S
INCE the early 1990s historians, military historians in particular, have done much work on the operational, strategic and political elements of Australian peacekeeping, both generally and in regards to specific missions. An example of this work is Peter Londey’s, Other People’s Wars, which remains the only exhaustive history of Australia’s participation inpeacekeeping since 1947.44 An ‘Official History’ of Australian
peacekeeping, led by David Horner, is currently underway and will likely add much in this area. The two currently published volumes out of a planned six have explored a number of themes and missions across the years 1988-1993. The volume exploring the operations in Bougainville and Solomon Islands is forthcoming and efforts towards an East Timor study are ongoing.45 There have also been parliamentary reports and
edited collections from conferences throughout the 1990s involving academics, policy-makers, planners as well as peacekeepers. These offer
44 Peter Londey, Other People’s Wars: A History of Australian, Peacekeeping (Crows Nest:
Allen & Unwin, 2004).
45 The two published volumes are: David Horner, Australia and the ‘New World Order’:
From Peacekeeping to Peace Enforcement: 1988-1991, Official History of Australian
Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations, v. II. (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David Horner and John Connor, The Good
International Citizen: Australian Peacekeeping in Asia, Africa and Europe 1991-1993. Official
History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations, v. III. (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2014), for more on the overall project see https://www.awm.gov.au/histories/peacekeeping/ (Accessed 22 May 2015).
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much in terms of tracing the development and challenges of peacekeeping in an Australian context.46 Overall, however, the scholarly interest in
Australian peacekeeping has been slow to develop. Further, it has been overshadowed more recently because of scholarly and popular interest in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Outside of this historical literature there are broad case-studies on the individual operations in the Pacific, as well as studies of the political and historical dimensions at play in each. These add much depth and breadth
to the histories mentioned above.47 The large long-term project
‘Peacebuilding Compared’ led by John Braithwaite and Hilary Charlesworth has offered much insight into peacebuilding’s roles and abilities in relation to justice, democracy and governance. Their three studies of Bougainville, Solomon Islands and East Timor are particularly valuable for placing those operations in their international contexts.48
Alongside this project another similarly large one exploring the role of police peacekeeping in the Pacific has sparked many conversations and
46 Hugh Smith, (ed.), Australia and Peacekeeping (Canberra: Australian Defence Studies
Centre [ADSC], 1990); Hugh Smith, (ed.), Peacekeeping: Challenges for the Future (Canberra: ADSC, 1993); Hugh Smith, (ed.), International Peacekeeping: Building on the Cambodian
Experience (Canberra: ADSC, 1994); Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Defence and Trade (SSCFADT), United Nations Peacekeeping and Australia (Australian Senate, May 1991); Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (JSCFADT), Australia’s Participation in Peacekeeping (Canberra, 1994); for a more contemporary collection and report see Horner, Londey, and Bou, (eds.), Australian
Peacekeeping; SSCFADT, Senate Inquiry into Australia’s Involvement in Peacekeeping Operations,
(Canberra, 2008).
47 This is a large literature but for illustrative examples see the following. For
Bougainville - Bob Breen, Giving Peace a Chance: Operation Lagoon, Bougainville 1994: A Case
of Military Action and Diplomacy, Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence, no. 142
(Canberra: Strategic Defence Studies, Australian National University, 2001); Donald Denoon and Monica Wehner, (eds.), Without a Gun: Australians’ Experiences Monitoring
Peace in Bougainville, 1997-2001, (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2001); Anthony J Regan, Light Intervention: Lessons from Bougainville (Washington DC: United States Institute of
Peace Press, 2010); for East Timor – Bob Breen, Mission Accomplished, East Timor: The
Australian Defence Force Participation in the International Forces East Timor (INTERFET)
(Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2000); James Dunn, East Timor: A Rough Passage to
Independence, (Double Bay: Longueville Books, 2003); for Solomon Islands - Clive Moore, Happy Isles in Crisis: The Historical Causes for a Failing State in Solomon Islands, 1998-2004
(Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2004); Sinclair Dinnen and Stewart Firth, (eds.), Politics and
Statebuilding in Solomon Islands (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008).
48 John Braithwaite and Hilary Charlesworth, Reconciliation and Architectures of
Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville, (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010); John Braithwaite and Hilary Charlesworth, Pillars and Shadows Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010); John Braithwaite, Hilary Charlesworth, and Aderito Soares, Networked Governance of Freedom and Tyranny: Peace In Timor-Leste, (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012); For more on the ‘Peacebuilding Compared’ project itself see,
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offered insight into peacekeeping in the region from a non-military perspective.49 For this thesis this latter work has been essential to
sketching the experiences of AFP peacekeepers. There is, as yet, a gap in the literature regarding the experiences of APS peacekeepers, and this thesis goes some way towards filling it. Rich though this work is, none of it is focused exclusively, or in any sustained way, on peacekeepers’ experiences or perceptions. As such, this thesis has had to draw together the literature described above with a wide range of scholarship from a variety of international contexts.
