontal interaction between different forces in the field may help inculcate praetorian dispositions. Establishing whether there is any link between peacekeeping and praetorianism requires measuring how important peacekeeping is to the officer corps not only in terms of career progression and individual earnings but also how far their identity and political outlook may be shaped by the experience of peacekeeping and peacebuilding.
Nor would this need to be restricted to the military: how far peacekeeping affected a country’s identity might also be significant. This could be gauged by how far politicians and leaders refer to and politically valorise peacekeeping. Biographical career data but also elite interviews and ethnographic fieldwork would help to establish how far the experience of peacekeeping and complex peacebuilding shapes officers’ ideas of authority, politics and civil–military relations. This is not simply a question of operational experience but also of the content of training and recruitment decisions, as Worboys’ work on Argentinean peacekeeping demonstrates. 79 Training might provide links and contacts with other militaries that could facilitate leverage for external powers. But wider questions about peacekeeping emerge. How far can the content of peacekeeping training and operational experience be parlayed into functions of domestic repression and/or counter-insurgency? Many of the tasks peacekeepers perform in today’s operations – crowd control, armed policing, military deterrence, disarming and battling ‘spoiler’ factions – could be pursued to different ends within peacekeepers’ home states.
Military size
Strikingly, peacekeeping and military size are distinctly correlated in two of the three cases. Controlling for other possible drivers of military growth, if peacekeeping is associated with a large military in peacetime, under democratic conditions and in the absence of any extraordinary security threat, this would suggest participation in peacekeeping is sustaining a disproportionately large military. Uruguay is another instance of this development. 80 The impact of peacekeeping on military size could be further isolated by comparing peacekeeping-intensive militaries to regional and global averages of military size. This is a question not only of military growth or size per capita but also of the relative size of a country’s peacekeeping complement. As Nurul Islam observes about Bangladesh, it is reasonable to infer that a consistently large peacekeeping deployment abroad suggests either a country is running down its defences by sustaining large foreign deployments, or these forces are simply excess over national concerns. 81 A large military force, particularly one tied to a country’s international identity and foreign policy, might skew civil-military relations in favour of the military, as well as possibly skewing economic development through the diversion of scare resources and labour. Finally, given the link that has been established between domestic repression and military size, if peacekeeping allows armies to sustain a larger size than they would otherwise be able, it should give us cause for concern. 82
The data in Table 1 suggest that in the cases of Bangladesh and Fiji, peacekeeping has helped to sustain the military in the face of transition: the per capita size of the Bangladeshi military has stayed roughly constant since the end of General Ershad’s rule, and this while Bangladesh has sustained large peacekeeping deployments abroad – suggesting that the military is larger than may be necessary. The case of Fiji is even more extreme with an extraordinary proportion of its army deployed overseas as peacekeepers across periods of both democratic and military rule, even as the size of the military has declined from its height in the early 1990s. The Gambia provides an interesting contrast, with the size of the military deployment indicating either (1) that Jammeh did not require the military to maintain his rule, enjoying the protection of ‘one of the most feared’ secret police forces in Africa 83 or (2) that he engaged in coup-proofing-via-peacekeeping. This possibility should remind us that diversionary peace may cut both ways – a strategy of ‘coup-proofing’ that might be as effective for dictatorship as for democracy. If peacekeeping does work as a coup-proofing strategy for both democracies and dictatorships, this would suggest that there is nothing intrinsic to peacekeeping that transforms militaries into pro-democratic institutions.
