The Infrastructure of Peace: Socio-spatial planning in UN Peace Operations

Abstract

My research examines infrastructure building, and the ‘planning for peace’ embedded therein, in the context of United Nations (UN) peace operations. The installation of solar panels, the repair of roads, and the construction of bridges constitutes an important vehicle for conflict transformation and imaginary for the future of a conflict-affected society. Peace operations’ infrastructure projects have a significant, long-term impact on the built environment and ecology in the places of intervention – a logic that is scarcely articulated as part of peace efforts and remains disjoint from the sustainability discourse to which peacebuilding has turned. My dissertation constitutes a multi-disciplinary inquiry, connecting urban studies and peace studies through an approach informed by historical sociology. I offer an urban planning perspective on peace operations, and specifically its infrastructure building. Through three case studies, this dissertation explores the ‘infrastructural imaginaries of peace’ – infrastructure as promise, risk, and legacy – pursued through engineering and planning expertise and practice in the UN missions in Cyprus in the 1960s, in Haiti after the mid-2000s, and in Mali after 2013.

The dissertation’s central argument is that peacekeeping operations conduct a significant socio-spatial (re-)organization in pursuit of peace through infrastructure building. The dissertation’s historical perspective on peacekeeping’s involvement in public works highlights that – contrary to the recent uptick in attention to peacekeepers’ ecological footprint and ‘sustainable’ peace efforts – socio-spatial, urban and environmental aspects have always featured in peace operations, albeit through different paradigms. Furthermore, the recent increased attention on ‘greening’ peacekeeping and ‘positive legacy’ after missions’ closure reveals an uneasy positioning of peace operations’ infrastructure building between the pursuit of positive and negative peace objectives. These objectives are not easily reconcilable and challenge us to rethink the spatial and temporal dimension of peace efforts, and the equity planning that might need to gain more traction in peace operations’ infrastructure projects.