Sex on mission: care, control and coloniality in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations

Abstract

Twenty years ago, the UN adopted a zero-tolerance policy (known as ‘the Bulletin’)¹ on sexual exploitation and abuse after a series of high-profile misconduct scandals involving peacekeepers and humanitarians fuelled a growing global crisis of confidence in UN peacekeeping. The Bulletin revolves around three rules: all sexual activity with children is prohibited; exchanging sex for money, employment, goods or services is prohibited; and sexual relationships with beneficiaries of assistance are strongly discouraged because ‘they are based on inherently unequal power dynamics’ (Section 3.2(d)). In this article, I focus on the third rule, which, in policy debates and practice has focused primarily on relationships between male interveners and local women.

I argue that the rule, and the non-fraternization impulses that derive from it, homogenize ‘women’ as a category, denying their agency to make choices within hybrid and fluid political environments that receive peacekeeping operations. In doing so, the rule renders invisible relationships or sexual interactions that do not conform to a heteronormative foreign man/local woman dynamic, and emphasizes gendered power disparities at the expense of considering the way other power structures—including sexuality, race, capital, class and culture—contribute to producing the conditions in which some individuals (predominantly women and children, but also men) become vulnerable to abuse and exploitation while others (predominantly men) perpetrate it. Furthermore, I show that the Bulletin represents the institutionalization of feminist concerns around care and protection through the enactment of policies that control and limit individual women's agency and that it collapses diverse sexual interactions into sexual harm in ways that belie their complexities. By centring the ‘inherent power imbalance’ between peacekeepers and local people, the Bulletin has the paradoxical impact of compounding that power imbalance in practice and reinforcing racist and colonial dynamics that have long characterized how the global North has perceived and policed the personal and sexual choices of people of the global South. In doing so, it embeds a form of institutional paternalism in the practice of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, indelibly marking how communities experience being peacekept and how (or whether) missions can build and maintain the relationships of respect and trust with local communities that are critical to mission success.² It thereby reinforces and perpetuates current power imbalances between peacekeepers and the peacekept.³

This article reflects on institutional efforts to prevent sexual exploitation through establishing rules on (un)acceptable sex between peacekeepers—and other humanitarian actors—and the communities which their deployment is intended to support and protect. It traces the assumptions and motivations that underpin the Bulletin's rule-setting and considers the consequences that its rules around exploitative sex have on the power dynamics between international missions and the local communities into which they are deployed. I focus on exploitative sex both because it is the most contested aspect of the Bulletin and because it provides unique points of insight into how the relations and power dynamics between interveners and local people are conceived and shaped by the organizations under whose auspices peacekeepers and humanitarians are deployed. Established bodies of literature have critiqued the appropriateness of the transactional sex and discouraged relationships standards, and have documented the ways in which local women in peacekept communities have made sense of their own sexual agency and intimacies in the context of the power imbalances that characterize large international missions.⁴

This article begins from a different starting point, drawing inspiration from the project led by Halley, Kotiswaran, Rebouché and Shamir to document what happens when feminist ideas and projects become institutionalized in state and state-like institutions.⁵ In it, I consider what happened when the feminist project to ensure care for and protection of women and children in crisis contexts became institutionalized in UN and international NGO (INGO) bodies through the Bulletin and its implementation mechanisms, and what the trajectory of the rules in practice can tell us about the assumptions about both sex and local communities that underpin them.

I trace a growing trend towards prohibitionist approaches to sex, driven by both bureaucratic logics and a growing public moral opprobrium at the prospect of peacekeepers or humanitarian actors engaging in any transactionary sex with local people. The latter has been fuelled by the global #MeToo movement and the resurgence of conservative sexual moralities in many countries globally. In translating feminist concerns about care into practice, the Bulletin and its associated policies around exploitative sex have become mechanisms for control, with several unintended consequences which will only be amplified through moves by key donors and institutions towards broader prohibitions on all fraternization. These consequences include: 1) homogenizing women as a group and rendering them perpetually and uniquely vulnerable, thereby reinforcing local patriarchal gender orders and obscuring non-heterosexual interactions; 2) denying individual women choice and agency in complex political and social contexts, thereby undermining localization and Women, Peace and Security (WPS) efforts; and 3) restructuring institutional paternalism in unhelpful ways, entrenching the imbalance of power between local communities and the organizations mandated to ‘protect’ them and reproducing colonial and carceral patterns of dealing with sex and sexuality. Thus, to riff on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's description of colonial projects, international organizations are responsible for ensuring that (poor, brown) women are protected from both (richer, more powerful, foreign) men and themselves.⁶

