David Ambrosetti

Sending peacekeepers abroad, sharing power at home: Burundi in Somalia

This article attempts to answer how Burundi has become one of the main troop-contributing countries to international peacekeeping missions. To do this, it examines how the post-conflict political settlement between Burundian parties and external partners has impacted on the decision to deploy Burundian troops in multilateral peace operations in Africa. The authors claim that Burundis decision to deploy troops, which took place in the midst of an overarching security sector reform, had a temporary stabilizing effect on the internal political balance due to several factors, including professionalization, prestige, and financial opportunities. From an international perspective, Burundis role in peacekeeping has helped to reverse the image of Burundi as a post-conflict country in need of assistance to that of a peacebuilding state, offering assistance to others who are worse off. These factors taken together have also enhanced the possibilities for the Burundian Government to continue its trend of demanding independence from international oversight mechanisms and political missions, while maintaining good relations with donors, despite reports of increasing authoritarianism and limited political space. The article draws on significant fieldwork, including over 50 interviews with key actors in the field and complements the scarce literature on African troop-contributing states.

Human Security as Political Resource: A Response to David Chandler's `Human Security: The Dog That Didn't Bark'

FROM AN ACADEMIC STANDPOINT, I see two ways of dealing with the currently influential discourse of ‘human security’. The first consists in assessing the internal logic of the arguments supporting (or contesting) the new doctrine, and in examining their expected political and ethical consequences through the use of logical reasoning. Although valuable, however, such exercises present a risk: as Pierre Bourdieu (1990: 48–51) has put it (following Marx), it is a frequent mistake of ‘professional exponents of logos and logic’ to ‘take the things of logic for the logic of things’. In response, the second, more sociological, way favours long-term empirical analyses focused on the transforming and unchanged practices surrounding the new doctrine and their consequences for the actors concerned, in terms of resources, social/ political positions and hierarchies, ‘rules of the game’, stability and change, etc. The major interest of David Chandler’s (2008) review essay is to call for critical distance and empirical research as regards human security, in order that we might better understand the growing appropriation of the human security discourse by state officers and bureaucratic decisionmakers. This is the core of his quite severe criticism of Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh & Anuradha M. Chenoy’s (2007) Human Security: Concepts and Implications. Those authors do not propose in-depth empirical analyses of the politically oriented appropriation of human security, though they do acknowledge its possibility when they discuss the relation between human security and the ‘responsibility to protect’, as well as the interventionist and discretionary content of the latter doctrine. The second book discussed by Chandler, A Decade of Human Security: Global Governance and New Multilateralisms, edited by Sandra MacLean, David Black & Tim Shaw (2006), meets his expectations more accurately. The authors of the various chapters in this edited collection are more sceptical of the new ‘paradigm’, and their approaches are more empirical. They place more importance Response

The Diplomatic Lead in the United Nations Security Council and Local Actors' Violence: The Changing Terms of a Social Position

ABSTRACT Inspired by interactionist and constructivist sociology, this paper focuses on the United Nations Security Council as an arena with its own social rules and bureaucratic routines. It presents the informal position that security council diplomats delegate to specific members of the council, the position of “leader,” when dealing with specific dossiers. Indeed, a change occurred during the 1990s and the early 2000s in how council diplomats considered the task of leading a United Nations peace operation, notably in regard to the use of offensive military. The analysis of this change is documented with empirical material concerning the French leading position in the African Great Lakes region, from Rwanda in 1993 to Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2003. A second instance of diplomatic leadership considered is the leading role assumed by the British authorities in Sierra Leone (1991–2002). The new “leadership” role calls on United Nations diplomatic leaders to better protect the credibility of “their” peace operations. It sheds a light on the importance of deterring or incentive messages embedded in routine security council decisions and how routine practices may change when facing critical situations.

