Det är ont om vetenskaplig forskning om underrättelsesamarbete. Majoriteten av tillgänglig forskning avhandlar bilaterala samarbeten mellan stora nationer eller transatlantiska samarbeten och anlägger en resultatinriktad ansats. FN som organisation består av en stor blandning civila och militära delar och befattningshavare. FN står för öppenhet och transparens vilket är en rak motsats till underrättelsetjänst och underrättelsesamarbete, vilket ofta präglas av slutenhet och nationella agendor. FN hade aldrig innan MINUSMA insatsen i Mali officiellt hanterat underrättelser och Sverige aldrig tidigare bidragit med ett renodlat underrättelsebidrag till en FN insats. Trots dessa svårigheter bidrar Sverige tillsammans med flera andra européiska stater till ett multinationellt avancerat underrättelsekoncept och även med underrättelseofficerare till gemensamma stabsfunktioner inom FN insatsen. Denna undersökning syftar till att förstå hur och vilka faktorer som försvårade och förenklade underrättelsesamarbetet i MINUSMA. Uppsatsen undersöker hur försvårande faktorer som byråkratiskt motstånd, institutionell tröghet och förenklande faktorer som förtroende och samarbetets design påverkade underrättelsesamarbetet i positiv eller negativ mening. Resultatet av undersökningen är att kultur och bristande kompetens och nationella restriktioner försvårar samarbete. Undersökningen visar även att förtroende och en autonom och hierarkisk maktfördelning som speglar de insatta resurserna underlättar samarbete. Ytterligare ett resultat av undersökningen visar på ett inbördes förhållande mellan faktorerna där de påverkar varandra och fungerar som motiv eller stöd för egna agendor eller för att bevara status quo.

Following the mid 1990s, a drop in Swedish contributions to UN led peacekeeping have been evident and EU and NATO led operations have taken preference. However, in 2013 Sweden invested in a substantial troop contribution to a UN led peacekeeping operation in Mali. There is a lack of existing sources providing arguments for this sudden increase of support to a UN peacekeeping operation. This thesis looks at governmental documents and declarations of Sweden in order to find an understanding of why Sweden decided to contribute to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission (MINUSMA) in Mali in 2013. In light of the past trends of increased focus towards operations led by NATO or the EU, this research was interested in what motivated Sweden to implement a substantial troop contribution to an UN led operation. Through tracing the arguments used by the Swedish government regarding their involvement in Mali and looking at core concepts of rational choice to find if the decision was rational.

The UN and NATO have implemented separate approaches to civilian-military cooperation. Central in both approaches is a need for information sharing between civilian and military actors. Without shared information, cooperative planning becomes impossible. For military actors secret information makes sharing difficult and for civilian actors, principles hinder close cooperation. Scholars in the field of intelligence study have identified that states and organizations share information if the benefits of such, outweigh costs and risks. This thesis examines institutional differences between the UN mission MINUSMA in Mali and NATO mission ISAF in Afghanistan, in order to better understand how institutional factors, affect sharing of information. With an outset in Rational Choice Institutionalism and by use of Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Development and Analysis Framework, an analytical instrument is designed. Through inductive review of interviews, first-hand accounts and reports; factors that drive, enable and hinder civilian-military sharing are indicated. The thesis indicates that the institutional framework of MINUSMA forms interdependency between civilian and military actors, while sharing in ISAF was enabled only when common goals were agreed upon. Military and civilian actors, in both MINUSMA and ISAF point to unclear mandates and vague goals as primary barriers to civilian-military sharing.

While there exists a considerable body of literature on the development of UN peace operations: from traditional peacekeeping operations to today’s robust enforcement missions; scrutinizing their efficiency and the challenges they face – little attention has been paid to why various levels of military action are used by a mission. This study addresses this research gap by comparing three UN enforcement operations: MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, UNMISS in South Sudan, and MINUSMA in Mali. This study specifically investigates how the level of hostility in the conflict and commitment from the troop-contributing countries affect the level of enforcement actions taken in each conflict. The arguments are tested using a Structured Focused Comparison. The study finds that increased levels of hostility generated an increase in the level of enforcement in all three cases studied, while the level of commitment did not have the same distinct effect.

The UN doctrine for Peacekeeping operations is based on three fundamental principles for obtaining legitimacy for military operations. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the change in the UN Security Council's view of legitimacy and the use of force in the context of the UN Peacekeeping Operation in Mali between 2013 -2016, and how this has been demonstrated in the robust mandate authorized by the UN Security Council. Using Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis Model, together with the resolutions and debates from the Security Council that constitutes the MINUSMA mandate and is the basis for this analysis. The analytical results identify two significant changes in the Security Council's view regarding legitimacy and methods, including the use of force applied in the field to defend the integrity of the mandate. Firstly, the view of legitimacy changes from extending support to host-nation authorities, to instead supporting the implementation of the peace agreements. Secondly, the Security Council's view on the use of legitimate force switches from defensive operations to preventive measures. This study fills a research gap on robust mandates, and how the UN's highest decision-making body is evolving its view on legitimacy in peacekeeping operations.

