UN Peacekeeping or the Reinvention of Colonialism? An Interview with Margot Tudor.
Traditional historiography has regarded the UN Peacekeeping missions as the liberal international order’s initiative to mediate the conflicts of the postcolonial world and avoid escalation towards another great war. It was a chronicle about enlightened UN officials and Western idealists thriving to maintain peace amid the turbulences of decolonisation and civil wars within the emerging nations of the Third World. By delving into a rich array of primary sources, Margot Tudor proposes a different narrative to this story. Her book Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores the colonial continuities and lineages of peacekeeping practices in the field by taking a comparative approach to the first four armed UN missions: UNEF (Sinai and Gaza), ONUC (Congo), UNTEA (West Papua), and UNFICYP (Cyprus). According to Tudor, UN peacekeeping personnel played a role in redefining sovereignty and restructuring colonial-era power structures for populations in the Global South who were at the forefront of establishing post-colonial nation-states. The 'blue helmet bureaucrats' extended colonial structures and imaginaries into newly independent nations, linking the high aspirations set out in the UN Charter with the daily conflicts arising from the fights for independence in the Third World. Following their archival traces, Tudor exposes that these intricate networks of experts conducted their "operations" based on their existing knowledge, frequently utilising the material and ideological systems established during years of colonial dominance.
Salvador Lima, European University Institute
Your central hypothesis is bold: “peacekeeping missions remade the hierarchies and narratives of the colonial era”. So, first of all, I would like you to talk about the research experience for this book.
I think the project began as a social scientist project while doing my interdisciplinary master’s degree. I've always been very interested in international organisations and liberal international institutions. The colonial continuities of the UN institutions seemed like a well-known assumption in many social science literatures I read. Still, nobody dealt with the specificities of the peacekeeping missions during decolonisation and their entanglement in Cold War geopolitics. Studying the technocracy within the International Criminal Court (ICC), I learnt about these colonial continuities, about these spaces of liberal internationalism having a pervasive core of coloniality in various forms, both in practices and logic. So, while I was working on my dissertation on the colonial continuities of the ICC, I asked myself about the previous scholarly works on the history of United Nations Peacekeeping during the decolonisation period. I thought that, indeed, someone had written something about it. I started to look for footnotes on the subject to learn more about that period and discovered that there had not been any multi-mission historiographic work on that period and theme.
I initially wrote the peacekeeping proposal as something that I felt tensely could be a larger project that encompassed a significant amount of archival research. By then, I didn't know what case studies I would look at. So, it was very exploratory, like most PhD proposals are. I suppose the project's development came from sources that have driven all my future research. I started with a question and then was very lucky that I was able to speak to supervisors and colleagues who gave me the confidence to push beyond a social sciences project and to try and find some archival research.
What advantages and limitations did you find in the UN archives?
What was an attractive methodology aspect to me was that the archive work was not only about progress reports or correspondence between the field and the headquarters. I used personal letters, memoires and media. There was a lot of “note-taking” during the peacekeeping missions. This is what has now become the source base for my second book project, which is based on UN magazines. I mean how peacekeepers constructed their magazines on the ground.
I would say that the UN archive works almost as an umbrella; there are various accessible sources, such as photographs, for instance, and again, something I'm trying to use a lot more of now. UN documents are much more complex and broader than other public documents. For instance, the archival documents within the General Assembly resolution contain diverse papers, reports, and commentaries. Because they are from the field, that gives me a real insight into how the organisation operated or had these bureaucracies on the ground, just as much as within the headquarters and the tensions between the headquarters and the field.
I could not write this book using only UN archival sources. So, I also relied heavily upon newspaper sources on different accessed oral histories. I found oral histories and interviews with various UN bureaucrats and administrators fascinating. I have an article coming out quite soon with some of the most exciting aspects of oral history that I didn't have space to put into the book. I recommend looking into alternative testimonies and access to recorded histories, particularly beyond nation-state archives. I also used the archives of the ICRC and other kinds of NGOs. A big part of all these is digitised now.
What precedents to the peacekeeping interventions did you find in the League of Nations trajectory and 19th-century colonialism?
