Peacekeeping, policing and politics: assembling the Ghana Armed Forces

Abstract

‘These skills are translated into peacekeeping’, one officer offered, as we discussed his training for and involvement in the many internal security operations that the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) deploy across Ghana. ‘The more internal operations you engage in, the better you become, because you are exposed to different situations’, he continued.¹ In turn, ‘experiences from Liberia and Sierra Leone train them [soldiers] to do missions back home’, explaining how peacekeeping shapes GAF responses to domestic chieftaincy and resource conflicts, patrolling highways and other law enforcement roles.² These context-specific statements reflect this article's larger analytical ambition: to expand what peacekeeping as a form of intervention entails. It suggests including—but also reaching analytically beyond—a focus on missions and the countries that host them, which dominates policy and academic discussions, to incorporate discussion of how peacekeeping transforms the troop-contributing countries within a single framework of analysis.

For understanding the circular, mutually productive, relationship between peacekeeping mission and troop-contributing country, Ghana provides an exemplary case. The country has consistently figured in the top ten troop contributors³ and has been widely recognized for its in-mission efforts. Much analysis has emphasized the positive aspects of participation in peacekeeping, including financial benefits for individual soldiers as well as the state; national and regional stability; international prestige; and the democratizing effects of such participation.⁴ These findings may be valid, but they do little to explain how, in practice, peacekeeping has contributed to transforming the military into a domestic security actor. By presenting a concrete, contextual and in-depth case-study of Ghana that builds on long-term qualitative fieldwork with the GAF, our article constitutes the basis for a comparison with other countries—such as Bangladesh, Rwanda and Ethiopia—which through their extensive peacekeeping contributions have shaped, adapted and partially funded their militaries.⁵ We have done this by outlining an analytical approach that centres on the assemblage concept,⁶ while also insisting on the particularities, historically and politically, of the case under scrutiny.

The article contributes to broader debates about how national—and local—military practices and global forms of intervention such as peacekeeping are interconnected. The peacekeeping literature has generally been preoccupied with the political, economic and social effects of missions as they deploy, and their effectiveness in implementing their mandates.⁷ The relationship between mission legitimacy and sovereignty of the host state,⁸ coping with violence against civilians,⁹ and, more recently, the implications of deploying in increasingly violent contexts¹⁰ have been dominant topics. A more sociologically orientated body of work examines how missions shape and transform the societies they deploy in, including the broader relational and spatial dimensions of everyday security.¹¹ A similarly comprehensive area of investigation has consisted in identifying motivations to contribute troops¹²—for example, to gain international recognition,¹³ build an army's identity,¹⁴ respond to pressures from foreign governments¹⁵ or simply to serve national security interests.¹⁶

An aspect of peacekeeping that is equally important to understand, but that has received less attention, is how the politics of sending troops abroad plays out in countries that contribute security personnel, including intended and unintended consequences of peacekeeping as the soldiers return from missions. The literature suggests that personnel gain important training and combat experience.¹⁷ For many global South contributors, like Ghana, peacekeeping has constituted a source of external revenue for both their militaries and individual personnel.¹⁸ A persistent claim is also that contributing to peacekeeping operations strengthens democratic learnings of militaries at home.¹⁹ At the same time, more sinister security-related effects have been identified that challenge the idea of peacekeeping's coup-proofing effect.²⁰ Maggie Dwyer identifies a link between military deployments to missions and mutinies in cases like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone.²¹ Other scholars have shown that the Brazilian government used peacekeeping deployments in Haiti to prepare soldiers for internal security operations in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.²²

This article inserts itself into these wider discussions on peacekeeping, emphasizing its global reach. It professes to see peacekeeping as a complex of relations that are spatially stretched as the material, ideological and practical manifestations of globalization, at times instrumentalized through agency, and sometimes the outcome of structuring effects.²³ The significance of peacekeeping is not just in how it transforms the places where missions are deployed. Equally important is the way in which the security personnel who deploy, as well as the contributing countries, undergo change in both conspicuous and instrumentalized as well as subtle and indirect ways.

To capture this more comprehensive gaze on peacekeeping, the assemblage concept is employed to analytically frame how the effects of peacekeeping are dispersed across space in ways that do not separate or hierarchize the local, national and international into distinct analytical levels.²⁴ Understanding peacekeeping and its effects as intervention in a particular location cannot be separated from how it shapes personnel that circulate in and out of missions, while simultaneously (or consecutively) having transformative effects on the countries that send them. Thus, recognizing peacekeeping as a form of intervention is to identify these spatially dispersed effects of what the article refers to as a peacekeeping assemblage.²⁵ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduced the assemblage concept to confront bordered and categorical thinking, specifically with respect to territory.²⁶ In the context of this article, it helps to challenge approaches that consider the state a bordered power container as the basic unit of analysis to understand security governance. The peacekeeping assemblage constitutes a continuously interactive and circular process of assembling, disassembling and reassembling. Multiple actors, things, discourses and experiences continuously assemble in missions, disassemble and reassemble in new constellations, for instance, in Ghana's internal security operations.

