About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


21 Global Governance 141 (2015)
Beyond the Technological Turn: Reconsidering the Significance of the Intervention Brigade and Peacekeeping Drones for UN Conflict Management

handle is hein.journals/glogo21 and id is 143 raw text is: Global Governance 21 (2015), 141-160 Beyond the Technological Turn: Reconsidering the Significance of the Intervention Brigade and Peacekeeping Drones for UN Conflict Management Touko Piiparinen In 2013 the United Nations applied two new peacekeeping instruments, the Intervention Brigade and unmanned aerial vehicles, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This article argues that the significance and novelty of the Brigade and UAVs for UN peacekeeping are not only attributable to their technologically advanced and robust capacities, as maintained in pre- vious accounts. Most importantly, these instruments also function as the harbingers of a new paradigm for peacekeeping-sovereignty building. The current technological turn of UN peacekeeping is only an epiphe- nomenon of a more profound paradigm shift in UN peacekeeping toward sovereignty building. Sovereignty building can be defined as an emerging set of peacekeeping practices that aims to create or reinforce four consti- tutive elements of sovereignty, which have previously been sidelined in state building; namely, sovereign agency (the political will of the host gov- ernment), sovereign space (the area of supreme state authority), related sovereignty (the sovereignty network of subregional and regional peers), and popular sovereignty (the protection of the population). KEYWORos: peacekeeping, unmanned aerial vehicles, United Nations. THE UN PEACE OPERATION IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (DRC), Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en RD Congo (MONUSCO), has functioned as a laboratory for testing new peace- keeping techniques. Many of those instruments have subsequently been approved and applied throughout the UN peacekeeping system. One new technology is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for MONUSCO's surveillance purposes. The Security Council's decision to deploy UAVs as a part of MONUSCO in January 2013 marks the first-ever authorization of UAVs in UN peacekeeping.' The template for peacekeeping drones is expected to be replicated in the UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in southern Sudan and in C6te d'Ivoire.2 The second new instrument employed by the UN in the DRC is the so-called Intervention Brigade (henceforth, the Brigade) authorized by the Security Council in March 2013, which also pro- vides a model of offensive operations for future UN peacekeeping. A third, normative, innovation is the due diligence policy, officially termed the