Most of the logic for peacekeeping or militarised forms of peace is enrooted in the Great Powers’ policy of imperial control. As a historian of humanitarianism, I am very interested in those lineages that date back to the 19th century. Peacekeeping missions are connected to the narrative of the civilising mission. Development as a concept was coined afterwards, during the postwar years. Still, we can argue that, already in the age of empire, colonial officials perceived the “white man's burden” as a moral obligation to foster development. So peacekeeping, development, and humanitarianism are new ideas based on old Eurocentric notions. They have been recoded into a new language that held much of the empire's ideas and racialised hierarchies.
I was fascinated by tracing this assumption or acceptance of a progressive linear aim towards a European “universal” model of development and peace. How do we then end up with a liberal internationalist system cementing these interventionist ideas in a much more collective security way? How can we, in an internationalist environment, understand intervention as a part of this lineage of colonial logic and civilising ideas?
That was when I started looking at the practices of multilateralism in the League of Nations and the multilateral efforts to police and administer territories, such as the mandates in the Rhineland and the Levant. This idea that a multilateral force could undertake sovereignty was a novel concept at the beginning of the 20th century. Suddenly, it is not just a nation-state with a monopoly on sovereignty. The international liberal order institutionalised in the League of Nations was able to have mandated territories.
Tracing the peacekeeping philosophy with colonial and liberal ideas allows us to see the Suez Crisis of 1956 as part of a process and not as a turning point in history. These incremental steps began with the League of Nations since 19th-century humanitarianism was increasingly framed as something that could work alongside war.
One of those incremental steps you mentioned was creating and expanding the International Committee of the Red Cross. Since its inception in 1863, it has been an instrumental organisation in developing notions such as humanitarianism and the rules of war. What philosophical or political differences are between the ICRC and the United Nations Peacekeeping missions?
The ICRC was conceived to protect civilians and combatants; it is an organisation devoted to providing medical care in humanitarian emergencies and ensuring the warring parties respect the rules of war. They also see themselves as the guardians of international humanitarian law.
Even if protecting civilians as an ideal is at the core of peacekeeping missions in the post-Cold War era, they are essentially a militarized form of policing peace. Peacekeeping is about troops, a multilateral collection of different national armies that have deployed and donated some of their soldiers. These professional warriors, men and women, are trained to fight, so within a peacekeeping mission, they need to hold themselves back from what they were taught to do. It is a problematic reframing to many blue helmets who have had military training their entire lives.
Peacekeeping had a substantial civilian aspect, but they were essentially military endeavours. For instance, in Congo in 1960, a significant element of the mission was replacing Belgian colonial officials' withdrawal to prop up the newly independent Congolese administration. They ended up with many technocrats, experts, and international officials who participated under the big umbrella of the peacekeeping mission. And yet, the peacekeeping mission was a martial effort. There are a lot of rituals involved in peacekeeping that are explicitly militarised.
This in no way means that the ICRC is not militarised. It has military structures within its hierarchy. However, the ICRC policies are more about humanitarian efforts to limit belligerence.
Your book's assessment is attractive, especially regarding the “imperial pretensions” of some of the new postcolonial states, such as Indonesia and India. These anticolonial bastions of the Third World and Non-Alignment movement would instrumentalise the peacekeeping missions to legitimise the latest state to uphold and cover the bureaucratic deficiencies. At the same time, they would try to subvert the status quo by annexing neighbouring regions and suppressing their minorities’ self-determination claims. How did the UN missions deal with these dominant postcolonial states?
The chapter that I work on, the case of the peacekeeping mission in West Papua, demonstrates these existing tensions in the moment of decolonisation. By the early 1960s, everyone in the Afro-Asian anticolonial movement seemed relatively united. Still, it was an intense debate about what sovereignty and the nation-state should look like. There were alternative visions by internationalist and antinationalist thinkers at the time, people who were conceiving other ways for political organisations to have representation, protection, and recognition.
The narrative of the peacekeepers is about protecting the liberal international order by safeguarding the existing states. The UN cosmopolitanism was supported by the idea that every nation-state should have its place at the table. This implied, within the UN, that everyone agreed that the nation-state was the perfect unit of political organisation. This tension is created by the actors in the decolonisation geographies. For instance, in Congo, we see the fear of balkanisation in the secession of Katanga. Once decolonised, the artificial lines of colonial nations’ borders became very fragile. The logic of Congo's borders was entirely a colonial construct by the Belgian Free State, and when this crumbled, the entire territoriality was questioned.
