Louisa Lombard Explains the Complexities of U.N. Peacekeeping

“Contemporary peacekeeping is really quite bizarre,” said Yale Anthropology Professor Louisa Lombard at the March 1 Human Rights Workshop. As she went on to explain, the United Nations sends peacekeepers into the middle of fighting and forbids them from taking sides. Peacekeepers need to make locals trust them, while making it clear that they are “not supposed to win.”

Under these circumstances, which Lombard calls “contradictory,” the 100,000 U.N. peacekeepers currently engaged in missions all over the world have to defend themselves against increasingly common attacks and navigate situations in which laws and codes fall short. Lombard is investigating how peacekeepers construct their codes of ethics and deal with their everyday moral dilemmas as they engage in what Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the U.N. peacekeeping chief from 2000 to 2008, has called a “highly moral enterprise.”

For this project, Lombard spent time with peacekeepers stationed in the Central African Republic (CAR), a country that has experienced sporadic violence and as a result has hosted many different kinds of peacekeeping missions in the last few decades (its current mission has soldiers from 52 countries). She has also interviewed peacekeepers in India and Sudan, and attended a training for peacekeepers in Rwanda.

Lombard shared some of the observations she has made from these interviews. She noted that the majority of peacekeepers are from countries in the Global South, and for many of them, U.N. humanitarian interventions are part of their personal and national history. Lombard recalls one meeting in CAR, in which some of the Rwandan peacekeepers met with a local neighborhood organization and told the locals over and over again that they could learn from Rwanda’s experiences. “There was, to some extent, a ‘We’ve been there and see ourselves in you’ mindset,” noted Lombard.

Lombard has also observed peacekeepers wrestle with the rules they are meant to follow. In CAR, she talked with peacekeepers who were wondering whether MINUSCA—the peacekeeping mission in CAR—should allow civilians to take shelter on its bases, as peacekeepers did in South Sudan. The decision in Sudan “unquestionably saved people’s lives,” said Lombard, “but it raised the question—‘What do you do next?’” Lombard explained, “The protection of civilians as an operational philosophy is very present-focused. You save lives today, but you don’t know what happens tomorrow.” For example, the peacekeepers in Sudan had to figure out how to provide shelter for many thousands more people than the base was designed for, how to police de facto camps, and tackle many other issues once they took the step to open their gates.

Lombard said that many soldiers who spoke with her often “feel like the rules that are applied to them are anti-humanitarian,” such as regulations that forbid peacekeepers from sharing their leftover food with locals or rehabilitating schools. Yet such criticism does not prevent many peacekeepers responding to their contradictory situation by acting outside of their instructions in an effort to provide assistance. She recalled one peacekeeper in CAR remarking to her, “Sometimes in order to be human, you have to break the rules.”