These policies do little to address the real sources of sexual exploitation in most societies, namely the patriarchal norms and socio-economic structures that put both women and other marginalized communities in asymmetrical material conditions to men. The emerging challenge is that, despite the shortcomings of the policy framework as currently articulated and socialized, the question of the practice and regulation of potentially exploitative relationships between peacekeeping or humanitarian personnel and local people remains critically important. As such, it demands that we pay greater attention to how the personal behaviours and choices of interveners are experienced by those in whose communities they work, and how those choices and behaviours affect the capacity and perceived legitimacy of their organizations and missions.

This article proceeds in three sections. The first explores the prohibitionist tendencies of the current framework on sexual exploitation and the growing trend towards non-fraternization. The second explores how the Bulletin makes sense of power and the operational implications of its current framing of (un)acceptable sex. The third traces the roots and ramifications of institutional paternalism in efforts to address sexual exploitation. The conclusion considers how international actors might more sensitively approach the regulation of (un)acceptable sex in ways that prioritize care rather than control, and agency rather than duty. I draw on policy and institutional documents as well as primary research conducted over the past seven years, including more than 100 semi-structured interviews with community members and local professionals that responded to issues of sexual exploitation and abuse during international interventions in Bosnia and Timor-Leste, as well as with policy-makers and practitioners from peacekeeping and humanitarian organizations globally.

Exploitative sex or legitimate intimacy? Moving towards non-fraternization

The question of when it is appropriate for humanitarian actors or peacekeepers to have intimate relationships with local people has become increasingly fraught, with repeated global media scandals fuelling a growing public and donor perception that paying for sex is not compatible with being a ‘good’ or ‘dependable’ humanitarian worker or peacekeeper.⁷ The parameters of (un)acceptable sex are codified in the UN Secretary-General's 2003 zero-tolerance policy (‘the Bulletin’) which was promulgated in response to a series of revelations of peacekeeper and humanitarian sexual misconduct in Asia, the Balkans and West Africa.⁸ Although previous codes of conduct had noted the necessity for peacekeepers to act with integrity, and to respect the human rights and dignity of the communities into which they were deployed, the Bulletin represented the first time that sexual exploitation and abuse was specifically defined and prohibited behaviours delimited. The Bulletin is binding on all UN staff and peacekeeping personnel, including those in separately administered UN organs and programmes, as well as individuals or organizations working with the UN under cooperative arrangements (Sections 2 and 6). The prohibitions were subsequently replicated for the humanitarian sector through the Six Core Principles of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, the highest-level humanitarian coordination forum.⁹

The Bulletin revolves around two broad prohibitions and three specific standards about inappropriate sexual conduct. Sexual abuse is defined as ‘the actual or threatened physical intrusion of a sexual nature, whether by force or under unequal or coercive conditions’, while sexual exploitation is ‘any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust, for sexual purposes, including, but not limited to, profiting monetarily, socially or politically from the sexual exploitation of another’ (Section 1). The Bulletin notes that both ‘violate universally recognized international legal norms and standards and have always been unacceptable behaviour and prohibited conduct for United Nations staff’ (Section 3.1). Three further standards are promulgated. Child sexual abuse is dealt with in Section 3.2(b): ‘Sexual activity with children (persons under the age of 18) is prohibited regardless of the age of majority or age of consent locally. Mistaken belief in the age of a child is not a defence’. (However, Section 4.4 notes that this standard does not apply where a staff member is legally married to someone who is under 18 but over the age of consent in their country of citizenship.) Sexual exploitation is further delimited in two subsections: 3.2(c) prohibits the ‘[e]xchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex, including sexual favours or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behaviour … This includes any exchange of assistance that is due to beneficiaries of assistance’. 3.2(d) extends the policy to capture exploitation that results from abuses of power in sexual relationships: ‘Sexual relationships between United Nations staff and beneficiaries of assistance, since they are based on inherently unequal power dynamics, undermine the credibility and integrity of the work of the United Nations and are strongly discouraged’. These last two standards introduce significant conceptual murkiness into the rules and their application, and are both poorly understood and controversial among those whose conduct they govern.¹⁰

