Abstract
In 1957, following the truce which ended the Suez War, the United Nations deployed its first peacekeeping force to monitor the separation of Egyptian and Israeli troops in Gaza and in the Sinai. On the first evening that the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was deployed in Gaza, UNEF troops sprayed with machinegun fire a minaret from which a muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer. The UNEF soldiers, not understanding Arabic or Islam, had mistaken this as a call for civil disobedience.1 Ten years later UNEF withdrew from Gaza and the Sinai at the behest of the Egyptian President Nasser. This withdrawal was a key factor leading to the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War and was widely cited as evidence of the failure of the United Nations’ foray into the field of peacekeeping. Further, it set off a continuing debate about what Nasser’s statements and actions really meant, underscoring the importance of cultural questions to the establishment and success of peacekeeping.2
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Notes
B. Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 136.
R. Cohen, Culture and Conflict in Egyptian—Israeli Relations: A Dialogue of the Deaf (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 98–110
I.J. Rikhye, The Sinai Blunder: Withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force Leading to the Six Day War June, 1967 (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing Company, 1978), p. 240.
I.J. Rikhye and K. Skjelsbaek (eds), The United Nations and Peacekeeping: Results, Limitations and Prospects: Issues in Peacekeeping and Peacemaking (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 199
T.G. Weiss (ed.), Humanitarian Emergencies and Military Help in Africa: Issues in Peacekeeping and Peacemaking (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 136
I.J. Rikhye, Strengthening UN Peacekeeping: New Challenges and Proposals (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1992), p. 48.
B. Urquhart, Decolonization and World Peace (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989), p. 105.
C.W. Maynes, ‘Containing Ethnic Conflict’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 90, No. 3, 1993), pp. 3–21.
R.A. Rubinstein and S. Tax, ‘Power, Powerlessness, and the Failure of “Political Realism”’, in J. Brøsted, et al. (eds), Native Power: The Quest for Autonomy and Nationhood of Indigenous People (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget AS, 1985), pp. 301–8
R.A. Rubinstein, ‘International Conflict, Decision-Making, and Anthropology’, Anthropology Today (Vol. 2, No. 1, 1986), p. 14
R.A. Rubinstein, ‘The Collapse of Strategy: Understanding Ideological Bias in Policy Decisions’, in M.L. Foster and R.A. Rubinstein (eds), Peace and War: CrossCultural Perspectives (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986), pp. 343–51.
R.A. Rubinstein, ‘Cultural Analysis and International Security’, Alternatives (Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988), pp. 529–42
R.A. Rubinstein, ‘Ritual Process and Images of the Other in Arms Control Negotiations’, Human Peace (Vol. 6, No. 2, 1988), pp. 3–7
R.A. Rubinstein, ‘Culture, International Affairs and Peacekeeping: Confusing Process and Pattern’, Cultural Dynamics (Vol. 2, No. 1, 1989), pp. 41–61; R.A. Rubinstein, ‘Methodological Challenges in the Ethnographic Study of Multilateral Peacekeeping’ Paper presented at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, 15–19 November
R.A. Rubinstein, ‘Culture and Negotiation’, in E.W. Fernea and M.E. Hocking (eds), The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), pp. 116–29.
R.A. Rubinstein and M.L. Foster, ‘Revitalizing International Security Analysis: Contributions from Culture and Symbolism’, in R.A. Rubinstein and M.L. Foster (eds), The Social Dynamics of Peace and Conflict: Culture in International Security (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 1–14.
P.K. Davis and J.A. Winnefeld, The RAND Strategy Assessment Centre: An Overview and Interim Conclusion about the Utility and Development of Options (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1983), p. vii.
S. Hosmer, Constraints on U.S. Strategy in Third World Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1985), p. 130.
Political realism is an approach which privileges certain kinds of information in the analysis of political relations. Especially it: (1) treats the state as the unit of analysis; (2) construes useful knowledge as objective fact; (3) treats the state as a rational actor the behaviour of which conforms to the objective realities; and (4) restricts calculations of power and interest to material resources. See Rubinstein, ‘Cultural Analysis’, op. cit., in note 7, pp. 530–2; and Y.H. Ferguson and R.W. Mansbach, The Elusive Quest: Theory in International Politics (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), p. 300.
R.G. d’Andrade, ‘Cultural Meaning Systems’, in R. Shweder and R. LeVine (eds), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 88–119. Similarly, in his Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 89, Clifford Geertz defines culture as ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life’.
See, for instance, G. Weiss, ‘A Scientific Concept of Culture’, American Anthropologist (Vol. 75, No. 5, 1973), pp. 1376–413.
For surveys of the importance of symbolism to cultural analysis, see M.L. Foster and S. Brandes (eds), Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning (New York: Academic Press, 1980), p. 416
J.L. Dolgin, D.S. Kemnitzer and D.M. Schneider (eds) Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 523; and R. Shweder and R.A. LeVine (eds.) loc. cit., in note 14, p. 359.
For discussions of the nature of ritual symbolism see, E. d’Aquili et al., The Spectrum of Ritual (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979)
C.D. Laughlin et al., ‘The Ritual Transformation of Experience’, Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Vol. 7, No. 4, 1986), pp. 107–36
D.I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 235.
See I.J. Rikhye, The Theory and Practice of Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p.
D. Kertzer, op. cit., in note 18, p. 11. See also V. Turner, ‘Ritual Aspects of Conflict Control in African Micropolitics’, in M. Swartz, V. Turner and A. Tuden (eds), Political Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1966), pp. 239–46
V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967)
V. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1969).
M.L. Foster, ‘Reversal Theory and the Institutionalisation of War’, in J. Kerr, S. Murgatroyd and M. Apter (eds), Advances in Reversal Theory (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1993), pp. 67–74; and D.I. Kertzer, op. cit., in note 18, p. 132.
M. Heiberg, ‘Peacekeepers and Local Populations: Some Comments on UNIFIL’, in I.J. Rikhye and K. Skjelsbaek (eds), The United Nations and Peacekeeping: Results, Limitations and Prospects (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 151. See also E.A. Erskine, Mission with UNIFIL: An African Soldier’s Reflections (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1989)
M.L. Foster, ‘The Growth of Symbolism in Culture’, in M.L. Foster and S. Brandes (eds), Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 367–97. For discussion of ritualized role reversal in human societies, see also E. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 132–6.
R.A. Rubinstein and S.D. Lane, ‘International Health and Development’, in T.M. Johnson and C.F. Sargent (eds), Medical Anthropology: a Handbook of Theory and Method (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 380.
E.E. Rice, Wars of the Third Kind: Conflict in Underdeveloped Societies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 186.
See for example, D.P. Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 22
Z. Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century (New York: Charles Scribner, 1993), p. 240.
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Rubinstein, R.A. (1998). Cultural Aspects of Peacekeeping: Notes on the Substance of Symbols. In: Jacquin-Berdal, D., Oros, A., Verweij, M. (eds) Culture in World Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26778-1_9
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