Louisa Lombard

LOUISA LOMBARD, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, received funding in October 2017 to aid research on ‘Ethics in Wars of Protection: Rwandans Re-Make Peacekeeping.’ In the 21st century military peacekeeping has changed: peacekeepers are expected to do more to protect civilians, and there are more peacekeepers from Africa, and deployed in Africa. Rwandan soldiers are at the center of these transformations. Their government has been among the staunchest supporters of aggressively protecting civilians, and the tiny country has become one of the world’s largest contributors of peacekeeping troops. The changing social landscape for peacekeeping creates new moral challenges for the deployed soldiers, and the grantee’s ethnographic research with Rwandan soldiers before, during, and after their deployment as peacekeepers has delved into what they see as morally challenging and how they deal with conflicts that arise. They described how they strove to align the prerogatives of bureaucratic rules and process, their roles in hierarchies, and their ideals. They wanted to be both good students, following all the rules and using the best parades, and good teachers, demonstrating they knew how to do peacekeeping better than (differently than) the ‘mere’ procedure-followers. Though they frequently resolved the inherent tension between the two by prioritizing the role of good student, that is changing.