The Bulletin's two standards regarding exploitative sex encompass a broad spectrum of sexual interactions. On one end lies what might usefully be called sextortion, ‘a form of corruption in which sex, rather than money, is the currency of the bribe’.¹¹ In the peacekeeping or humanitarian context, this involves personnel implicitly or explicitly demanding sexual activity in exchange for supplies, services or employment that are rightly owed to a local beneficiary. On the other end lies discouraged consensual sexual relationships between adults, one of whom is a beneficiary—a term initially meaning direct recipients of protection and assistance, but now understood to encompass entire communities in which humanitarian and peacekeeping personnel live and work¹² (although this remains a source of confusion among staff in practice).¹³ Such relationships are, according to the Bulletin, inherently unequal because of a power differential perceived to be inevitable between international personnel and the local people whose circumstances they have been sent to address. Transactional sex lies between these two ends of the spectrum: sexual interactions that involve the exchange of sex for money, goods or things, as distinct from the extortion of sex in exchange for humanitarian or peacekeeping support already owed to the local person involved. Such transactions are negotiated (alongside non-sexual transactions) with varying levels of agency and coercion, in peacekeeping economies characterized by material deprivation and physical insecurity, and inequality between foreigners and locals.¹⁴ Such transactions may take the form of formal sex work (which may be legal under local law) or pursued ad hoc by local people in order to secure the means of survival.¹⁵ While sexploitation—like sexual abuse—is clearly coercive, the behaviours that fall further along the spectrum of exploitation are harder to characterize, because of the complex interplay of circumstance, consent and coercion in specific interactions. Moreover, the murkiness of the boundary between transactional sex between consenting adults and the discouraged relationships in which transactions may or may not occur (for example, if the foreign partner pays rent or covers a partner's child's school fees) creates an impasse for investigation and accountability mechanisms.¹⁶

Some scholars have responded to this lack of clarity by highlighting the conditions under which consent is given, arguing that free consent is effectively impossible given the conditions of deprivation, desperation and insecurity in which local women live in and which drive their choice to seek out sex with UN/NGO personnel.¹⁷ These analyses strongly focus on women's vulnerabilities and the redressing of the accountability gap for sexual exploitation of adults by bringing the discouraged relationships more clearly into the exploitative sex category. Freedman et al. consider ‘transactional sex’ to refer to sex exchanged for goods, services or money (which they also call ‘adult prostitution’), while ‘survival sex’ refers to sex that is agreed to in order to ensure basic survival, and exchanged for benefits including financial support or humanitarian supplies, either in a one-off interaction or in ongoing sexual relationships.¹⁸ They suggest that ‘[t]he vast majority of “consensual” relationships between peacekeepers and locals in Haiti were ones of “survival” sex’.¹⁹ Mudgway similarly cautions against overestimating ‘the ability of some local women to negotiate terms of an exchange or exercise true agency’, rejecting the focus on consent and agency and asserting that such sex ‘is not about agency, it is about survival’.²⁰ This position is challenged by other scholars illuminating the complexities of the political and social economies in which individuals seek out transactional sex, highlighting the importance of recognizing the exercise of agency that occurs on the part of local people who engage in it, and identifying the colonial legacies of how prostitution in post-conflict contexts is represented.²¹

These debates have occurred in the context of three important global trends. First, in the media, the #MeToo movement highlighted the ubiquity of sexual misconduct wherever there are imbalances of power and sharpened global public attention on cases of sexual exploitation and abuse, fuelling what some have identified as a ‘sex panic’.²² Sandvik traced how the moral panic associated with this trend linked up with a broader trend in big donor countries of the de facto criminalization of prostitution by criminalizing the buyer, and the associated belief that ‘that paying for sex, anywhere and at any time, is incompatible with being a “good” humanitarian worker and dependable employee’.²³ Second, institutionally, the evolution of governance feminism (and governance feminists) in global and national efforts to deal with sexual violence, prostitution/sex work and sex trafficking²⁴ fundamentally shaped how questions of sexual misconduct in international missions are dealt with. Otto argues, building on the work of Nancy Fraser, that this has generated feminism's ‘institutional double’ at the UN: what began as feminist struggles for emancipation became institutionalized in ways that focused on women's sexual vulnerabilities and divested them of their ‘liberatory content through technocratic processes of calculation, measurement and management’.²⁵ Third, these trends are amplified by what Bernstein documented in the context of the global anti-trafficking movement as the rise of carceral feminism: a ‘rightward shift on the part of many mainstream feminists and other secular liberals away from a redistributive model of justice and toward a politics of incarceration’.²⁶. Together, these trends consolidated a focus in international institutions on sexual harm, as well as a carceral logic of response, whereby sexual harm is considered the worst possible experience a woman can have, and criminal accountability the only appropriate response.²⁷ Importantly, a strong sex work abolitionist coalition within the global anti-trafficking movement influenced the prohibitionist approach taken by the 2000 Palermo Protocol on human trafficking, and set the foundations for the broad definition of sexual exploitation adopted by the Bulletin in 2003, reflecting a conviction that all transactional sex is inherently exploitative and should be criminalized.²⁸