Next, the article elaborates the concept of the peacekeeping assemblage and how to use it theoretically and methodologically to frame peacekeeping's multiple effects. This section includes a discussion of where and how data was collected. We then turn to the case of Ghana in greater detail to explore the role of the GAF at the centre of government, in peacekeeping abroad and, increasingly since the early 1990s, in internal security operations. These discussions are followed by an analysis of how peacekeeping and internal operations assemble, mainly from the perspective of the people who deploy in both: namely, soldiers and officers in the GAF. Two internal operations are focused on in detail, Operation Halt and Operation Gong-Gong, the first of which was set up to support the Forestry Commission in countering illegal logging and the second to deal with land and chieftaincy disputes.

The peacekeeping assemblage—a theoretical and methodological approach

In this article peacekeeping is framed as a form of intervention that has global reach, with consecutive and sometimes simultaneous effects in multiple locations across space. Approaching peacekeeping in this way has specific analytical implications. It makes explicit that how the peacekeeping assemblage provisionally stabilizes in one place, disassembles and reassembles in others, should be analysed equally for how it occurs in countries that host missions, in countries that contribute the troops, and in international organizations that orchestrate interventions. In Ghana and other troop-contributing countries, discourses, practices, things and resources are derived from peacekeeping. They materialize in concrete form in ways of operating, such as conducting patrols, setting up checkpoints, escorting convoys and protecting VIPs and civilians, but also materially in the form of money, personal and embodied experiences, new ideas, policies and markers of identity. Together, they have knock-on effects for the organization of domestic security, while the role in internal security operations influences how peacekeeping is understood and performed. An important consideration here is agency: how individuals and institutions deliberately use ideas, resources and language to further their own—often historically embedded—interests and notions of order. Yet, equally important are the structuring effects of peacekeeping that make some learned practices and ideas more logical to pursue and perform than others. In sum, assemblages are not accidental, but they are held together both knowingly and unknowingly.²⁷

The ideas of an assemblage as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari, and by Manuel DeLanda,²⁸ and as further developed by Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, who analysed security governance through their concept of global security assemblages,²⁹ mirrors our expansive notion of peacekeeping as stretched across territorial boundaries. As numerous scholars have done before, this article emphasizes the need to reassess state-centred approaches to security governance. This is not just the case vis-à-vis multiplicities of actors such as traditional leaders and vigilante groups at the local level, but also more broadly in terms of seeing a state as the main locus of analysis, a territorial space, or a power-container, in and on which to centre the analysis of peacekeeping. Peacekeeping is carried out in a territorially defined space, but by militaries that belong elsewhere, who in turn are also shaped by the intervention—subtly as well as substantially.

Assemblage theory challenges conceptions of society that represent it as an organic whole (parts, homogeneity and similarities) and acknowledges that it is constituted by relations, heterogeneity and differences. Deleuze and Guattari developed the idea of assemblage as a ‘general logic’,³⁰ suggesting that one of its central axes consists in continuous practices of territorialization and deterritorialization. Creating territory is itself the attempt by humans to wring a fixed or stable entity out of something that is inherently political, dynamic and volatile. Thus, the concept of assemblage incorporates a spectrum, from stability to instability, fixation to fluidity, an attempt towards territorializing or connecting to place, and a proclivity towards change through deterritorialization.³¹ This challenges our understanding of what the reach of peacekeeping is. It opens an analytical space of transformation that can be minuscule and insignificant to macro-political dynamics—yet vital to individual experience³²—or structural and comprehensive in engendering societal change.³³ The determinants of peacekeeping assemblages, and the process of understanding how and where they provisionally stabilize, disassemble and reassemble, must necessarily undergo empirical scrutiny. This means grasping the multiplicity, complexity and contingency through which they take form, disassemble and reassemble in specific locations.

The assemblage approach reinforces an expansive gaze on peacekeeping—the circular relationship that exists between international intervention practices and discourse and the organization of law enforcement in a troop-contributing country like Ghana. In this way, the local, national and international are not distinct levels of analysis, but rather spatially dispersed locations that are connected (networked) and co-produce one another. Furthermore, and following the broader logic of an assemblage approach, the ‘aim is not a totalization’, as Steven Shaviro notes. We are not proposing ‘a definitive tracing of limits, or a final theory of everything’³⁴ that relates to peacekeeping. The aim is rather to exhibit pervasive transformative effects of international peacekeeping that are rarely at the centre of the analysis because the intervention itself, rather than the troop-contributing country, has been considered the critical object of analysis in the peacekeeping literature.

The centre of gravity in this study is to understand how experiences and resources travel across space from international peacekeeping and assemble in the domestic security practices of the internal operations of the GAF. The article does so by identifying associations between different networked components that constitute the peacekeeping assemblage as it takes shape, disassemble from it and reassemble in different locations and constellations across space. From this follows another value of the assemblage concept: it emphasizes the dynamic and somewhat unpredictable ways in which assemblages are formed. The productive effects of peacekeeping are not just to identify that war-fighting experience and training are gained, or that mission deployments allow states in the global South—like Bangladesh and Ghana, among others—to better fund their militaries. We need to understand the implications of these effects empirically for the troop contributors, but also be open to the unexpected effects of deploying with peacekeeping missions in the long term, both for the individual soldier and the military institution. These effects might be subtle, hidden and more surprising than we expect, yet they are vital to grasp.

