United Nations Peacekeeping Participation and Civil-Military Relations in Troop Contributing Countries with Reference to Nepal

Abstract

This study focuses on Nepal’s historical contribution to United Nations peacekeeping missions and identifies an empirical puzzle: Nepal suffered from unstable civil-military relations (CMR) at home, even as it supported UN peace efforts with large peacekeeping deployments during the period studied. This finding is counterintuitive because the conventional wisdom on CMR argues that participation in international peacekeeping operations promotes stable CMR by making young soldiers more cosmopolitan, less nationalistic, and more resistant to calls for military “salvation” via coups in times of crisis. This work traces the policy-making process on peacekeeping issues, including the role of the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the military establishment, and analyses the evolution of CMR in Nepal. The study uses a qualitative analysis, as well as comparative methods. The two-step approach enables the author to find the correlation between political interests and the level of CMR in Nepalese peacekeeping participation and to compare it with other nations to test the validity of the hypothesis. The main objective of this research paper is to analyze the relational aspects and interdependence between United Nations peacekeeping participation and civil military relations in troops contributing countries. It also examines CMR during different periods of peacekeeping participation and political evolution in Nepal; and, compares it with Argentina and Mongolia.