Together, these global trends have coloured and constrained work on sexual exploitation and abuse: institutionally, conceptually and in terms of the social and political moralities that animate it. Recently, they led to growing momentum for a blanket non-fraternization rule in order to bypass current impracticalities of implementing the discouraged relationships standard. In the UK, in 2020 the House of Commons International Development Committee expressed concern that the rules for staff of UK government departments spending official development assistance did not expressly prohibit sexual relationships with aid beneficiaries, and received confirmation from the responsible minister that such relationships would in fact be ‘considered unacceptable and … treated as potential gross misconduct’.²⁹ Similarly, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) promulgated a broad prohibition on fraternization that applies to all non-national personnel engaged in the direct delivery of DFAT business in very high-risk contexts, which sits alongside an existing prohibition on transactional sex in such contexts. Fraternization in this policy is defined broadly as ‘[a]ny relationship that involves, or appears to involve, partiality, preferential treatment or improper use of rank or position including but not limited to voluntary sexual behaviour’.³⁰ In 2019, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee—the highest-level humanitarian coordination body globally—updated its core principles to remove the language of unequal power dynamics, instead introducing the language of prohibition: a key rules graphic described the relevant rule as ‘NO SEX WITH BENEFICIARIES’, even though the longer explanation is more nuanced, saying ‘[a]ny sexual relationship with beneficiaries that involves improper use of position is prohibited’.³¹ In a 2021 training video InterAction, the largest alliance of INGOs in the US, states that ‘all sexual relationships between humanitarian workers and locals are prohibited because of the power differential’.³² While the DFAT rule exempts local staff, the InterAction rule does not—the latter clearly explains that even if a staff member is part of the local community (which 40–50 per cent of civilian peacekeeping personnel and 90 per cent of humanitarian personnel are),³³ they hold significantly more power as a result of their job, and are therefore subject to the non-fraternization rule. These prohibitions hinge on a calculation of harm that holds that while a non-fraternization rule may prevent some ‘good’ relationships (‘which may be the rare exception rather than the rule’³⁴), it will ultimately prevent more harm than it causes.

A problem with power: gender and agency

As noted, a significant body of scholarship has built up around the questions of where the appropriate boundaries of (un)acceptable sex should be drawn, and on how to understand the complexities of agency and consent in the contexts of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. My focus is different: what are the implications of the current framing of exploitative sex—including the drift towards non-fraternization—for understanding the practice of peacekeeping and humanitarian response and how it is experienced by communities in crisis? The following analysis outlines three key consequences.

The Bulletin and its implementation to date reflect a superficial understanding of gender and power, which non-fraternization expectations reinforce. Consequently, women are homogenized as a group and rendered uniquely and perpetually vulnerable, thereby reinforcing local patriarchal gender orders. Sexual exploitation is considered a product of gendered power disparities, where vulnerable women are harmed by men who have more power as a result of their gender and employment status within international missions and, therefore, their material resources. Thus, the combination of masculinity and comparable wealth produces an inevitable and insurmountable power imbalance, which international actors assume responsibility for managing. This framing is deeply paternalistic, suggesting that all local women are vulnerable and that institutional actors have a duty to protect them even from consensual interactions. It is also misguided, as it oversimplifies the complex realities of social relations when people live and work together in hybrid local/international communities during what are, for civilian personnel, often long-term deployments.³⁵