As protectors of the status quo, the UN peacekeeping mission had to defend these artificial colonial borders. With the annexation of West Papua, Indonesia sought to keep its colonial boundaries, hold its place as one of the leading anti-colonial powers, and foster its national interest. It is curious how the fiercest anticolonial state elites were also the greatest advocates of the artificiality of colonial territories. Peacekeepers were well aware of this and their role as protectors of the postcolonial status quo. A chaotic decolonisation was dangerous not only because of the perils of collapse and ethnic violence but also because of the permanent communist threat and the possibility of the new countries falling into the Soviet fold.
Interestingly, you mention the Soviet threat. Despite the broad communist membership in the UN, you note that Western officials, politicians, and liberal ideas about the international order dominated the peacekeeping initiative. How did Cold War anxieties and rivalries shape the goals and actions of peacekeeping missions?
Anticommunism within the UN Secretariat filtered through peacekeeping, which I saw across all my different missions. This insidious fear of Soviet ideological aggression took over many of the UN institutions and was often racialised in a lot of ways.
Liberal democracy was subconsciously conceived as a white supremacist order that has been the Great Powers’ design for a very long time. After the Second World War, this hegemony became more precarious due to decolonisation. Colonised nations such as Indonesia and India had sacrificed too many men and resources in the war effort against Japan. Hence, their self-determination demands intensified since 1945, when we saw the structures and systems of the UN being established for the first time. Within that mindset, the Soviets began 1945 by being allies, but very soon, they became adversaries, and the relations between the permanent members of the Security Council froze. What had previously been a process that enabled a vast amount of power for the wartime allies was now empowering the Soviets with the veto within the Security Council. They became this authoritarian power to deal with. To Western eyes in the UN, threats to peace were inherent to communism; this was regarded as a destabilising ideology that would use decolonisation as an opportunity to take over the Third World and shape a new socialist international order. These fears were entrenched in the idea that liberal democracy was the most moral and superior form of governance and a beacon for peacekeeping. Therefore, the military interventions led by a liberal organisation would always be in the best interests of the host states.
Why do we not see the socialist regimes equally committed to the Peacekeeping missions?
The Soviet Union initially tried to donate troops to observe a mission in Palestine, but it was blocked. There was an effort by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld to prevent all permanent members from accepting Soviet involvement. Within the very own peacekeeping programme, there was a natural preference for countries seen as middle powers, such as Yugoslavia, Iran, and Pakistan. The Soviets resisted because of the prevailing anticommunism in the UN liberal elites and because they were one of the Security Council's permanent members. There was a deliberated policy to keep great powers out of peacekeeping missions. During the Cold War era, we often see the United States giving military resources to peacekeeping but never providing actual troops on the ground.
How were the missions staffed? Was there any conflict between the peacekeepers' national loyalties and the UN mission on the terrain?
When I examined missions from 1956 to 1971, I realised there was a shift towards increasing amounts of mid-level leadership coming from Third World nations, especially after the election of U Thant as Secretary General. From the beginning, Dag Hammarskjöld had recognised that there would be an accusation of colonial continuities if peacekeeping missions were commanded and staffed by American, British, French or Soviet personnel. That is why he prevented all permanent members from being involved. Regarding European participation, Cold War-era missions have a strong Scandinavian, Irish, and Yugoslav presence. There were also many Canadians, Pakistanis, and Indians—the so-called middle powers. From the UN perspective, Hammarskjöld conceived them as politically or diplomatically safe.
There was a troop donation process, but the actual recruitment of individual members of staff who would then be leadership figures is what I found particularly interesting. Those personnel were incredibly influential for being gatekeepers between the field and the headquarters. They held a massive amount of power and decision-making whilst also being in this quite difficult position of having limited room to manoeuvre a lot of the time. This is why we potentially lose sight when we talk about peacekeeping. Although we can speak of continuities between each mission, each mission’s context is unique to the particular staffing consideration at the time and the geopolitical position, the regional context, or all of those different aspects.
If, as you claim in the book, peacekeeping practices perpetuated colonial imaginaries and structures, how is this possible, given the non-Western origin of most peacekeeping personnel?