As a methodological–analytical framework, analysing peacekeeping as an assemblage means grasping its networked effects across space. It means revealing, interpreting and representing peacekeeping in its different material and practical (empirical) manifestations framed by recognizing its spatial and practical diversity. Along these lines, we perceive peacekeeping as a never fully formed, nor entirely stable, network of associations that link institutions, people and practices both conspicuously and organizationally, as well as in less evident, more concealed and more indirect ways.³⁵ Different elements within the same assemblage can inhabit either the local or the global, but more often they inhabit both simultaneously.³⁶ It is the peacekeeping assemblage's analytical strength to recognize this foundational condition of intertwinement. This is the case in conspicuous and instrumentalized ways when soldiers make enough money after several deployments to build a house for their families, or when, as in the case of Ghana, an institution like the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) is established and new training curriculums are developed. It also happens more covertly and indirectly in less controlled or controllable ways, as embodied and individualized experiences of soldiers and officers that shape how they perceive their role in a political system that proactively encourages the use of soldiers for law enforcement roles.

The article adopts an ethnographic sensibility, that is, an in-depth qualitative data-driven approach to understand the meanings derived from peacekeeping, and the resultant individual and institutional choices and behaviours.³⁷ Furthermore, it tracks the assemblage's networked effect across space in seemingly distinct sites,³⁸ and reveals the multiplicity of what is being assembled, how it happens and with what effects.³⁹ At a basic level, operationalizing the assemblage concept means tracing people, practices, norms, discourse and policies to specific localized sites and examining the ways in which they are assembled.⁴⁰ Data for the study was collected during fieldwork in Ghana between 2019 and 2022 in the Greater Accra, Northern, Ashanti and Bono regions, mainly in military camps. The analytical depth and rich contextual specificity of this case have both inspired and facilitated development of the article's key concept, the peacekeeping assemblage.⁴¹ The nuance that a case-study makes space for, combined with an ethnographic sensitivity, has also enabled us to assert in both subtle and overt ways the complex interplay between international peacekeeping and internal security operations.⁴² Finally, while this study focuses on Ghana, it serves both as inspiration and as a benchmark for comparison with countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia, whose militaries have significantly contributed to peacekeeping while also managing domestic operations.

The focus of the article and a considerable proportion of the data that it is based on have been collected through more than 50 structured and semi-structured interviews, and through countless casual conversations with our interlocutors. Formal access to the GAF was gained through the KAIPTC, one of the main partners in Domestic Security Implications of UN Peacekeeping in Ghana (D-SIP), a five-year research project coordinated by the Danish Institute for International Studies.⁴³ This also meant that in addition to interviewing, we spent substantive time in military camps, observing military practices and visiting soldiers and officers while they were in the field on operation. We were careful to select different ranks of soldiers and officers for interviews, because of their different roles, experiences and perceptions as they relate to both internal and external security matters. The analysis is the result of categorizing interview material and field notes to identify dominant themes, ideas and practices that help us understand the mutually productive relationship between peacekeeping missions and domestic security.

Military engagement in politics, domestic security and peacekeeping

Examining how peacekeeping assemblages take form in a troop-contributing country like Ghana, and understanding the way peacekeeping and internal security assemble, necessitates delving into the networks of historically embedded trajectories, practices and discourses that the GAF has influenced and that have moulded it. Soon after Ghana's independence, peacekeeping became part of the foundation of the new state and of the articulation of its national interests globally. In 1960, when its first president Kwame Nkrumah engaged politically and militarily in the Republic of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo—DRC), this engagement was a manifestation of his grand strategy of decolonization, pan-Africanism and non-alignment.⁴⁴ Ghana left the Republic of the Congo in 1964, and did not deploy peacekeepers again until 1973, in the Second United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF II) in Egypt. Yet, the idea that Ghana had, and continues to have, a central role to play in global and African stability had been established, and peacekeeping provided a language and an institutional set-up for practising and articulating this role.

Jerry Rawlings—who became Ghana's president as a military officer through coups d'état in 1979 and 1981, and who served until 2001 following Ghana's transition to democratic rule—and his successor John Kufuor (2001–2009), saw peacekeeping as an important domestic and international policy instrument.⁴⁵ Rawlings had an intuitive understanding of what motivates soldiers, and practically ‘ran the army from his office’, as one of Kufuor's key advisers suggested,⁴⁶ spending earnings from UN peacekeeping on various strategies intended to stabilize relations with the military.⁴⁷ When Kufuor, the first civilian president of the Fourth Republic, came to power, he also saw peacekeeping as having a positive effect on the GAF by giving them a focus and a steady external income that benefited the military institution as well as individual soldiers and officers.⁴⁸ Indeed, ‘what really excited Kufuor was a presentation made to him early in the regime to show how profitable peacekeeping could be’.⁴⁹

The intimate role of the military in Ghana's political life reflects broader patterns in West Africa, a region which has experienced the highest rates of military coups on the continent.⁵⁰ Ghana alone experienced five coups between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. Rawlings headed a military government until January 1993 when the Fourth Republic was announced, ‘an experiment in democratic institutionalization’, as suggested by Kwesi Aning of the KAIPTC.⁵¹ As a civilian candidate and head of the National Democratic Congress, he was elected to the presidency and served two successive terms, remaining in power until 2001. Ghana has often been heralded as a ‘durable democracy’ with ‘roots of effective democratic governance’.⁵² However, the country was ruled almost without interruption by the military, or a president with a military background, for more than 30 years. This emphasizes the never fully institutionalized separation of military and civilian domains and has been key in shaping the form that the peacekeeping assemblage has taken in Ghana. Peacekeeping does not have effects independently from these factors. Rather, what is explored here is how peacekeeping in its different articulations travels and intertwines with existing constellations of power and authority.

