With 16 ongoing peacekeeping operations currently deploying almost 100,000 troops, United
Nations peacekeeping is the largest single source of multilateral military intervention in conflict
zones. Because UN peacekeeping is entirely dependent on voluntary contributions from Member
States, there a pressing need to better understand why nations contribute peacekeeping troops in
the first place. Individual national rationales for peacekeeping contribution vary significantly,
and incentives may include regional hegemonic aspirations, positive economic benefits from
peacekeeping, desiring a seat at the Security Council, or a combination of any number of
incentives. This has made it difficult to provide a generalized explanation about why states
provide peacekeepers. This thesis proposes a model for understanding the peacekeeping
contribution issue under the lens of strategic culture. The strategic culture approach focuses on
elite beliefs about the objectives of the use of force, with national factors such a geography,
history, domestic politics, and bureaucracy forming into cohesive and competing norms about
the purpose of the military. Drawing on the fourth generation of strategic culture literature, this
dissertation argues that strategic culture serves as an intermediary variable that can be measured
by discourse analysis to help understand changes in specific strategic behaviour, such as military
peacekeeping contributions. By understanding the dynamic way that a country views the use of
force – in short, by understanding how a country views its military as being useful in achieving
policy goals -- we work towards a better understanding of why a country may contribute troops
to United Nations peacekeeping.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/37148 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Libben, Joshua |
| Contributors | Turenne-Sjolander, Claire |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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