Since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping has shifted from impartial mediation toward militarised intervention, a trend accelerating after 9/11. The article develops the concept of proxy peacekeeping to argue that peacekeeping can function as a form of proxy intervention, enabling troop-contributing countries (TCCs) to advance national security interests and manage regional threats under multilateral cover. Drawing on cases from Mali and Somalia, it shows how neighbouring TCCs instrumentalise peacekeeping to project influence, secure borders, and externalise risk, undermining mission impartiality and cohesion. It concludes by questioning proxy peacekeeping as a collective response to contemporary conflict management and resolution.

Analyses of Somali kinship groups often focus on their mobilisation during conflict, while their contributions to service provision receive less attention. We engage literature on authority in contexts where state institutions are absent or coexist with multiple actors, including traditional leaders. Rather than depicting patrilineal descent groups as performing state-like functions, we examine them as products of socio-political, cultural, and religious dynamics, emphasising their histories without attributing primordial properties. An empirically grounded approach is required, focusing on how kinship networks generate authority, mobilise resources, deliver services, and gain legitimacy. Findings are based on fieldwork between 2021-2023 in Kenya and Somalia, combining interviews, observations, and document analysis. We show how descent-based networks mobilise qaraan and religious giving, coordinate diaspora support, and deliver education and healthcare, thereby reproducing authority while shaping everyday governance and offering crucial insights into debates on political order and service provision beyond the state.

How does the experience of peacekeeping shape the countries that contribute troops and the troops themselves, individually and collectively? Most of the peacekeeping literature's focus has traditionally been on field missions, the countries that host them and the challenges of attracting sufficient and appropriately trained troops. We suggest that more emphasis should be put not only on the locations where missions deploy, but also on the individuals, countries and institutions that make up the missions. To analytically capture this more comprehensive understanding of what peacekeeping is-its multiple effects across space-we suggest drawing on the concept of assemblages to make an analytical shift from peacekeeping missions to global peacekeeping assemblages. First, this approach abandons the prior analytical separation of field mission, host country and contributing state/organization as discrete or isolated analytical focus points. Second, it encourages a detailed empirical methodology that focuses on how multiplicities of different actors, knowledges, technologies, norms and values through power struggles and negotiations constitute assemblages in geographically dispersed locations. Third, we suggest treating peacekeeping as flexible social facts, as outcomes of the co-functioning of heterogenous actors with diverse motivations and objectives that cannot be traced back to a single, but rather multiple point(s) of origin(s).

While much of the peacekeeping literature fixates on mission deployments, associated challenges and the escalating violent contexts they navigate, this article underscores the transformative reverberations of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries. Drawing from the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) case, our main focus is to elucidate how international peacekeeping shapes domestic security procedures, but we also point out that they are reciprocally influenced by them. Central to our analysis is the concept of 'peacekeeping assemblage' that we introduce to highlight the symbiotic relationship between the GAF's domestic security roles and its international peacekeeping engagements. Through this lens, we trace the cyclical flow of practices, discourses and experiences as they disassemble and reassemble in varied configurations, emphasizing the fluidity of peacekeeping influences across global landscapes. As discussions on peacekeeping evolve, it becomes paramount to grasp its broader implications-particularly its transformative impact on the personnel from troop-contributing nations and their home societies. This enriched perspective not only deepens our comprehension of the multifaceted nature and global reach of peacekeeping, it also provides policy-makers with insights into the broader ramifications of deployments, especially for those nations from the global South that bear the weight of these missions.

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework through which we can understand the city as a medium of future policing. Employing the city as a lens for illuminating how the police perceive of and seek to preempt and counter diffuse and hybrid threats associated with crime and terrorism, we direct attention towards how officers' affective orientations such as fear, anxiety and desire inform practices of policing. At the core of our framework is the argument that police work in the city implies an emotional response to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the urban environment that is aimed increasingly at responding to threats that have not yet materialized. To capture how affective orientations inform police work, it is necessary to move beyond the understanding of police work as expressions of a centrally governed bureaucratic institution, adopting instead an ethnographic focus on the micro-dynamics and everyday practices of policing. An ethnographic approach, we propose, allows access to the context-specific ways in which the police engage in preemptive practices of policing the future, and in turn, opportunities for unfolding how urban transformations will shape the future of policing.