Normes et rivalités diplomatiques à l’ONU

Lorsquils traitent des conflits armes et des violences aux consequences humanitaires les plus graves, tels que ceux qui ont ensanglante la region africaine des Grands Lacs ou encore la Sierra Leone des 1990, les decideurs diplomatiques a lONU ne sauraient perdre de vue les interets des Etats quils servent. Ces interets ne peuvent toutefois etres compris hors des normes partagees par les differents acteurs engages sur ces dossiers. Construites au fil des pratiques, selon des ressources tres inegalement partagees, ces normes fonctionnent comme des balises dans la reconnaissance de linfluence entre pairs et entre partenaires. Si elles facilitent la reproduction quotidienne de linfluence, elles supposent egalement le risque de discredit et de declassement dans les arenes multilaterales. Pour le montrer, le present ouvrage replace ces diplomates gestionnaires de conflits armes face a leurs audiences , et mesure les risques que ces dernieres font peser sur eux dans leur travail quotidien. En appliquant aux relations internationales des outils forges par la sociologie, et fort dune observation du travail diplomatique au Conseil de securite de lONU, lauteur porte un eclairage original sur la prise de decision en politique etrangere, en particulier sur le poids de limage mediatique et de la politique interieure au coeur des rivalites diplomatiques.

Beyond the “Norm Entrepreneur” Model: Rwanda, Darfur, and Social Sanction among UN Diplomats

When investigating why state decision makers opt for intervention in the heart of armed violence abroad, many scholars refer to new humanitarian norms appearing among state officers, particularly within the UN. In these approaches, “norm entrepreneurs”, and the high risks of public opprobrium they are supposed to induce, stand at the front stage of normative change. Compliance with newly promoted normative ideas seems totally bereft of professional risks, though. This paper intends to bring back in a dimension of norms that is central in sociology: social sanction. Investigating how social sanctions are practically enacted among diplomats at the United Nations precisely provides useful data to detect the many norms that prosper beyond—and before—normative enterprises, and to assess why the humanitarian idea and the recent “responsibility to protect” still have weak normative effects, practically speaking. The international failures in Rwanda and more recently in Darfur deserve re-examination in this prospect.

The Burundian army’s trajectory to professionalization and depoliticization, and back again*

ABSTRACT How can post-conflict militaries with a history of politicized oppression and exclusion achieve professionalization? In this article, we examine the Burundian armys trajectory through the longue durée, studying its role in and for the state from 1966 to the current political crisis. The aim of the article is to increase understanding of how, and to what extent, the Burundian army has managed to professionalize after the end of the civil war in the early 2000s, in spite of its violent and exclusionary history. We argue that the Burundian army has managed to professionalize and depoliticize to a limited extent (and with important constraints) following the end of the civil war due to three factors: (1) an important pre-war heritage of a technically and functionally professional, yet politicized army; (2) a favourable domestic political climate where the army no longer needs to play a political role but can take on the role of domestic peacemaker; (3) significant external training and support related to peacekeeping deployment and Security Sector Reform (SSR). This professionalization has, however, partly been reversed during the recent crisis starting in 2015, showing the fragility of a post-conflict professionalization where ties between officers and political actors are revoked again.

«Décide de demeurer saisi de la question». La mobilisation du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU face aux crises

Cet article s’interesse aux regles formelles et surtout informelles, ou pratiques, autour desquelles s’organise le travail des delegations diplomatiques au Conseil de securite en reponse aux conflits armes, ces «xa0crisesxa0» qui rythment le quotidien de ces delegations. Ce faisant, l’article interroge les modalites d’une sociologie des agents etatiques plonges dans un environnement multilateral comme l’ONU. Il propose plus precisement une grille de questionnement axee sur l’identification de groupes plus restreints, porteurs d’attentes collectives en vertu des positions specifiques (institutionnelles, professionnelles et interactionnelles) que les diplomates se reconnaissent a l’ONU. L’analyse permet de comprendre combien l’«xa0interetxa0» des representants diplomatiques a agir, a se saisir d’une situation de conflit arme et a l’eriger en crise a l’ONU, depend d’enjeux elabores en partie en dehors du temps de l’urgence provoquee par ces conflits, et en partie a l’exterieur du Conseil de securite. Cet interet s’ajuste a la grammaire du jeu multilateral ainsi investi par les Etats face a des audiences plus larges, generant pour ces diplomates de nouvelles opportunites mais aussi de nouveaux risques dans l’exercice de leur fonction.