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Peacekeeping and development assistance are two of the United Nations’ (UN) defining activities. While there have been extensive studies of UN engagement in each of these areas, respectively, less attention has been given to the relationship between peacekeeping and development. We examine that relationship in this article. We do so by first considering whether concepts and principles that underpin peacekeeping and development cohere. We then combine original quantitative data with qualitative analyses in order to document the degree to which development goals and activities have been incorporated into UN peacekeeping operations since their inception over 70 years ago. While we observe a steady increase in the level of engagement of peacekeeping with development over time, we argue that short-term security goals have been prioritized over longer-term development objectives in a number of recent UN peacekeeping operations, as peacekeepers have been deployed to contexts of ongoing conflict.

I first met Monique at the Colegio de Michoacán, when she was doing fieldwork in Jalisco for her doctoral thesis. We shared interests in both Mexican land reform communities and political anthropology generally and continued to exchange ideas back in Europe. I felt privileged to be invited to be one of the examiners of her thesis in Wageningen, which was awarded a far-from-routine cum laude distinction. I reported to the committee that I judged her work equally outstanding for its depth of ethnographic enquiry and for its theoretical contributions. It reached a much wider audience than specialists on Mexico after being condensed into her book Power, Community, and the State. Here, however, I want to focus on some of Monique's later research, on the urban periphery of Recife, Brazil. By a happy coincidence, our mutual interests converged again in Brazil, where I was working on the urban periphery of Salvador, Bahia, in collaboration with Dr. Maria Gabriela Hita of the Federal University of Bahia; but it is not because of professional links or the deep personal affection that Monique inspired in all her friends that I want to discuss her Recife studies. It is because they confirm that she remains a “presence that does not end,” the wonderful title chosen for the online event paying homage to all her contributions that the Colegio de Michoacán organized in March 2021. Monique's research is highly relevant to the current conjuncture in Brazil, shaped by the 2016 “parliamentary” coup and subsequent election as president of Jair Bolsonaro, whose regime is now regularly accused of being genocidal as well as ecocidal. Since Bolsonaro's popularity is waning and the Supreme Court has drawn a line under the “lawfare” that blocked ex-president Lula of the Workers’ Party (PT) from standing against him in the 2018 election, the return of a more civilized government under Lula's leadership now seems a possibility. Yet for that very reason, Monique's critical analysis of the PT in power in Recife offers us vital lessons about the limitations such a government would need to transcend to eliminate the enduring structural foundations of social injustice.

While scholars of nonviolent resistance recognize that large-scale campaigns are more likely to be successful campaigns, we currently have little understanding of why some nonviolent protests grow into mass movements while others do not. In this article, we explore campaign size and, in particular, the role of individual and collective motives in facilitating the growth of nonviolent campaigns. We start by assuming that, after campaign onset, barriers to growth emerge because some aggrieved individuals who are sympathetic to the cause are wary of incurring the (opportunity) costs of participating in campaign rallies. On occasion, we argue, organizers respond to this challenge by staging events that generate rewarding emotional experiences for participants and spectators, such as concerts, mass singing, or other collective expressive acts. Since the feelings of empowerment, solidarity, catharsis, or glee that accompany these events can only be enjoyed by those who are physically present at campaign rallies, the provision of such “emotive events” creates an individual-level incentive for passive supporters to mobilize. As this incentive attracts new participants, campaigns can grow—potentially into large-scale phenomena. To assess the plausibility of our argument, we code original data on emotive events and investigate whether the provision of such events in the course of nonviolent campaigns is associated with the size and scale of those campaigns. Finding this to be the case, we conclude that campaigns that are more creative, humorous, cathartic, and/or fun are also more likely to be large-scale campaigns.

The social impacts of neoliberal capitalism combined with colonial legacies have supported the instrumentalization of a politics of resentment on the part of the far-right in many countries. With an ethnographic perspective, we explore in depth how a politics of hate implanted itself in contemporary Brazilian society. With data from a low-income community in Brazil, we analyse the development of the strong polarization that began in 2016, within and between different social classes, which served as the basis for a notable electoral victory by the far-right.

This article takes its cue from Joel Kahn’s reformulation of the Kantian account of cosmopolitanism, which highlights the way that ‘popular’ cosmopolitan practices tend to emerge between localized ...

‘Peace’ and (violent) ‘conflict’ are often seen as conceptual mirror images of one another; peace is the absence of conflict, and conflict is the absence of peace. Given this conceptual interdependence, some scholars see that the study of war/making and the study of peace/making are complementary – or even functionally identical – academic projects. Others, however, see that studies of violence and warmaking are antithetic to studies of peace and peacemaking. The six contributions to this JoGSS Forum explore these contrasting perspectives, with a view to assessing the ‘state of the discipline’ of peace and conflict studies (and cognate disciplines, such as security studies). The introduction offers provocations for debate. The two contributions that follow consider connections and disconnections between the study of conflict and studies of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice, respectively. The next two contributions focus on areas of investigation that do not fit neatly into either the ‘peace’ or ‘conflict’ categories – Gender, and Nonviolence – and the authors explore how studies of these topics might create bridges between scholarship on peace and studies of violent conflict. The concluding contribution argues that ‘mainstream’ peace and conflict research has come to be dominated by positivist treatments of war and violence, and it draws attention to alternate approaches that have the potential to transform and ameliorate social relations.

Previous research has suggested that leaders of democratic regimes are particularly willing to contribute troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations because backing ‘liberal’ peacekeeping allows them to support the diffusion of liberal institutions. However, evidence used to sustain this argument is based on contribution patterns during the decade of peacekeeping that followed the Cold War. In this article, we argue that there has been a reversal in the relative willingness of democratic and non-democratic governments to provide the United Nations with peacekeepers since then. Specifically, we propose that the introduction of more ‘robust’ forms of peacekeeping during the 1990s has rendered democratic governments reluctant to contribute large numbers of peacekeepers to United Nations operations because elected leaders are now concerned that voters may object to the deployment of national troops to high-risk humanitarian missions in which there is no clear national interest. By contrast, non-democratic leaders partly discount public opinion because they are less reliant on popular support to retain power. Thus, when non-democrats see that contributing troops to United Nations peacekeeping will bring them reputational and/or resource benefits, they are willing to contribute peacekeepers — and on a large scale. We test our claims quantitatively. We find that since the 1990s, democratic governments have remained more likely than non-democrats to contribute some troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations, but non-democratic governments have been more likely to make large-scale contributions. We also find that governments have been especially reluctant to make sizeable contributions to peacekeeping when elections have been on the horizon.

A mi parecer, la diagnosis de nuestra situación ofrecida por Gustavo es muy oportuna. Tal vez las voces de antropólogos profesionales sean un poco más prominentes en el mundo del “conocimiento experto” ligado a organizaciones multilaterales e internacionales y a comités de asesores de organizaciones gubernamentales y no gubernamentales, pero en general creo que tenemos que aceptar lo que dice sobre la debilidad de nuestro perfil público profesional actual y nuestra aparente incapacidad de producir análisis de los “grandes retos” de nuestra época que consiguen atraer el interés del público en general y ganar peso político.

espanolTanto en Brasil como en Mexico, las elecciones de 2018 resultaron en un “cambio del regimen” importante. Aunque la victoria de la ultraderecha en Brasil parece una replica de tendencias en los estados Unidos y Europa, expresando un rechazo de la clase politica establecida, algunos analistas ven el triunfo de Lopez Obrador en Mexico como un fenomeno de la misma indole, sugiriendo que se trata simplemente de versiones “derechistas” e “izquierdistas” de una reaccion “populista” a condiciones de crisis. Este trabajo pretende matizar este analisis, dando mayor consideracion a las distintas historias de Brasil y Mexico, junto con la configuracion de fuerzas, nacionales y transnacionales, que estan detras de los escenarios actuales. Desde una perspectiva que toma en cuenta tanto las duraderas estructuras del poder social como los impactos de politicas economicas y sistemas de mando neoliberales sobre el tejido social, la coherencia de movimientos anti-sistemicos, y la administracion de la vida politica, se aprecia mejor los desafios de salir del laberinto neoliberal en base a acciones “desde abajo”. EnglishIn both Brazil and Mexico, the 2018 elections resulted in an important “regime change”. Although the victory of the ultra-right in Brazil appears a replica of tendencies in the United States and Europe, an expression of rejection of the established political class, some analysts see the triumph of Lopez Obrador in Mexico as a phenomenon of the same type, suggesting that it is simply a matter of “right-wing” and “left-wing” versions of a “populist” reaction to crisis conditions. This article aims to qualify this analysis, giving greater consideration to the different histories of Brazil and Mexico, together with the configuration of forces, national and transnational, behind the contemporary scenarios. From a perspective that takes into account both enduring structures of social power and the impacts of neoliberal economic policies and rule systems on the social fabric, the coherence of anti-systemic movements, and the administration of public life, one can better appreciate the challenges to exiting the neoliberal labyrinth on the basis of actions “from below”.

ObjectiveTo develop a diagnostic test that stratifies epileptic seizures (ES) from psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) by developing a multimodal algorithm that integrates plasma concentrations of selected immune response–associated proteins and patient clinical risk factors for seizure.MethodsDaily blood samples were collected from patients evaluated in the epilepsy monitoring unit within 24 hours after EEG confirmed ES or PNES and plasma was isolated. Levels of 51 candidate plasma proteins were quantified using an automated, multiplexed, sandwich ELISA and then integrated and analyzed using our diagnostic algorithm.ResultsA 51-protein multiplexed ELISA panel was used to determine the plasma concentrations of patients with ES, patients with PNES, and healthy controls. A combination of protein concentrations, tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL), intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1), monocyte chemoattractant protein-2 (MCP-2), and tumor necrosis factor–receptor 1 (TNF-R1) indicated a probability that a patient recently experienced a seizure, with TRAIL and ICAM-1 levels higher in PNES than ES and MCP-2 and TNF-R1 levels higher in ES than PNES. The diagnostic algorithm yielded an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.94 ± 0.07, sensitivity of 82.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] 62.9–93.0), and specificity of 91.6% (95% CI 74.2–97.7). Expanding the diagnostic algorithm to include previously identified PNES risk factors enhanced diagnostic performance, with AUC of 0.97 ± 0.05, sensitivity of 91.3% (95% CI 73.2–97.6), and specificity of 95.8% (95% CI 79.8–99.3).ConclusionsThese 4 plasma proteins could provide a rapid, cost-effective, and accurate blood-based diagnostic test to confirm recent ES or PNES.Classification of EvidenceThis study provides Class III evidence that variable levels of 4 plasma proteins, when analyzed by a diagnostic algorithm, can distinguish PNES from ES with sensitivity of 82.6% and specificity of 91.6%.