While the political role of the post-independence GAF has been central to carving out a space for the military in domestic security, so has the police's ambiguous position vis-à-vis the political elite. Ghana inherited a paramilitary police force from the colonial administration, but rather than sustaining this capability, emphasis was put on straitjacketing the police service and maintaining its loyalty to the party in power at any given time. At its core, the Ghana Police Service's role has continued to protect the executive's interests and access to resources channelled through or safeguarded by state institutions. The postcolonial history of ‘political meddling’ in policing affairs has resulted in the non-investigation of politically motivated crimes by ruling party affiliates and the use of the police to target members of the opposition.⁵³ Distortion of the police as an apolitical and predictable security actor has been further reinforced by underfunding and the neo-patrimonial logic that governs policing (and public authority) more broadly.⁵⁴

Hence, the Ghanaian public views the police as one of the most corrupt state institutions.⁵⁵ These factors also reinforce the belief among Ghana's political elite that the military is a more consistent and reliable instrument to have at their disposal for enforcing internal security. GAF officers interviewed for this research did not disagree. They may have hesitations about being dragged into law enforcement roles, but as one former general and national security coordinator commented, reflecting broader sentiments among most interviewed military personnel:

Now, before we even look at how requests for involving the GAF in internal security are made, let's look at the police's capacity. Over time, our police [have] lacked capacity in many ways. He [the police officer] doesn't know how to shoot, nobody fears him, he can't enforce the law, he is somewhat stale. That created a gap that the military too early too soon came and filled.⁵⁶

Since the 1980s, attempts have been made to establish paramilitary capabilities within the police, in part ‘to leave the army alone’.⁵⁷ Some success was achieved during the 1990s with the establishment of what became known as the Buffalo Unit (equivalent to a SWAT—special weapons and tactics—team). However, the combination of a 32 per cent rise in national crime rates (on a per head basis) between 1990 and 2000,⁵⁸ together with the decision not to sustain the Buffalo Unit's capability, meant that ‘the momentum of paramilitary policing was dying down’⁵⁹—a momentum that would have been essential ‘to keep the military out of internal operations’.⁶⁰ Instead, a weakened police force has contributed to an image of the GAF as more neutral, better equipped and more highly trained.

Grasping how resources, discourses and practices move within the peacekeeping assemblage and partially shape internal security operations requires an understanding of how the military came to engage in law enforcement in the first place. Two factors stand out: the historically far-reaching role of the GAF in domestic politics and governance, and the politicization of law enforcement in the country. Indeed, these factors, which locate the military at the centre of internal security, create the foundation for a circular relationship between the roles of the GAF at home and abroad. They are key components of the peacekeeping assemblage, emphasizing that it simultaneously contains and inhabits the local and the global as partially co-constitutive.

Peacekeeping has not produced a space in which the GAF can legitimately and logically take on a role in law enforcement. This argument would oversimplify the implications of peacekeeping and would undervalue how soldiers, and their affiliated institutions, shape the discourses and experiences that come with peacekeeping. At the same time, peacekeeping has undeniably provided both a language and institutional practices that intertwine with and shape the historically embedded role of the GAF in domestic security, including how soldiers and officers understand and articulate it, as we explore in the next section of this article. In this way, Ghana provides the empirical groundwork to illustrate the peacekeeping assemblage, epitomizing wider debates on the interconnectedness of institutions, actors, practices, norms and discourses across local, national and international categorizations.

Assembling peacekeeping and internal security operations

Internal operations and international peacekeeping are not identical, even if practices used in the two are comparable and reinforce one another, and Ghana's long-term contributions to peacekeeping have corroborated deployments of the GAF domestically. Apart from legal and bureaucratic differences, the analytical implication of applying the peacekeeping assemblage suggests that the shape of practices, ideas and logics that assemble in a locality is contingent on histories of power, hierarchies of authority and decision-making, and relations among those who inhabit it. Thus, differences were regularly identified by our interlocutors, as one officer in Tamale explained while speaking about deploying at home and abroad:

There is a big difference, because first, we are human beings, and here [in Ghana] we feel more at home. Another issue is that in peacekeeping, we are more professional than when we are home, because when you deploy in the Congo, all you do is your task, your role, the whole year, that's what you do. But in Yendi [a town in northern Ghana], we speak the same language, relate with them, it is more relaxed in Ghana.⁶¹

While differences were frequently highlighted in our interviews, links between peacekeeping and internal operations were more often discussed in a way that blurred lines between the local and international. Often, it was unclear which of the two was being discussed, indicating how naturalized their intertwinement has become. ‘In peacekeeping, we are doing patrolling, roadblocks, that is something that is done often’, the general of the northern command in Ghana explained. ‘In this area [northern Ghana], where we are patrolling’, he continued, ‘the guys who went on peacekeeping have a very good sense of manning checkpoints, what to look for, patrolling, what do you look out for?’ This is common sense among GAF soldiers and officers alike. Peacekeeping reassembles in internal security operations, reinforcing soldiers' ability to perform in this capacity.

Engagement in peacekeeping superimposes internationally legitimate practices and discourse onto domestic roles of the GAF that do not concern classic military tasks such as territorial defence—a type of war that the GAF are likely neither to engage in nor be a party to. While peacekeeping missions during the 2010s have deployed in violent contexts where combat is a possibility, the primary experiences of the GAF have been in places where the overlap with internal security operations has been pronounced. It is due to these similarities—overlapping operational logics—that comparisons can be made and that we can talk analytically about peacekeeping assemblages taking form across space.