International relations theorists, legal scholars, anthropologists and sociologists have studied various elements of peacekeeping in a range of international settings. Two prominent areas have been the study of connections between post-Cold War peacekeeping operations and ideas of imperialism and legitimacy50, as well as studies of the role of
49 The project is led by Sinclair Dinnen and called ‘Policing the Neighbourhood’. For
illustrative examples of the work see Dinnen and Matthew Allen, ‘Paradoxes of Postcolonial Police-Building: Solomon Islands’, Policing and Society, 23, no.2 (2013): 222- 242; Dinnen and Gordon Peake, ‘More than just Policing: Policing Reform in Post- Conflict Bougainville’, International Peacekeeping 20, no. 5 (2013): 570-584; Dinnen and Abby McLeod, ‘Policing Melanesia - International Expectations and Local Realities’,
Policing and Society 19, no.4 (2009): 333-353; Andrew Goldsmith, ‘“It Wasn’t like Normal
Policing’: Voices of Australian Police Peacekeepers in Operation Serene, Timor-Leste 2006’, Policing and Society 19, no. 2 (2009): 119-133; Goldsmith and Dinnen, ‘Transnational Police Building; Critical Lessons from Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands’,
Third World Quarterly 28, no. 6 (2007): 1090-1109; Peake and Kaysie Studdard Brown,
‘Policebuilding: The International Deployment Group in the Solomon Islands’,
International Peacekeeping 12, no. 4 (2005): 520-32; there is also some valuable earlier work
on Australian police in peacekeeping, see John Rixon, ‘The Role of Australian Police in Peace Support Operations’, in Smith (ed.) International Peacekeeping, 115-130; Chris Eaton, ‘The Role of Police in Institution Building’, in Smith, (ed.), International Peacekeeping; 60- 63; Shane Austin, ‘A Policeman’s Lot’, in Denoon and Wehner (eds.), Without a Gun, 135-141; Geoff Hazel, ‘Police in Peacekeeping’, in Horner, Londey and Bou (eds.),
Australian Peacekeeping, 153-170.
50 Roland Paris, ‘Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism’, International
Security 22, no. 2 (1 October 1997): 54-89; Roland Paris, ‘International Peacebuilding and
the “Mission Civilisatrice”’, Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (October 2002): 637- 656; Roland Paris, ‘Still an Inscrutable Concept’, Security Dialogue 35, no. 3 (2004): 370- 372; Neil Cooper, Mandy Turner, and Michael Pugh, ‘The End of History and the Last Liberal Peacebuilder: A Reply to Roland Paris’, Review of International Studies 37, no. 4 (October 2011): 1995-2007; Marina Ottaway and Bethany Lacina, ‘International Interventions and Imperialism: Lessons from the 1990s’, SAIS Review 23, no. 2 (2003): 71-92; Kimberly Zisk Marten, Enforcing The Peace: Learning From the Imperial Past (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2004); Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White
Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2004); Bruno Charbonneau, ‘The Colonial Legacy of Peace(building): France, Europe, Africa’, Conference Paper presented at the International Studies Association Convention, New York, 2009; Fry, Greg and Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka (eds.). Intervention and State-Building in the Pacific: The Legitimacy of ‘Cooperative Intervention’. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
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masculinity and militarism in peacekeeping.51 Importantly for this thesis,
some of this work has also explored a whole range of factors shaping relationships between local people and peacekeepers. The ideas, approaches and theories in this work need particular attention because they are appropriated throughout this thesis in different ways.
In her work on how local communities interpreted peace operations in El Salvador, Cambodia and Haiti, political scientist, Béatrice Pouligny has shown how a range of intersecting structural influences shaped and limited the kinds of interactions and impressions local people had of peacekeepers. She outlines how engagement and perceptions were shaped by a range of features such as the local geography and distribution of peacekeeping personnel, the peacekeepers’ home-organisations and the specific jobs of peacekeepers while on mission. She also identifies how local demographic and civic factors shaped interactions. For example, a small rural community would interact with and expect certain things from peacekeepers in ways that could be quite different compared to people from urban centres. Similarly, Pouligny reminds us that the term ‘local people’ needs to be understood as shorthand not for a passive homogenous group of people, but as a dynamic adjective denoting diversity and activity. ‘Local people’ describes all kinds of groups and individuals from political elites, to UN employees, to farmers, bureaucrats, mothers, students and children. Each of these will have their own agendas, wishes, and relationships to the peace process and peacekeepers. Further, underlying any and all of these factors will be a constantly shifting and almost always muddied political landscape in the host community. This will continually make and remake peacekeeping
51 Claire Duncanson, Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan
and Iraq (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Gabrielle Simm, Sex in Peace Operations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Paul Higate and Marsha Henry, Insecure
Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia (London: Zed Books,
2009); Paul Higate, ‘Peacekeepers, Masculinities, and Sexual Exploitation’, Men and
Masculinities 10, no. 1 (1 July 2007): 99-119; Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts, and
Jane L Parpart, Gender, Conflict and Peacekeeping, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Sandra Whitworth, Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004); Cynthia Cockburn and Dubravka Zarkov, (eds.), The
Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, Bosnia and the Netherlands, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2002).
