Justifying the (Interim) Intervention Order, Securing the Mission: The case of UNIFIL in southern Lebanon
Abstract
While the importance of local legitimacy for the success of international peace-support operations has been widely acknowledged, the justifying discourses various missions use vis-a-vis local communities have not attracted much scholarly attention. Drawing on the insights from critical peace studies, I explore the discursive strategies employed by United Nations peacekeeping missions to justify the presence of international troops on the ground.
In particular, I focus on the UN peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon (UNIFIL II) and the discourses through which it reaches out to civilians living in its areas of operations and justifies its presence. Using the data gathered through analysis of mission's public media production and interviews with mission's personnel, local authorities and NGOs, I explore UNIFIL's narrative of its own activities, interpretation of local context and embeddedness of both within the liberal peace discourse.
I subsequently track one of the leading rationalities behind the narrative of the mission, which I identify as strengthening the security of mission through winning 'hearts and minds' of potentially hostile local population. In conclusion, I point out how is this security rationality and many elements present within the justifying narrative (such as the unity of peacekeepers and local communities) linked to the shifts in mission's peacekeeping practices brought by the establishment of UNIFIL II and broader trends in contemporary peace-support operations - i.e. their militarization and ""bunkerization"".