The experience garnered from international peacekeeping directly informs and refines domestic security operations of the GAF, as an officer observed:

[International] operations help us perform the task in Ghana with much ease. We are operating under some kind of tension [abroad], because there may not be weapons firing over us, but you are kept in the camp and don't go out [which is stressful].'

At the same time, there is an element of predictability in peacekeeping that separates the two roles. As he continued: ‘for internal peacekeeping, there is no clear mandate like what we have in Lebanon; this is your job [in Lebanon], a, b, c. But in here, internal operations, you use your discretion’.⁶² Using discretion or ‘your number six’ (sixth sense) are common phrases used to denote using intuition, which means avoiding actions that could create problems, such as arresting politicians or politically well-connected individuals. Rarely, however, were external and internal peacekeeping explained as entirely separate practices. Indeed, one senior GAF officer asked rhetorically:

What is peacekeeping? Peacekeeping is internal security duties being carried out in somebody else's country. We do patrols in Ghana, we call it [Operation] Calm Life, it's like peacekeeping. VIP protection and escorts we do in both places. It has helped us a lot to do internal operations as well as peacekeeping. [Indeed, the mutual dependence of international peacekeeping and internal operations] is one of the reasons why it will be difficult to reduce internal security duties. It is our record from peacekeeping that mostly influenced the decision to introduce the military internally.⁶³

And it works in the other direction, too: ‘Based on our teaching, doctrine, peacekeeping duties and Calm Life, there is no difference between the two. There is a very direct link. If we did not have the experience from here, how would we go out there?’⁶⁴ These statements indicate a logic among soldiers and officers that reflects how the peacekeeping assemblage takes form in practice, making internal operations a more coherent endeavour because of soldiers' experiences abroad and the commonality of logics that they generate. Simultaneously—and almost tautologically so—internal operations are considered a precondition for doing peacekeeping well. It is in this way that experiences, practices and ways of observing inherent to peacekeeping manifest within and between networked locations where they produce effects and give meaning, even dignity and legitimacy, to the roles that the GAF undertake.

Patrolling abroad and at home

Localized everyday security, with ‘taken-for-granted practices’ of order-making,⁶⁵ constitutes an important empirical entry-point to investigating how embodied practice, discourse and experience circulate among international peacekeeping missions and Ghana's internal security operations. Peacekeeping assemblages can be observed in tangible ways and through individuals' lived experiences, both in thought and practice. This is evident when GAF personnel repeatedly carry out assignments and tasks, ultimately conferred upon them by international and domestic political leaders and bureaucratic networks. As soldiers and officers translate these instructions into their daily duties, the processes of assembling, disassembling and reassembling become more accessible for analytical study.

Simultaneously, as practices are learned and travel across space as embodied experience or discourse, it is the constellations that they reassemble in in specific locations and histories of power and authority that shape their effects. No two peacekeeping assemblages are the same. Herein lies the transformative potential inherent in the peacekeeping assemblage, specifically as peacekeeping practices of the GAF are incorporated into law enforcement. Lessons may be drawn from peacekeeping in the sense that it reinforces the logic that military practices can be used efficiently outside warfighting in contexts that are more like law enforcement. However, these practices produce effects that are likely to differ substantially from one context to another, because the make-up of an assemblage is bound to change across locations.

An appropriate place to start in this regard is an unspectacular task such as patrolling, whereby militaries gather information and monitor and report incidents, while establishing presence in and dominating an area of operation. In the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), a mission to which Ghana has regularly contributed troops since its inception in March 1978, the GAF have prioritized extensive patrolling to a relatively greater extent than other troop-contributing countries such as France, Italy or South Korea.⁶⁶ In turn, the UN sees patrolling as ‘one of the most important activities that peacekeepers perform’,⁶⁷ and, in UNIFIL, the GAF have either commonly conducted patrols using non-armoured vehicles (such as white pickup trucks), or—unlike other militaries—has shown a preference for carrying out foot patrols.⁶⁸

Just as patrolling is a critical peacekeeping activity—indeed, as one officer described it, ‘the key to every military operation’,⁶⁹ so too is showing presence—exhibiting ‘hard posture’⁷⁰—a key dimension of patrolling in Ghana: ‘All these [internal] operations: the underlying task that we do is patrolling.’ In the words of a young officer in Tamale, ‘a patrol is briefing your men, getting them on board, moving along selected areas. The difference [between operations] is what you look out for.’⁷¹ In other words, patrolling is a generic military practice, whether performed in Ghana or a peacekeeping mission. It is endlessly practised, but with different aims and objectives and therefore different effects. As one general with experience of numerous missions abroad and at home explained:

A common thing that we see in internal operations and peacekeeping, there are certain drills, like patrolling, that's how we dominate our area of responsibility. We patrol to pick info about people in the area, warring factions, whoever is there, so that informs the force as to what kind of operation they can do.⁷²

In internal operations, the patrolling of highways between and within the main cities (Operation Calm Life) or routes to and from mining areas, to ensure that no gold is excavated illegally (Operation Vanguard) and, along similar lines, patrolling forested areas to ensure that illegal logging is minimized (Operation Halt), exemplify the type of activities that the GAF routinely engage in domestically.⁷³ In the case of Operation Halt, particularly rigid rules govern how the military operates under civilian direction. Operation Vanguard is unique, because the military is mandated to oversee the operation, and in Operation Calm Life, which is meant to support police work, soldiers often patrol without direct police involvement.⁷⁴ In this way, how the practice of patrolling is exercised in any one of Ghana's many internal security operations necessarily takes a different form from how it plays out in peacekeeping—not because the practices of international peacekeeping and internal security operations are not comparable, but rather because of the constellations of power and authority that shape the assemblage. We now turn to exploring two of Ghana's internal security operations in greater detail.