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contexts for both peacekeepers and local people.52 Pouligny’s work
highlights the inherent variability and constant state of flux that generally characterises most, if not all, peacekeeping missions.
Sociologists, Paul Higate and Marsha Henry have also explored local perceptions of peacekeepers. Their work concerns operations in Haiti, Liberia and Kosovo. They have foregrounded how these peacekeeping contexts were influenced by the way peacekeepers performed and presented themselves.53 Higate and Henry show how local communities
actually saw peacekeepers in terms of their uniforms, nationality, equipment and physical bearing and how this was profoundly important to the way they understood and evaluated how well or not peacekeepers were providing security. They demonstrate, for example, that local people often had higher expectations of peacekeepers from wealthy countries because they were known to be more competent and more richly equipped than poorer counterparts. These expectations could remain irrespective of actual experience of nationalities during an operation.54 While this work is specific to the operations in Kosovo, Haiti and Liberia and focuses on notions of security it points to the ways tension can arise between local communities and peacekeepers due to mutual misunderstandings not just of actual behaviour and relationships but also of perceptions and expectations.
Further, the issues raised by Higate and Henry speak to the idea that peacekeepers tend to have a highly symbolic presence. As the public face of a mission, peacekeepers always represent a whole range of ideals, hopes and assumptions of local communities as well as the international community. Anthropologist, Robert Rubinstein has shown that UN peacekeeping has been built upon a ‘root metaphor’. The UN, he argues, has long been understood to be a benevolent organisation equipped and willing to feed the poor, protect the weak and settle conflicts peacefully. This creates certain expectations as to what a specific mission stands for and can do at a macro level, and also shapes what is expected to occur
52 Beatrice Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People,
(London: Hurst and Company, 2006), 32-86.
53 Paul Higate and Marsha Henry, Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in
Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia, (London: Zed Books, 2009), 1-20.
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between peacekeepers and locals at a micro level. As peacekeeping operations have grown to be larger, more complex and involved in state- building the ability of peacekeepers to meet these ideals and expectations has become more difficult, if not impossible.55 Irrespective of the actual
involvement of the UN, peacekeeping has become so synonymous with that organisation that long before peacekeepers ever arrive somewhere they already represent and embody certain ideals, hopes, histories and identities associated with it.
Scholars from across a range of disciplines have also employed categories of gender, militarism and race to help explain peacekeeping contexts. Questioning the use of militaries to bring about peace has long been a central question in peacekeeping practice and theory, but exploration of these issues gathered pace as scholars sought to understand common peacekeeper behaviours in major operations in the early 1990s. Some of this behaviour included extreme unlawful violence, involvement in prostitution and human trafficking. Two prominent examples include the murder and torture of a teenaged boy by Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, and peacekeepers’ involvement in the human trafficking trade in Bosnia, both in the early 1990s. These have rightfully captured scholars’ attentions. In grappling with actions like this, scholars have so far generally relied upon notions of military masculinity to explain them and make broader conclusions about peacekeeping generally.