By exploring the case of Ghana, this special issue provides two perspectives on UN peacekeeping that until now have been underdeveloped in the literature. First, rather than taking a mission and its host country as the analytical point of departure, the contributions in the special issue focus on how peacekeeping has shaped domestic security in Ghana – a consistent contributor of security personnel to peacekeeping since 1960. Second, instead of focusing on the military component, attention is paid to the link between peacekeeping and law enforcement, and thus how policing – as carried out by the state-sanctioned Ghana Police Service, Ghana Armed Forces and a range of non-state actors – intertwines with and is partially shaped by practices, ideas and discourse that can be traced back to mission deployments. Theoretically, the concept of assemblage is used to frame how peacekeeping stretches across state boundaries and intersects with the politics and practices of domestic security provision. Both at a state institutional level, and in day-to-day policing by individual police officers, order-making practices and discourses are constituted by the assembling of a multitude of logics and historicities that integrate and assimilate as well as contradict and oppose one another. It is how the experience of peacekeeping becomes part of and shapes these ever-evolving assemblages that the contributions to this special issue investigate. Changes may be institutional and macro-political but are as often deeply personal and individualised, with implications for how security personnel perceive and practice their roles.

While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions, the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize this notion of urban space to capture Freetown's war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sierra Leone Police (SLP) re-emerged with external support, seeking to compartmentalize and fixate Freetown through a combination of force and negotiation. We use borders and bordering to understand policing as attempts by both ex-combatants and the SLP to border in as well as out; defensively against external interference and offensively to make territorial claims. By extension, it is tensions in these practices between attempts to defend and harden borders, and at the same time, expand and soften them that trigger a tremble. The city tremble was a reminder of the possibility of war that Freetown very easily could return to. It also became a more general and inconspicuous condition of the city as an inhabited space, where multiple and often incompatible and conflictual spatial logics, strategies, and practices of policing clashed, overlapped and co-existed uneasily.

This article shows how peacekeeping experiences manifest in the Ghana Police Service’s (GPS) community policing strategies and practices in often inconspicuous and individualized ways. Peacekeeping constitutes an important element of what the article refers to as the community policing assemblage. However, the article emphasises that the shape of the community policing assemblage is conditioned by a wide range of discourses and practices beyond peacekeeping. Global and national policies and strategies relating to policing, including the GPS’s own transformation agenda, local and individual interpretations and translations of peacekeeping experiences and what community policing means, all play into how the assemblage is formed. Thus, the article disentangles the effects of peacekeeping and puts it in the context of broader policing in Ghana, based on in-depth interviews and observations with police officers, mainly from the GPS’s community policing headquarters in Tesano, Accra. It concludes that while several studies have shown how peacekeeping has shaped Ghana’s security institutions and sense of role in the world, it has not been able to chip away at or counteract the deep and deepening control that security institutions in the country are subjected to by politicians. Arguing that the peacekeeping experience may have a profound transformative effect on individual police officers, yet little if any impact in terms of depoliticising the GPS and policing more broadly, is a less sweeping conclusion. However, suggesting that the effects of peacekeeping often are local and individualized, at times deeply embodied experiences, is also a more accurate conclusion empirically.

Through the lens of security sector reform, this article explores shifts in international interventions since the Cold War. Identifying three phases, it traces the global North's failure to transform fragile states into liberal democratic polities and changes to intervention practices in response to that failure. Immediately after the Cold War, an unfettered belief in the liberal peace thesis, and its global applicability, drove interventions that sought to establish an integrated liberal internationalist system of states shaped by mutuality. This changed with 9/11, shifting the focus towards extensive statebuilding exercises to replace, by force if necessary, security sectors and reconstruct failed states as liberal democracies. The current phase reflects lost faith in the global North's transformative potential following experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. New forms of intervention from a distance have emerged, relying on delegation to technology and militaries of the global South. This type of intervention allows the global North to maintain a sense of influence while shifting the burden of intervention onto the global South's populations and militaries—and foreclosing comprehensive statebuilding. The global North can no longer claim to act on behalf of universally applicable norms, but alternatives have yet to materialize, leaving interventions in an ideological limbo.

