Productive contestation : R2P and the images of protectors in UN peacekeeping

Abstract

Protection, uncommon in peacekeeping before the 1990s, has become the norm. This article takes issue with this normative shift and explores how the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Protection of Civilians (POC) have normalized peacekeepers’ protection duty in particular ways. Taking a discursive rather than functionalist approach to norms, I develop the concept of productive contestation to emphasize the polysemic, interactive, and relational essence of norms as social processes with unintended and not necessarily positive consequences. Revisiting the narrative around protection norms and analyzing changes in the peacekeeping principles, I argue that the cosmopolitan R2P helped construct peacekeepers as militarized protectors of individual bodies, while its currently prevalent state-centric version remade them into police protectors of order and stability. This article reinterprets how “robust” protection has transformed in peacekeeping, offering a new way to theorize contestation by making visible the political productivity of contested norms.