Assembling UN Peacekeeping and Counterterrorism in Ghana

Abstract

Through the case of Ghana, this article proposes a link between international peacekeeping deployments and national processes of stabilisation. Based on fieldwork among soldiers and police officers, it explores how peacekeeping experiences are transferred and translated into security provision at home within the field of counterterrorism. Introducing the notion of the ‘peacekeeping-counterterrorism assemblage’ as an analytical lens for unpacking the co-production of external and internal security provision and, more specifically, the processes and practices through which international peacekeeping experiences become entangled with national counterterror policing, the article empirically unfolds the relational and societal impact of peacekeeping on domestic security. The exposure to the human consequences of warfare in peacekeeping missions, the article shows, has nurtured a profound awareness of keeping war at a distance, which may have a preventive effect on the policing of the threat of terrorism, as well as on the broader dynamics of domestic security and stability in Ghana.