Performing Peace: Discourses of Progress and Professionalism in United Nations Peacekeeping

Security sector reform (SSR) – a practice aimed at promoting effectiveness and accountability among host state security forces – has become a core responsibility for many UN peace operations. Blue helmets are routinely tasked with fostering respect for human rights and the rule of law among local police and military personnel, activities that are discursively framed as essential for long-term peace and stability. Among those engaged in SSR, narratives about progress and professionalism figure prominently in justifications for their work. UN officials, representatives from troop contributing countries, and peacekeepers themselves tend to represent SSR as a necessary, linear process; security sector actors are trained, ‘professionalized,’ and then used to extend the authority of a liberal, democratic state. How are these discourses of progress and professionalism deployed in the context of UN peacekeeping, and to what effect? Existing scholarship shows that hierarchical assumptions about expertise – about peacekeepers’ own professionalism and their role as ‘helpers’– can reinforce unequal power relations with host communities. There is, however, a further dynamic at play among some peacekeepers and troop contributing countries. With most blue helmets coming from under-resourced states in the Global South, including countries that have recently hosted UN missions, narratives about progress and professionalism also serve to enhance status and rebuff criticism. For peacekeepers, they are ready-made discursive tools, which can be invoked to assert one’s own professionalism. For troop contributing countries, they provide scripts that foreground domestic progress towards effectiveness and accountability in the security sector. Drawing on interview transcripts and UN documents, this paper uses a discursive lens to highlight these secondary effects and demonstrate the wider political impact of narratives about progress and professionalism in peacekeeping.