What Difference Does it Make? UN Peacekeeping’s Impact on Civil-Military Relations in Troop-Contributing Countries

Abstract

Participating in UN peacekeeping missions used to be seen as an appropriate way to improve civil-military relations in countries where armed forces held undue political power. Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship cautions that sending troops to increasingly coercive peacekeeping missions can contribute to a deterioration of civil-military relations. How can this variance in outcomes of peacekeeping deployments be explained? Taking stock of the existing academic debate on socialisation processes in peacekeeping and comparing the cases of India and Brazil, this article argues that military role conceptions are a key factor for understanding the effects of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries.