UN Institutional Self-Legitimation: Competing Normative and Operational Identities in Peace Operations

This paper represents the initial conceptual exploration for a new research project examining the issue of institutional self-legitimation in the context of peacebuilding operations by the United Nations (UN). The UN, as an organization, has certain perceptions of its own identity—what it stands for, how it behaves, and what its role is. However, the UN’s identity is manifold: it is at once an operational actor that participates actively in the management of conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction and a normative actor that develops, upholds, and promotes norms and principles at the international level. These identities are not only external projections, they are also internal self-perceptions—they define how UN staff see themselves and help them to gain and maintain a sense of the worthiness and ‘rightness’ of their role in international affairs. However, the UN’s different identities may dictate conflicting goals and practices in the context of peace operations, forcing UN staff to ‘violate’ the principles and activities considered appropriate to one of its identities. The UN thus often undertakes contradictory practices and relies on discourse and symbolic acts to convey or ‘package’ its actions a certain way. It does this partly to shape external perceptions of its behaviour, but also partly to convince itself that it is behaving in line with its stated principles. This paper unpacks this process of endogenous or self-legitimation in the context of UN peace operations, examining legitimacy and legitimation, the ways in which the UN’s multiple identities dictate different sources of legitimacy in post-conflict situations, and the way in which it uses discourse to validate and revalidate its different identities where its normative and operational identities conflict. The paper concludes with next steps and implications for the research.