I think the argument throughout the book is demonstrated through structures rather than individuals.
Although some individuals themselves are often perpetuating racist characteristics, my interest is in how there are continuities in these structures that enable the perpetuation of colonial thought and practices in the field. In many cases, part of the peacekeeping staff had colonial backgrounds and careers previously. So that is kind of the easy way out of this argument. They had this expertise and so were hired as part of that process.
What is more complicated and nuanced for us is how someone from a Third World nation would reflect politics or ideas that are not necessarily anticolonial. A lot of the officials I looked at were global South representatives acting in the field and perpetuating colonial or Eurocentric ideas, even if they had anti-colonial credentials. For instance, Djalal Abdoh, the Iranian representative at the UN, was incredibly elitist in his conceptions of what a standard of development looked like within the structures, language, and cultures of UN peacekeeping.
Peacekeeping initiatives were inspired by liberalist nationalism and determined by this Western entitlement to impose upon a host country a specific model for how its future should look. So, that kind of civilising mission aspect was perpetuated through the logic of peacekeeping itself.
The time frame you chose to study (1956-1971) is closely related to decolonisation. However, the peacekeeping missions did not cease to exist by then. Why did you stop your research there? What happened with the peacekeeping policies after the 1970s?
I think the Peacekeeping chronology was cut in half by 1994 when the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was established. It completely transformed how peacekeeping is structured, how decision-making practices exist, and how the missions were related to the General Secretariat and the Security Council. During my period (1956-1971), the UN was a very young and experimental organisation. Peacekeeping has been forged during these years, so this aspect of improvisation is fascinating to me. As the peacekeeping missions developed, there was this elastic question of what they could be and how they might work.
In 1994, it became its own department and specialised agency within the UN. During my time there, the secretary general was always very influential in the missions. This personal relationship existed between the leadership, the face of the UN, and its manifestations on the ground. In addition, most of the scholarly work on peacekeeping had dealt with the post-Cold War period, so I was curious about those foundational years. Another reason why I ended my story in 1971 is because my main characters passed away or left the UN by then. The 1970s were a period when no new peacekeeping missions were created. There would be observer missions but no armed peacekeeping missions in the same way. It is a very different kind of relationship between a host country and an observer or armed mission. Besides, when designing the project’s draft, I needed to narrow my scope; we all have to narrow our scope somewhere, so I chose to focus on the armed peacekeepers.
How have the four peacekeeping missions you worked with (Suez, Cyprus, West Papua and Congo) remade international cultures of humanitarianism and doctrines of imperial war?
I believe peacekeeping does remake how we think about conflict and war, as much as we would like to think about peacetime. I do not understand the binary between war and peace. In studying military conflicts, we see a constant negotiation between war and peace and warring actors compromising and moving between different spaces. My goal was to understand how peacekeeping as a political project was able to position itself as the solution to world conflict to the benefit of great powers: putting a conflict in the fridge and preventing it from expanding into potentially a regional or even a geopolitical crisis and having that kind of Cold War impact. Thus, peacekeeping implied a complete transformation in how states interacted with one another, conceived conflict, and the types of solutions available.
Many scholars working on international humanitarian law have shown how fascinating it is that global organisations have accepted this militarised solution as peaceful, disregarding more militant forms of the abolition of war. Pacificist ideas had incredible vibrancy and energy from anticolonial activists during the 1950s and 1960s. Still, peacekeeping eventually demonstrates how these ideas were squashed in preference for the domination of the hegemony of militarised peace. The idea of a permanent militarized peace gave the UN a permanent function simultaneously, but it also transformed how we think about interstate and civil wars.
It can be said that peacekeeping missions legitimised the UN. They created a loophole in militarised peace and interventions, and the UN could not solve conflicts. There would be an international outrage if the UN took sides. It is a very vulnerable organisation. The UN has many limitations and structural issues, and it must rely so heavily on its most powerful member states to maintain its operations. Keeping neutrality and compromising with all the member states was crucial to guarantee the UN’s ongoing survival and reputation. So, there is always this tough line the organisation has to walk.
Margot Tudor was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter from 2021 to 2023 and currently holds a position as Lecturer in Foreign Policy and Security in City, University of London.