The Dark Side of United Nations Bureaucracy - Taking a Closer Look at Peace Operations

Abstract

Establishing a sustainable peace in a conflict-ridden country is challenging. Scholars dealt extensively with the local conditions on the ground, the international community’s will to invest its capabilities, and single strategies in policy areas like security sector reform to identity patterns of success and failure of peace operations. The role the international bureaucracy plays in this regard has largely been neglected though. Therefore, the primary idea of the international panel is to facilitate in-depth discussion on two largely neglected aspects of UN peace operations: the administrative side of peacebuilding and the political side of international administration. We aim at establishing a new research agenda focusing on the fine-grained processes and administrative micro-politics within peace operations - patterns that will inform general research agendas on international organizations, international public administrations or international bureaucracies as well. In particular, we look at the dark side of bureaucracy. We distinguish between structural patterns like inflexibility, dys-functionalities, deep equilibria and path-dependencies, and unintended consequences as well as conscious agency like spoiling, dissent-shirking, obstruction, and sabotage. The contributions to the panel will be published in a special issue in an international journal. We have contacted Professor Thomas G. Weiss (City University New York) as the panel chair.

Title	Details
Keeping the Peace through Bureaucratic Power and Politics?	View Paper Details
Strategic Management in Peace Operations. An Organizational Analysis of Post-conflict Police Reform in Afghanistan and Kosovo	View Paper Details
Spoiling from Within: Empirical Evidence from the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor	View Paper Details
Organised Hypocrisy or Multiple Actors and Centres of Agency? Examining the Competitive Arena for Normative change Processes in the Area of Peacekeeping	View Paper Details
Bureaucratic Spoiling – Dissent-Shirking, Obstruction, and Sabotage in International Public Administrations	View Paper Details