United Nations (UN) peacekeeping principles affect all peacekeeping, thus it is important to under-stand their development. Many important changes in peacekeeping concern robustness and human security. This paper investigates developments in these two areas and their interrelation by means of a literature review, document analysis and case studies of two contemporary UN peacekeeping mis-sions. It identifies three generations in UN peacekeeping marked by changes in human security and robustness and relates these changes to the concept of sovereignty. Further, it identifies human secu-rity as the main motivation behind increasingly robust UN peacekeeping and finds that robust peacekeeping can, but does not necessarily, lead to greater human security.

In this thesis, I explore everyday militarisation in UN peace operations by studying how Sweden's s 'peace nation' narrative is possibly militarised by participating in the robust peacekeeping operation in Mali. The aim is to increase understanding around how militarisation occurs in modern peace operations, domains that are meant to be peaceful but are becoming increasingly war-like. The Swedish narrative is generated through interviews with Swedish peacekeepers that have previously been deployed to Mali and through readings of the Swedish Armed Forces blog Malibloggen. The material is analysed through a narrative analysis inspired by Mieke Bal (2009). I find that the Swedish narrative is partly militarised during participation in the mission, as it can be argued that Sweden arranged its sense of belonging around military values and chose military modes of conflict resolution over civilian to some extent. The soldiers were also cognitively preparing for war and military measures were partially normalised. This result illustrates that when countries that regard themselves as 'peace nations' take part in militarised UN PSOs, their narrative can become militarised to some extent as they arrange their sense of belonging around values of war and military force. This, in turn, has implications for the spread of militarisation across the globe, potentially leading to a lower threshold of war.

Until the 1980s, the People’s Republic of China was principally opposed to United Nations peacekeeping, understanding the institution to be a thinly veiled excuse for powerful states to intervene in the sovereign affairs of others. However, the meaning the country attributes to peacekeeping has changed drastically since then. China has adopted a more pragmatic attitude and has gradually become more supportive and involved in United Nations peacekeeping. Today the country stands as a major contributor to peacekeeping, not least in terms of the number of peacekeepers it contributes to missions. However, how does China make sense of its current behaviour? This paper seeks to understand how the participation of Chinese military personnel and police in peacekeeping operations is made coherent with Chinese self-identity. The paper employs a narrative analysis that focuses on how narratives draw on master narratives about Chinese collective memory to construct participation in peacekeeping as a natural conclusion to already accepted notions about what it means to be Chinese. On the one hand, this paper confirms the findings of previous scholarship on Chinese identity and the country’s attitude on peacekeeping. Like these, this paper finds that China’s self-identity as a part of the Global South and as a great power plays a role in how China conceptualizes peacekeeping. However, on the other hand, the paper also finds dissonance in how the narrative relates peacekeeping to China’s identity as a part of the Global South. Additionally, this paper also demonstrates that the narrative draws on several master narratives that have not previously been identified as important to how China makes meaning of peacekeeping. Specifically, these are the collective memories of ‘Asian values’, China’s experiences from the Second World War, and the revolutionary history of the CPC.