This article explores Sierra Leone's trajectory from host of the world's largest peace-support operation to post-conflict provider of peacekeepers elsewhere. Building on the authors' previous research, it aims to nuance contemporary theoretical discussions of why states contribute peacekeepers, arguing that existing frameworks are unable to fully explain such developments in the Sierra Leonean case. A key reason is that these frameworks principally focus on national-level decision-making, overlooking the influence of foreign governments and external political pressures. Sierra Leone's contribution of peacekeepers became integral to the post-conflict reconstruction of its armed forces, enabled and pushed forward by external partners, most prominently the UK. As such, internal and external factors intertwined to advance this trajectory, from national identity to income generation, international support and domestic crises. Sierra Leone's trajectory grew from unique circumstances - with international partners playing an exceptionally central role in driving the process forward. These factors make Sierra Leone an important case to interrogate, against the backdrop of existing theoretical frameworks that seek to explain why states contribute troops.

This article explores how transitions produce non-linearity in Sierra Leone's security and justice programming, as it unfolded from the late 1990s and onwards starting in open conflict. Transitions have received limited detailed analytical consideration in the literature on interventions because they are mundane and inevitable, and therefore taken for granted. However, they definitively condition how programmes evolve. We show that transitions can be seemingly small as well as comprehensive, but commonly have unpredictable, hidden and often unmanageable transformative effects on the trajectory of security and justice programmes. To conceptualize the logic of transitioning, ritual theory - and specifically liminality that is a central component of rites of passage - is used to capture the inherent diffuseness and unpredictability of transitioning. Transitions in programming are liminal moments, 'neither here nor there', and as such characterized by ambiguity and indeterminacy. The ambiguity, and importance, of transitions stems from their potency to disturb the direction of programming, requiring the suspension of routine, which internationally funded programming is notoriously ill-suited to deal with. Empirically, the article looks at three types of transitions in Sierra Leone: (1) war to peace; (2) turnover of staff; and (3) elections leading to change of the party in power.

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

The concept of friction is applied to challenge the assumption that the main goal of peace support operations is to permanently stabilise a country. By exploring missions in Somalia and Mali, where neighbouring states are the main troop contributors, we suggest to focus on the interaction among troop-contributing countries within missions. They express how national interests play out in the framework of international organisations. Even when a mission deploys, rules that should de?ne how cooperation is to occur during deployment are lacking, especially when they contradict national interests of individual troop contributors. The result is mission incoherence and fragmentation.

This paper addresses an important critique of hybridity as it has been applied in peace and security studies. On the one hand, it has assumed separation and otherness, because of its point of departure in understanding what occurs in the meeting between international and national (or local) actors in peacebuilding processes. At the same time, there is a danger of overemphasising positive accommodation, while not detailing what processes of hybridisation entail in practice. By exploring police reform in Sierra Leone, the paper shows the inherent tension that characterises hybridisation, and how positive accommodation as well as separation occurs simultaneously.

This book explains how security is organized from the local to the national level in post-war Sierra Leone, and how external actors attempted to shape the field through security sector reform. Security sector reform became an important and deeply political instrument to establish peace in Sierra Leone as war drew to an end in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through historical and ethnographic perspectives, the book explores how practices of security sector reform have both shaped and been shaped by practices and discourses of security provision from the national to the local level in post-war Sierra Leone. It critiques how the notion of hybridity has been applied in peace and security studies and cultural studies, and thereby provides an innovative perspective on IR, and the study of interventions. The book is the first to take the debate on security in Sierra Leone beyond a focus on conflict and peacebuilding, to explore everyday policing and order-making in rural areas of the country. Based on fieldwork between 2005 and 2018, it includes 200+ interviews with key players in Sierra Leone from the National Security Coordinator and Inspector-General of Police in Freetown to traditional leaders and miners in Peyima, a small town on the border with Guinea. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security, anthropology, African politics and IR in general.