Book Review: More than fighting for peace: Conflict resolution, UN peacekeeping and the role of training military personnel

• Author: Georgina Holmes
• Published date: 01 April 2019
• Date: 01 April 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X17730814
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Curran, D. (2016). More than fighting for peace: Conflict resolution, UN peacekeeping and the role

of training military personnel. New York, NY: Springer. 150 pp. $47.50 (paperback), ISBN

9783319463056.

Reviewed by: Georgina Holmes, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17730814

Recent policy developments reaffirm the importance of ensuring that military peace-

keepers are trained and equipped with the necessary skills and abilities to respond

effectively in complex and difficult peacekeeping environments. Three high-level

reviews commissioned by the United Nations (UN) in 2014–2015 emphasized the

requirement to ensure that local people are actively involved in decision-making at

all levels of peacebuilding, while high-profile failures to protect civilians, humani-

tarian workers, and journalists such as during the crises in Malakal, South Sudan, in

2016, have increased the pressure on UN troop contributing countries (TCCs) to

deploy adequately resourced military peacekeepers capable and willing to use force

(UN HIPPO Report, 2015, p. x).

These distinct objectives, as scholars in the field of critical peacekeeping studies,

military studies, and conflict resolution theory have argued, result in the articulation

of two different types of peacekeeper: the warrior peacekeeper who employs tradi-

tional military skills to engage in robust peacekeeping and the cosmopolitan peace-

keeper who uses softer skills for protection of civilian tasks and mission-specific

peacebuilding projects. The challenge is knowing how to improve peacekeeping

training, so that these divergent peacekeeping identities can be better reconciled.

The rationale here is that training military peacekeepers as third-party interveners

can help facilitate positive transformation of peacekeeping operations and improve

the implementation of protection strategies.

These are the policy-relevant, empirical quest ions David Curran addresses in

More than Fighting for Peace? Conflict Resolution, UN Peacekeeping and the Role

of Training Military Personnel. He contends that structural limitations in the curri-

culum design contribute to the failure of contemporary multidimensional peace-

keeping operations to evolve and identifies the challenges peacekeepers—and

trainers—face in light of the UN’s evolving policy framework for addressing violent

conflict. Theoretically, the book contributes to the field of conflict resolution studies

Armed Forces & Society

2019, Vol. 45(2) 389-393

ªThe Author(s) 2017

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