Peacekeeping, Poverty, and Development:
Towards an Understanding of the Gendered Peacekeeping Economies in the DRC, Sudan, and Liberia

• Participating institutions: Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo (project owner); the London School of Economics and Political Science; the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (Accra)
• Participating researchers:
  Morten Bøås, Fafo (project manager);
  Kathleen Jennings, Fafo;
  Marsha Henry, LSE;
  Øystein Rolandsen, PRIO;
  Kwesi Aning, KAIPTC
• Funder: Research Council of Norway, PovPeace program
• Project duration: Three years (spring 2011 – spring 2014)
• Disciplines: Political science, sociology, history, gender studies
• Main outputs: One co-edited book; a PhD thesis; multiple academic articles; a policy report and final conference in Oslo for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers
• Project contact (for general queries): Kathleen Jennings.

Peacekeepers and international development workers live in the same place as the local residents of mission areas, but they don’t live in the same world. The peacekeeping world is air-conditioned, clean, and well equipped and well guarded; it consists of decent housing, generous pay, access to vehicles, house-help, and, usually, a robust (if limited) social life that revolves around patronizing expensive restaurants, hotels, bars, and clubs. This forms the basis of what we call the “peacekeeping economy”. Peacekeeping economies include the skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled jobs available to local staff in UN offices or NGOs that accompany the UN presence (usually secretarial or translation-based, as well as cleaning, cooking, driving, guarding, etc); unskilled and mainly informal work such as housecleaning, laundering, cooking, running errands, etc for international staff; service jobs in the establishments that cater to internationals; and participation in the sex industry, whether independently or mediated through a third party. Accordingly, the peacekeeping economy is highly gendered in its division of labor. This does not mean that it is necessarily harmful to the local women and men involved in it, but rather to acknowledge that the peacekeeping economy seems to encompass and affect women and men in significantly different ways.

The peacekeeping economy is not usually examined in the existing peacekeeping or post-conflict literature. Yet the peacekeeping economy is the context in which most local residents have their main, or only, contact with international personnel; it may also be the source of the only concrete benefits that many locals receive out of the peacekeeping mission. Moreover, while the distortions and excesses of gendered peacekeeping economies help shape local perceptions of the mission, they also inevitably affect relations between local women and men. We thus contend that the study of the peacekeeping economy will provide significant insights into such crucial, complex, and inter-related issues as poverty reduction, livelihoods, and gender relations in post-conflict societies.

Among the questions posed by the project include: How do peacekeeping economies affect local livelihoods and politico-economic organization in the area of operations? Starkly put: are peacekeeping economies a means of post-conflict poverty alleviation, in the form of job creation, enterprise support, and infrastructure regeneration; or do they primarily entrench existing political, economic, and military elites and familiar (wartime) forms of economic organization; or both? Furthermore, how do peacekeeping economies seem to affect local social (including gendered) relations? That is, to what extent do peacekeeping economies help to upend – or reinforce – hierarchies relating to “women’s work”, “men’s work”, and women’s “proper” place in society, as well as other social and economic hierarchies? Third, what is the relationship between the tangible (and occasionally sordid) reality of peacekeeping economies and the aims of “official” development aid and peacekeeping activities? Finally, what happens to peacekeeping economies, and the people implicated in and dependent upon them, when peacekeeping operations begin to wind down and eventually leave?

Our hypothesis is that peacekeeping economies have a significant effect on incomes and livelihoods; and furthermore, that the impact is particularly strong on women’s livelihoods, insofar as many of the jobs and services that comprise the peacekeeping economy depend on (or are considered to be primarily the preserve of) women. A subsidiary hypothesis is that the impacts of peacekeeping economies are neither as temporary, nor as localized, as is commonly assumed. This claim points to the potential “multiplier effect” of the peacekeeping economy, in which benefits accrue indirectly to those not employed in the peacekeeping economy – or even living in its proximity, thanks to remittances. But it also reflects an understanding of “impact” that goes beyond the economic, to encompass shifts in norms regarding gender roles and relations (and other hierarchies) in the society.

The project has as its case studies Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and South Sudan. These cases have been chosen because they encapsulate different phases in the mission life, different points on the war-to-peace spectrum, and different economic and demographic/ geographic contexts. At the same time, there are sufficient commonalities between the cases to enable valid comparisons. We hope to identify some significant common threads (as well as important differences) between the cases, in terms of how peacekeeping economies affect – and are affected by – “the local”.

The project aims to generate knowledge and findings that will: help UN, donor country, and host country policymakers identify and leverage the benefits of peacekeeping economies and harness them to “official” aid, so that peacekeeping economies can complement concurrent attempts to alleviate poverty; generate ideas for how the benefits of peacekeeping economies can be more widely spread; and examine the downsides of peacekeeping economies, in order to assist future attempts to prevent and/or mitigate them. It also seeks to contribute to the academic literatures relating to poverty, peacekeeping, development aid, and gender in conflict and post-conflict environments.

The project is based on extensive fieldwork, which will include qualitative interviews with local residents and international actors involved in all aspects and levels of peacekeeping economies; participant observation (observing the dynamics and mechanics of the peacekeeping economy firsthand, through “shadowing” informants and observing interaction at establishments catering to internationals); and investigating the organization of, and relevant linkages and networks encompassed by, peacekeeping economies. Names and identifying details will be changed or removed when using information gained from interviews or observation in the field, except where the interviewee explicitly grants permission for attribution. Informed consent will be secured before each interview.