Operation Halt: diversifying patrolling, and compromising the GAF

Under Operation Halt, a civilian employee of the Forestry Commission with the title of Technical Officer (TO) directs the operation and checks the paperwork of loggers working in the forest. ‘Basically, they [the military] provide security to us’, a TO based near Sunyani in eastern Ghana explained. ‘If I go to the bush and tell the military to do a, b, c—go and arrest this person for me, do this—they do that. They act on our instructions.’⁷⁵ Soldiers are neither authorized nor have the expertise to inspect paperwork, and rarely engage in discussions between TOs and loggers. This means that while they can assess situations into which they are drawn, they cannot act independently on their assessments without repercussions. Specifically, as explained by one soldier on operation in Bechem, around 50 km south-east of Sunyani, regarding standard operating procedures in the GAF:

We are supposed to apprehend the person [the illegal logger], hand him over to [the] Forestry [Commission]. They will bring him to the police, and at that point it will be a matter between the Forestry Commission and police. When we hear the chainsaw, we trace the loggers. If we can stop the chainsaw from cutting, we have achieved our aim.⁷⁶

In practice, the TO decides whom to arrest and whose equipment and wood to confiscate, based on the loggers' paperwork. Once this judgement is made, the soldiers are called to the scene to execute the TO's decision. As explained by numerous interviewees, primarily soldiers, the GAF commonly engage after a possible deal is struck between TOs and loggers. This involves the payment of bribes and the release of those arrested, as well as their confiscated equipment and wood. Release of the materials occurs after they have been taken to the premises of the Forestry Commission, and possibly also after the case has been handed over to the police, which gives the process a semblance of (state-sanctioned) legality (just as deploying the GAF overwhelmingly projects state power). Thus, while the formal involvement of the GAF in these dealings is limited, taking bribes can involve military commanders (who in turn, we observed, at times run private wood-selling businesses). This runs the risk of undermining the authority of the GAF:

Gradually, this is giving the civilians control over us. You can arrest some of them, and they will say that they will call my commander. The commander will call and tell me to leave this place now, so at the end of the day, you [as a soldier] have given that civilian control.⁷⁷

When the GAF execute the arrest, it often involves negotiations with loggers over the arrest itself and the legitimacy of confiscating wood and equipment. Indeed, it can lead to open confrontation, as one non-commissioned officer explained: ‘There will be negotiations’, with loggers often attempting to ‘prevent you from moving, stop [your] vehicle; the loggers can become very aggressive. That is where you need to use your discretion. Our lives are the top priority, so when we are out on patrols, I try to negotiate’.⁷⁸ These cases demonstrate that while patrolling is integral to international peacekeeping as well as internal operations, the context in which such military practices are executed matters. In Ghana, the militarization of law enforcement is partially a consequence of the explicit politicization and underfunding of the Ghana Police Service. In turn, this means that while peacekeeping may have a normalizing effect on deploying soldiers in non-combat roles back home, the role that is expected of the GAF in internal operations is considerably broader, less regulated and less predictable:

In peacekeeping operations, we patrol and look out for information, but in Ghana we do more than that. In my peacekeeping deployments we never did cordon and search, but here we do it very often. In UN, we do patrols, patrols, information[-gathering], patrols, information[-gathering]. Here you find yourself trying to mitigate tension, settle disputes, assist the police in arresting. In UN operations we don't do those things, [because] you have the UN police.⁷⁹

On paper, the two types of military operation in which the GAF engage bear some resemblance to one another. Indeed, during pre-deployment training, officers are told that what they will be doing abroad is comparable to their home duties. They both traditionally take place outside warfighting and are characterized by similar military practice, including escorting convoys and protecting civilians. They are also the two primary ways in which soldiers gain experience. Co-production of and knock-on effects between the two aside, the contexts of operation—how peacekeeping assemblages take shape—make the everyday experience of the GAF less comparable. In an operation like Halt, soldiers are instrumentalized in dealings between the Forestry Commission and loggers (who often work for members of the political elite).⁸⁰ On a larger scale, the GAF produce and are at the same time the product of Ghana's deeply politicized security system where the police, most conspicuously, but also the GAF become extensions of the executive. It is inevitable that the peacekeeping assemblage will be shaped by these constellations of power and authority.

The military's role is consolidated and sharpened through peacekeeping, the only practical experience of the GAF besides internal operations. At the same time, peacekeeping also blurs what this role should be, to the extent that military practice ends up resembling law enforcement. This makes it possible, but also logical, to translate peacekeeping practices into internal security operations in a place where the military historically has been a central political player. ‘If we use Calm Life to sharpen our skills [for peacekeeping]?’ one soldier asked rhetorically in a focus group discussion of soldiers deployed in Techiman near Sunyani. ‘No’, he continued:

… we are using skills that we have from the outside where it is more violent than here in Ghana. We are applying it [experience]. The rebels, we were able to calm them down. We were in Liberia, Congo, so what is happening in our country, we are just trying to exercise our experience.⁸¹

Within a security system like Ghana's, where deployments of the military in law enforcement have become routine, drawing comparisons with one of the only other comprehensive types of practical experience of the GAF—i.e. peacekeeping—is not just done unwittingly, or in indirect ways. The comparison is explicit, and the link is seen as something positive by those who perform both—the soldiers and officers. The case of Operation Halt also shows that when practices and ideas disassemble from one context and reassemble in others, practices that might look similar in isolation end up having different effects due to the shape that the peacekeeping assemblage takes.

