Knowledge, Discourse, Security: UN Interventions as Security Practices – the Case of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq
The thesis is an interdisciplinary work that situates itself at the intersection of Critical Security Studies, Sociology and International Relations. In the poststructuralist stream of Critical Security Studies, foreign policy is analyzed as a discursive and social practice in which identities and representations are created by intertwining policy discourses with “material factors and ideas to such an extent that the two cannot be separated from one another” (Hansen 2006:1). Foreign policy thus also is identity politics that structures social space and creates social order. International interventions such as UN mission are representations of multi-lateral foreign policy and do as such need to be analyzed in terms of underlying identity politics, normativity as well as with regard to the discursive practices by which they are constituted. Using a deconstructivist approach, this research project analyzes UN interventions as international security practices that enact political identities through knowledge /and/ discourses. It proposes a new perspective on UN-supported interventions as the deconstructive perspective allows uncovering implicit normativity and linearity assumptions in current intervention paradigms. It further embeds interventions in a sociological framework that takes into account social reflexivity and interdependence and thus takes a first steps towards closing the micro-macro-gap in current theory.
Methodologically, this research project uses central poststructuralist concepts of discourse, identity, power and knowledge for the analysis of identity construction in intervention practices at the level of the UN Security Council and the UN Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). In addition, self-descriptions of different social groups within and outside of Iraq are being analyzed in regard to their own identity narratives, their interrelatedness to identity and knowledge discourses in the UN, and their structuring of (global) social space.