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 to navigate those interactions.

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 police officer. Meanings around gender, culture, and their own roles are drawn from the individual peacekeeper’s organisation and their own society. The other peacekeepers and the members of the local populations bring their own sets of meanings. Interactions can produce common understanding and cooperation, or they can lead to an impasse, damaged relationships and poor cooperation. The book draws on 177 in-depth interviews with experienced male and female military and police peacekeepers from six nations to provide significant insight into how interactions at the micro-level are crucial for 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 organisational 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.

Anne Holohan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is author of Networks of Democracy: Lessons from Kosovo for Afghanistan, Iraq and Beyond (2005) and Community, Competition and Citizen Science: Voluntary Distributed Computing in a Globalized World (2013).

Kamila Trochowska-Sviderok is Associate Professor, War Studies University, Poland. Since 2015, she has delivered soft-skills training for international peacekeeping personnel within NATO and EU frameworks.