Operation Gong-Gong: safeguarding, escorting and protecting

Just as patrolling is a central everyday military practice at home and abroad, so is the protection of civilians, articulated since 1999 in the context of UN peacekeeping as encompassing dialogue and engagement, physical protection, and establishing a protective environment.⁸² In practice, these principles are translated into a range of activities, all of which require the ability to negotiate, as one officer explained:

When civilians are not given the protection they require, it defeats the UN mission's purpose … The people who are committing atrocities are [often] government forces, and if you look at the mandate that the UN has, we are not as robust. So, to conduct protection, evacuate civilians who require hospital care, for instance, you need to be diplomatic. Once you deploy in an AOR [Area of Responsibility], you must meet the various leaders involved in the conflict and let them know why you are there. You are not there to fight them, but to ensure that the civilians are safe.⁸³

Indeed, the commander of the Accra-based military academy stated in 2019 that: ‘The core essence of a UN mission is protection of civilians’.⁸⁴ For Ghanaian forces, this has meant safeguarding the perimeters of refugee camps and escorting civilians in their everyday activities. In Darfur, Sudan, to deter conflict-related sexual violence, ‘firewood patrols’ were conducted twice a week in armoured personnel carriers. Women from refugee camps were escorted to surrounding forests to collect firewood, and grass to feed their animals. These activities were like the ‘harvest patrols’ undertaken by UNIFIL on the border between Israel and Lebanon to facilitate farming on the frontline between the two countries.⁸⁵

Protection is also the underlying logic of an internal operation like Gong-Gong, which, broadly speaking, ‘deals with chief and land disputes’,⁸⁶ mainly in Ghana's northern regions. More specifically, as one soldier noted, while there are several operations going on simultaneously under this label, ‘the main Gong-Gong’⁸⁷ was set up in response to a longstanding conflict in the Dagbon chiefdom between the Abudu and Andani ethnic groups. The two groups' disagreement over succession to the throne, which has alternated between them since the early 1950s, culminated in March 2002 in an outbreak of conflict in Yendi, Dagbon's capital and seat of the king. The ruler, Ya Na Yakuba Andani II and 40 others were killed. One of the government's immediate responses was to mount Operation Gong-Gong, the deployment of ‘police and military troops in Dagbon’, as Sebastian Paalo and Abdul Issifu explain, ‘for a peacekeeping mission in the effort to keep the two adversaries apart and prevent the conflict from escalating’.⁸⁸

Gong-Gong has been active in Yendi for the past 20 years, dealing with a conflict where ‘they do not fight because of lack of food, they are fighting over power, it's a family issue’, one soldier on duty explained as we sat in the Yendi base. ‘I can say that 80 to 90 per cent of the population is happy’, he added.⁸⁹ ‘We are here “defending the king”’, as another young soldier chimed in:

Mostly, what we see ourselves doing [is]… we look at the flashpoints, where people are likely to make mayhem. We put up a structure, observation post, sandbags and other stuff. We put one man there, that is daytime, one soldier observing. At night we put two. The section—that is ten men—the rest will be in the guardroom or where they can rest. Every two hours we change over. Also, we go on patrols. When we do that, half the section goes. You can do that for eight months.⁹⁰

In practice, Gong-Gong involves the provision of safe transportation, maintaining curfews, setting up and manning roadblocks, and guarding the chief's palace, in collaboration with or with the support of the Ghana Police Service, because the operation officially is police-led:

We are always deployed in these conflict areas, volatile areas, we support the police to maintain law and order. It has become a permanent thing, a norm, where we find ourselves, in this part of the country. We provide security to VIPs, the chiefs, municipal executives, and escort them as well when they are going from one point to another. The presence of the military scares the civilians, so they dare not come close.

Our main aim is to … put confidence in the people to go about their normal business, that is the main thing we do.⁹¹

‘As in international peacekeeping’, as Paalo and Issifu suggest, ‘where security forces ensure calm for peace negotiations’, the Ghanaian government ‘constantly provided security in Dagbon by deploying military and police personnel to deter potential conflict entrepreneurs and peace spoilers’.⁹² Thus, analyses of Gong-Gong are likened to international peacekeeping, but the soldiers themselves also draw connections between the two, indicating how peacekeeping assembles in internal operations.

