Human Interaction and Soft Skills in Peacekeeping

This book challenges the dominant top-down view of peacekeeping by focusing on the individual peacekeeper's embodied, everyday experiences and interactions in the field, and the soft skills needed for him or her to navigate those interactions. Why is this focus important? Because macro-level goals, such as security and stability, often hinge on micro-level dynamics: how peacekeepers perceive, interpret, and navigate interpersonal and inter-organizational encounters. These encounters are shaped by the varied set of meanings brought to every interaction by the embodied individual soldier and individual police officer. Meanings around gender, culture, and their own roles are drawn from the individual peacekeeper's organization and their own society. The other peacekeepers and the members of the local populations bring their own sets of meanings. Understanding these different social and cultural meanings and being able to act on them constitute key soft skills needed for peacekeepers. Interactions can produce common understanding and cooperation, or they can lead to an impasse, damaged relationships, and poor cooperation. Drawing on 177 in-depth interviews with experienced male and female military and police peacekeepers from six nations, this book provides significant insight into how interactions at the micro-level and the soft skills to manage them are crucial to effective cooperation and achievement of the mission goals. It delineates and demonstrates through vivid scenarios the soft skills each peacekeeper needs to improve these interactions: awareness of organizational culture, awareness of local culture, awareness of gender, awareness of the role of empathy, and crucially, the willingness and capability to act upon these.This book will be of much interest to students of peacekeeping, conflict studies, security studies, gender studies, sociology, and International Relations in general.