Peacekeepers are widely viewed as being at growing risk of direct and deliberate violence. Attacks are recorded in many and diverse contexts, targeting interventions deployed by both the United Nations and other organisations. This dissertation seeks to advance the understanding of such violence, studying its causes, characteristics and consequences. The impact of deliberate violence against peacekeepers can be severe; it often extends past those immediately affected and impacts interveners’ ability to accomplish their aims. As a topic of scientific inquiry, however, violence against peacekeepers has only recently seen a growth in interest, and systematic study has so far been sparse. This dissertation makes a number of theoretical and empirical contributions to this emerging area of research. The dissertation contains four individual essays. To set the stage and provide foundations for further studies, Essay I specifies key concepts and maps the research field to date. It promotes a wider, and arguably more theoretically appropriate, conceptualisation of violence against peacekeepers than used in earlier studies. Essay II presents new, systematically collected event data on violence against UN and non-UN peacekeepers deployed to conflict-affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 1989 and 2009. Patterns from the data demonstrate that, while widely prevalent, violence against peacekeepers is not ubiquitous to peacekeeping and displays considerable variation within and across interventions. Drawing on this novel data, Essay III provides one of the first systematic studies on the time-varying determinants of rebel attacks on peacekeepers, showing its occurrence to be closely linked to rebel performance on the battlefield. Finally, Essay IV explores how operating in a challenging security environment can affect peacekeepers’ ability to perform core mission functions, drawing on the case of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). The analysis illustrates how such an environment may expose and further constrain already limited capabilities and willingness for robust and armed action in UN peacekeeping operations. Taken together, the essays advance our understanding of the causes, characteristics and consequences of violence against peacekeepers.

This Master's thesis will focus on the newest trends in the field of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations that are moving the organization to unknown territory by deploying in theatres where missions are faced with asymmetric threats. In this regard, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), constituted as a groundbreaking and innovative peacekeeping operation, is spearheading a realignment in peacekeeping that can potentially shape future operations to come, as mandates increasingly reflect roles in areas such as counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. The core objective of this study will be to analyze why MINUSMA is being forced to go green while studying how it is doing so, reflecting on past experiences from other operations such as the International Stabilization Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and the Multi-National Force in Iraq (MNF-I), that have guided changes in MINUSMA's doctrines and capabilities. Gabriel van Oppen Ardanaz

In the years following 9/11, research has shown that United Nations peacekeeping has grown increasingly militarized. Meanwhile, there have long been calls for women’s increased participation in peacekeeping, for a myriad of reasons mainly founded on instrumental and essentialist arguments. According to feminist theories, however, militarization would limit the agency of women as they are often placed in marginalized, protected roles when such a militarization occurs. Against this background, this thesis has utilized a visual and textual discourse analysis to investigate memory books published by the Swedish Armed Forces, which detail the presence of the Swedish contingency in MINUSMA in the period 2014-2019, to understand the connection between female peacekeeper’s agency and the increasing militarization of the UN’s most deadly peacekeeping mission. The findings suggest that militarization does not seem to limit the agency of Swedish female peacekeepers, who have seen their roles become more varied and seemingly possess more agency later than earlier on in the mission, despite an increased militarization of the peacekeeping mission. The thesis thus contributes to an underexamined connection between agency and militarization in the context of peacekeepers, while exploring a heretofore unexamined material. In doing so, the thesis opens for further research in both the material itself as well as further comparative studies.

The UN Security Council established on the 25th of April, 2013; The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) to support political processes in that country and carry out a number of security-related tasks. The mission was authorized a strong mandate by the Security Council to carry out its tasks and to protects its mandate. Despite the mission’s strong mandate, violence on civilians has not reduced which has led to a debate on whether the UN can handle the situation in Mali. This study tries to examine whether MINUSMA can be described according to David Kilcullens conceptualisation of a COIN-operation in three pillars of counterinsurgency, by doing so this study hopes to give theoretical insight and enable a way of understanding the goals and means of the mission in Mali more than the stabilizing mandate does. The result of the analysis shows that MINUSMA can be described as a COIN-operation in large extent, mainly in the areas of cooperation, information and security. The result also shows that even if MINUSMA doesn´t work directly in the area of politics & economics they support both direct and indirect other agencies that does, thereby giving theoretical insight to the mission in Mali.

I den politiska elitens motiveringar till det svenska deltagandet i MINUSMA framförs varierande motiv som hänvisar till olika föreställningar och förväntningar kring hur Sverige bör agera. Motiveringarna kan ses som uttryck för och referenser till strategisk kultur vid fattande av strategiska beslut. De officiella motivförklaringarna förändras dock över tid, vilket antyder att betydelsen av olika aspekter av strategisk kultur har förändrats över tid och i relation till nationella och internationella kontextuella förändringar. Sammantaget väcker det frågor kring hur eliten refererar till strategisk kultur för att motivera säkerhetspolitiska beslut och hur refererandet till strategisk kultur förändras över tid. Studien syftar till att, med fokus på MINUSMA, bringa klarhet i hur den svenska strategisk kulturen framställs av den politiska eliten vid motiveringar till säkerhetspolitiska beslut om internationella truppinsatser samt bringa klarhet i hur den politiska elitens referenser till den strategiska kulturen, i de officiellt framställda motiveringarna, förhåller sig till förändringar i den strategiska kontexten. Undersökningen visar att den politiska elitens motiveringar tar sin utgångspunkt i egna eller gemensamma övertygelser som genom refererande till den strategiska kulturens inneboende normer ger de säkerhetspolitiska besluten till insatsen relevans och legitimitet. Vidare visar studien att vilka normer den politiska eliten väljer att referera till förändras över tid i harmoni med ett bredare utrikes- och säkerhetspolitiskt skifte i Sverige.