Leverage
One particularly striking finding that emerges in the case of Bangladesh and Fiji was that peacekeeping provided external leverage for Western actors to manipulate those countries’ politics for their own interests via the medium of the UN. This suggests a readiness and capacity on the part of elements of the UN to intervene in the politics of its contributor states on behalf of Western states. The possibility of shutting Fiji out of peacekeeping was repeatedly seen as a way of forestalling the 2006 coup and then subsequently pressurising the coup government. Prior to the coup, Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase sought to pre-empt the coup by saying it would threaten the military’s peacekeeping revenue, while Fijian civil servants feared that sanctions against Fiji’s peacekeeping role would harden the military’s attitude. 84 After the coup, Fijian MPs insisted that peacekeeping was the coup government’s weakness, and pressured Western allies to shut Fiji out of peacekeeping, to no avail. 85
An assessment as to the significance of peacekeeping in providing external leverage would need to be put into context alongside other possible levers of external influence (e.g. aid). It also seems reasonable to infer from the case of Bangladesh that peacekeeping enhanced external leverage by the fact that it lowered the political costs of military intervention into the political process that could be mediated through an international organisation rather than a national government. In the case of Bangladesh, it allowed donor states to threaten key sources of national revenue without slashing aid or development funding. The fact that the Bangladeshi military did not intervene in the 2014 election crisis offers something like a natural experiment regarding military interference in the country’s politics. It again suggests that Dessallien played a crucial role in legitimising the coup back in 2007, as the UN subsequently intervened directly in the political crisis through the good offices of Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, as the then Assistant-Secretary General in the UN Department of Political Affairs, suggesting that United Nations Headquarters wished to ensure there was to be no more freelancing by locally based officials. In both the cases of Bangladesh and Fiji, external influence was contingent on the significance of peacekeeping to the army’s identity and finances.
Conclusion
Exploring the feedback effects of peacekeeping on peacekeeper-contributing states is a logical next phase for peacekeeping scholarship. Returning back to the aims of the article, we see that in each case, peacekeeping was a necessary but insufficient condition of military rule. A possible threat to peacekeeping revenue helped motivate coups in Bangladesh and Fiji, while the stress of deployment precipitated military rule in the West African case. Further common patterns suggest that complex peacebuilding may enhance praetorian instincts. Finally, a range of variables were identified as relevant to potential negative feedback effects of peacekeeping, notably, revenue, leadership, military size and leverage, as well as suggestions of how these might work to transmit such effects.
In light of the three cases reviewed in this article, it is evident that the stakes of such research are high. Even if it is carried out under the blue flag, peacekeeping connects to a range of power structures, and the global deployment of peacekeepers treats not only of the armed power of the state and civil-military relations but also of the vitality and sustainability of democratic rule and civilian government in the developing world. Exceptional as these cases are, they are sufficient to show that the conventional wisdom that assumes that liberal internationalism, peacekeeping and domestic democracy are all mutually reinforcing cannot be taken as a given. Indeed, the idea that deploying forces abroad helps to strengthen democracy at home must, logically speaking, be predicated on the fragility of democracy in the peacekeeper-contributing states. Democratic notions of diversionary peace are premised on the idea that democratic order is not a function of the vitality and design of democratic institutions or the extent of popular participation and representation in political life, but rather is a function of military behaviour. In short, the logic of the theory alone should lead us not to vest too much hope in the purported benefits of military operations abroad in helping to maintain democracy at home, as the theory itself presupposes democratic frailty.
The question of feedback effects from peacekeeping ties together plenty of important new themes in IR: theories of identity transformation at the state and sub-state level, the processes through which norms are disseminated and localised, the globalisation and convergence of certain kinds of military behaviour and the connections between regime-type and use of force. All of these questions are all the more important given the growth in non-traditional uses of force that legally and politically (if not always in actuality) fall short of warfare, such as peacekeeping. IR research needs to go beyond traditional state-centric models regarding the use of force in order to better capture the globalisation of peacekeeping and the new institutional forms through which military power is applied. It is hoped that the investigation in this article will contribute to this goal.
Ten years ago, the Economist hailed the UN for having stumbled across ‘an ingenious tool of diplomacy. Using lucrative peacekeeping contracts as leverage, it could influence the providers of peacekeepers―and perhaps more effectively than it could influence the problem-nations to which those peacekeepers would be sent’. 86 Judging by the record of the Bangladeshi 2007–2008 state of emergency, there appear to be few reasons to celebrate the UN’s capacity to manipulate domestic political systems through military interference. Given how social science has compromised itself in the past with regard to naive expectations of military rule, it is all the more important that praetorianism be subjected to critical scrutiny, even when it takes on the form of cosmopolitan and good governance rather than anti-communism or nationalism.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent in helping to fund fieldwork for this project.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