Military masculinity can mean slightly different things or have different emphases amongst scholars but is generally used in this field to represent a gender identity that is constructed via a socialisation process in the military. That process cultivates and rewards, implicitly and explicitly, values such as aggression, violence, physical prowess, maleness, racism, and virulent heterosexuality. Coming from a feminist critical theory perspective, Sherene Razack and Sandra Whitworth, two prominent contributors to this field, suggest that unlawful violence, both sexual and physical, were the logical conclusion of a military masculinity
55 Robert A. Rubenstein, ‘Intervention and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to
Peace Operations’, Security Dialogue 36, no.4 (December 2005): 527-544; for a more comprehensive discussion of his ideas see, Rubenstein, Peacekeeping Under Fire: Culture and
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that prized violence, power, racism and misogyny. They go further and suggest that using soldiers in any peacekeeping operation is antithetical to the very idea of peacekeeping because values of violence and militarism do not belong in a peace context.56
Razack and Whitworth contextualise, though to different degrees, their critiques and analyses in relation to what is commonly called the ‘Somalia Affair’. This involved, amongst other things, the torture and murder of a teenaged Somali boy, Shidane Arone, by Canadian peacekeepers,
specifically by the Airborne Regiment, a combat paratrooper unit.57 They
both connect their work to the specific circumstances within the Canadian Forces in the early 1990s when the incident occurred and within the particular Canadian relationship to peacekeeping.58 They argue that this behaviour should be no great surprise given that soldiers whose
military masculinity was created and cherished were then asked to restrain
those very characteristics in a peace-zone, which unlike a war-zone calls for the restraining of violence, power and aggression.59
Neither explores in any sustained way or gives much credence to the role other factors, such as how leadership, or its breakdown and failure to be more precise, might have allowed a toxic undisciplined culture to fester within that unit. Instead, that unit and incident are used as an example of an all-encompassing generic Western military culture. Other scholars have responded to that rigidity with a more flexible model. Scholars such as Claire Duncanson and Paul Higate, drawing on the work of gender theorist RW Connell, argue that there are actually many military masculinities in any one military. They suggest that there exist at any one
56 See their major works for a comprehensive account of this approach: Sherene Razack,
Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Sandra Whitworth, Men, Militarism, and
UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis (Boulder, Co: Lynne Reiner Publishing, 2004).
57 Razack, Dark Threats 4-14; Whitworth, Men, Militarism, 91-98.
58 For Canadian specific discussion in Whitworth, Men, Militarism, see, 85-118.
59 For a more singular discussion of the connection between violence and militarism see
A.B. Fetherston, ‘UN Peacekeepers and Cultures of Violence’, Cultural Survival Quarterly 19, no. 1, (Spring 1995): http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival- quarterly/bosnia-and-herzegovina/un-peacekeepers-and-cultures-violence (Accessed 18 July 2013).
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time many different kinds of gender identities and hierarchies in a military which necessarily produce a range of perspectives and behaviours.60
One last important element of this body of literature is that peacekeeping, again in a general sense, has been a process of civilised nations (Western ones) pacifying and enlightening the unruly parts of the world. Therefore peacekeepers’ actions must also be understood as
complex performances of imperial identities and histories.61 This
argument is not just that structurally and politically peacekeeping has been a kind of imperialism, but that Western peacekeepers’ actual behaviour while on mission has been influenced by being a part of the so-called civilising nations of the world. Therefore, it has contributed to them acting in superior and sometimes brutal ways.
This conception somewhat simplifies the causal link between violence and Western histories of imperialism. For example, how this argument might apply to the peacekeepers not from Western nations who commit atrocities and abuses is not made clear. This is not to say that issues of colonialism and imperialism have no role, as many of these nations have been erstwhile colonies themselves, but that the discussion of those issues needs to be both problematised and more multifaceted in literature of this kind. This is a question which deserves much greater and sustained analysis because since 1996 peacekeepers from the developing world, and especially Asia and Africa, have been the largest troop contributors to UN peacekeeping operations.62
Nonetheless, issues of gender, militarism, race and imperialism offer a way to ask questions across peacekeeping operations and groups of peacekeepers in ways that offer a broad analysis. When combined with the frames offered by this work we are left with a tool kit of sorts. These tools provide various approaches for deep and wide comparative understanding of peacekeeping. Issues of peacekeeper symbolism,
60 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Claire Duncanson,
Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Paul Higate, ‘Peacekeepers, Masculinities, and Sexual Exploitation’, Men and Masculinities 10, no. 1 (1 July 2007): 99-119.
61 See esp., Whitworth, Men, Militarism, 1-43; Razack, Dark Threats, xi-14.
62 For more detailed data and discussion on this issue see Chris Perry, ‘New Dataset
Shows Trends in UN Peacekeeping’, Global Observatory,
http://theglobalobservatory.org/analysis/520-new-dataset-shows-trends-in-un- peacekeeping.html, (Accessed 5 August 2014).
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performance, structural factors, local and international perceptions, histories and expectations were all at play in Australian peacekeepers’ experiences and behaviours in the Pacific.
This thesis uses these frames of analysis to examine peacekeepers’ own stories. Peacekeepers’ oral histories are largely the foundation for this thesis. The missions being studied here happened so recently that there is, as yet, not much publically available archival material. Because of this and out of the need to have access to peacekeepers’ thoughts, memories, descriptions and perceptions a large oral history project was undertaken. To that end, I conducted oral history interviews across the country with 61 peacekeepers from the ADF, APS and AFP.
Though the oral histories are important and drawn on frequently they have been used alongside variety of other sources to create a broad discussion about Australian peacekeeping in the Pacific. Other source material has included Australian and international newspapers, including English-language newspapers from Solomon Islands and East Timor. Parliamentary reports, speeches, legislation and other government