Being on mission abroad sharpens skills that can be used at home and that become particularly useful in a conflict situation like Dagbon, where basic peacekeeping principles—consent, impartiality and minimum use of force—can be logically applied, but, once again, in a context that troops are ultimately not trained for. Soldiers in Yendi explained how deploying on peacekeeping calibrated when and how the use of force was considered necessary. The ‘rules of engagement’ and ‘the conduct of operations’ in peacekeeping were considered key experiences in helping to understand ‘how, as a peacekeeper or soldier, you conduct yourself in difficult circumstances, facing a hostile crowd, the steps that you have to take before turning to the last resort [violence]’.⁹³

Gong-Gong, as an instance of internal peacekeeping, demonstrates in a concrete way how embodied practices and sensitivities from international missions are brought back home and reassembled in the roles that soldiers occupy, not exceptionally or spectacularly, but on a regular basis and as an everyday occurrence. Experiences from abroad are registers that are drawn upon to explain, rationalize and perform roles at home. This addresses one of the core principles of internal operations that, similarly, lie at the foundation of peacekeeping: ‘we are always pre-emptive; we don't want it to degenerate; we are always there to prevent it from escalating’. Inadvertently, peacekeeping becomes a training ground for internal operations, ‘because of international laws’, an officer explained, ‘we now understand rules of engagement, we are more professional’. And he continued:

We used to beat [people]; it is not over, but it is reduced drastically. We go for peacekeeping and they [the UN] say that we have excelled, respected people, customs and coming back home, we decided to adopt one or two strategies to become more professional. For instance, whenever you go to a new place, the first thing that you must do is visit the opinion leaders, the chiefs, and peacekeeping has reinforced how important that is. You must learn the norms and culture of the people, and if you learn theirs, why won't you learn yours?

‘That is why I say’, he concluded, ‘we carry [experiences] to the international and also bring [experiences] to the local.’⁹⁴ The existence and prevalence of internal operations is the product of the historically dominant role played by the GAF in postcolonial Ghana, combined with the consistent politicization of the police. Peacekeeping provides both a language and sets of practices that help to articulate and perform internal operations. There is an inherent logic to the former that disassembles from theatres in Lebanon, South Sudan and the DRC, and reassembles in internal operations like Gong-Gong. The protection of civilians and the avoidance of escalation exhibit similarities and commonalities in both contexts, indicating a shared aspect between the two. In turn, this also means that the GAF use their experiences from internal operations abroad, as one officer explained:

Fortunate or unfortunate, the African state uses the military for internal operations. In Africa, we cannot afford to create more services and we gain some of our experiences from internal [operations]. They are against civilians, so when we go to international missions, we see them as our own people. Internal operations have given us a lot of experiences when it comes to POC [protection of civilians] that we translate into peacekeeping when we go outside.

Conclusion

Our study, centred on Ghana, demonstrates that peacekeeping both is and should be analysed as a complex and global phenomenon with reciprocal effects that extend beyond any one peace support operation and deep into the countries that contribute the troops. These insights challenge the traditional, mission-centric approach that characterizes much of the literature on peacekeeping. They call for a broader analytical lens that recognizes the interplay between individual and local security practices, national politics and international relations in shaping what peacekeeping is and the effects that it has as a form of intervention. Understanding this subtle yet significant interplay is crucial. It calls for policies that consider the broader ramifications of peacekeeping, aiming not just at mission performance and success but also at a mindful approach to peacekeeping's wider impact on troop-contributing nations.

The concept of the peacekeeping assemblage, as developed and applied in this article, captures the multidirectional notion of peacekeeping that, as a form of intervention, has global reach and effects in multiple locations across space consecutively and sometimes simultaneously. It paves the way for analysing peacekeeping not as a series of isolated events or missions, but as a dynamic, interconnected network of influences and transformations. It helps us understand how peacekeeping practices, ideas and resources circulate and interact across different contexts, challenging traditional notions of bounded military operations in one specific location. By recognizing the complex interplay of local, even individual, and global forces, the assemblage concept provides a nuanced framework to understand the broader, often underexplored, implications of peacekeeping on national military practices and global security governance, and how they continuously disassemble from and reassemble into one another.

The reciprocal relationship between Ghana's military at home and abroad is reflected in how practices, discourses and experiences assemble, disassemble and circulate to reassemble in different but comparable constellations across space. As such, Ghana becomes an ethnographically guided, thick analysis that reflects the article's broader analytical point: the interdependent relationship between mission and troop contributing countries and how through a continuous feedback loop international peacekeeping and internal security operations—or security practices more broadly—affect and sometimes profoundly shape one another. The study emphasises that when discourses, practices and resources derived from peacekeeping travel, they transform and change as they reassemble in different histories and constellations of authority and power. This occurs unwittingly and as the inevitable outcome of their movement and effect across space. It also happens through the individual and collective agency of officers, policy-makers and military organizations as they perceive, interpret, adapt and shape discourses, practices and resources from peacekeeping deployments to inform internal security operations, the main empirical focus of this article.

Building on the intricate understanding derived from the Ghanaian case, we set the stage for comparative analyses with other countries that have made substantial troop contributions to peacekeeping over an extended period of time. Exploring how peacekeeping influences the Ethiopian military's approach in Tigray, for instance, or the Bangladeshi army's maintenance of stability in the Chittagong Hill Tracts opens up crucial areas for investigation in this regard. By applying an assemblage framework and conducting in-depth ethnography, these inquiries do not only serve as comparative studies but also further broaden our understanding of what is significant to include as central in the analysis of peacekeeping. The expanded perspective advocated for here is essential to grasp the complex, ongoing interplay between national, local military practices and global peacekeeping initiatives. It not only deepens our understanding of the multifaceted impacts of peacekeeping globally but also highlights the diverse, often unpredictable, ways that countries are affected, from how military strategies are changed to the way that individual soldiers adjust how they perform their roles.

Footnotes

Author notes