The Bulletin rests on an understanding of sexual exploitation that stems from structural-bias feminism—which holds that ‘male sexual domination and female sexual subordination constitute the greatest structural impediment to women's emancipation’, and produces an institutional ‘“common sense” about sexual violence that relies upon and reinforces negative images of sex and sexuality, and problematic understandings of gender, ethnicity, and war and peace’.³⁶ As a result of its collision with carceral governance feminist impulses and imperatives, this framing emphasizes sexual harm and the importance of criminal accountability measures as the best mechanism by which to redress it. Consequently, relationships that do not conform to a heteronormative foreign man/local woman dynamic are rendered invisible. During my research on this topic, lesbian relationships were never mentioned. Sex or relationships between men were mentioned rarely and only in the context of commercial sex work, despite being well documented in the humanitarian sector.³⁷ And sex or relationships between foreign women and local men was raised, but often with the power dynamic inverted and the foreign women construed as the vulnerable partner due to their gender in the face of local (and implied violent) masculinities. Such relationships were always considered outside the purview of the Bulletin. Gendered power disparities are clearly important to understanding sexual exploitation, but they do not act alone: gender intersects and overlaps with other power structures, including sexuality, race, capital, class and culture, to produce the conditions in which some individuals become vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse, and other individuals perpetrate it.³⁸ Thus, while women and girls make up the majority of those who experience sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by interveners, the phenomenon is underpinned not only by gendered inequalities but also by the intersection of gender with other factors and systems of power or inequality that make certain women more vulnerable than others. Taking this broader view of power as working beyond just gender can also create space within discussions about and responses to sexual exploitation and abuse for relationships that do not align with the male intervener/local woman format. Moreover, it is only through a sensitivity to the intersection of these power systems that the issue of potentially exploitative sex between consenting adults can be parsed and the experiences of the local people involved placed at centre stage, rather than being overshadowed by externally imposed care through mechanisms of control.

Considering how these rules are experienced and perceived by those on whose lives they are de facto imposed when international missions are established provides a valuable counterpoint to institutional narratives of power, and opens lines of sight onto their implications both for social and political orders in host states and for peacekeeping outcomes. The way power differentials are perceived is instructive. The Bulletin posits that there are inherent power differentials between providers and recipients of assistance, and a non-fraternization approach elevates this concern, suggesting that power imbalances inevitably produce exploitation. The realities of how power works between local people and foreign personnel are more multifaceted. Anderson describes the unequal status of humanitarian personnel compared to local communities:

They have goods that others need. They have options that others do not have. They are usually safe and well fed when others are not. They can choose whether or not to respond to a crisis, whereas those who are struck by crisis have no choice. They can choose to leave (evacuate) if conditions become too difficult. Local people cannot leave or, if they do, face the uncertainty of being displaced persons or refugees.³⁹

However, Anderson shows that many people living in societies receiving assistance do not agree that inequality between aid providers and receivers is inherent. Rather, it is ‘a product of conscious and intentional choices and approaches of providers’.⁴⁰ Similarly, Simić criticizes the ‘inherent victimhood and vulnerability’ imposed on local women by the Bulletin, suggesting it fails to address ‘the complexities of power relationships that might occur between local women and UN personnel’.⁴¹ The Bosnian women Simić interviewed who had been in relationships with peacekeepers also rejected the assertion of inherent power imbalances, pointing to their education, social status and personalities as evidence of the sources of the power they held in their relationships. Otto further argues that limits on consensual sex are ‘out of step’ with the promotion of women's rights and conveys a ‘new legitimacy to conservative hierarchies of gender and sexuality’.⁴²

Reinforcing local conservative gender orders through sexual misconduct policies is one of the significant unintended consequences of the Bulletin, and the associated governance feminist efforts which amplified the focus on sexual harm, with ramifications for the capacity of international organizations to achieve their goals related to gender equity more broadly. This reveals the second key consequence of the Bulletin's framing of exploitative sex: that denying individual women choice and agency in complex political and social contexts undermines international efforts around localization and WPS.

During field research in Bosnia and Timor-Leste, many women suggested that some opposition within their communities to women having relationships with foreign men was because of the sense of ownership and entitlement local men (including fathers) had, and the belief that what was rightfully theirs was being taken away by foreign men. In Timor-Leste, the proliferation of relationships between women who worked in international organizations and their male colleagues caused some families to prohibit their daughters from working in the international mission, for fear that they too would enter such relationships, and the shame or scandal that might result if those relationships did not lead to marriage.⁴³ The Bulletin bolsters these conservative gender norms, presenting all local women as being unable to navigate the complexities of power imbalances in relationships and positioning them as being in need of protection from their own choices regarding consensual sexual relationships with UN/NGO personnel. This has a direct impact in terms of efforts to ensure women are included as active participants in decision-making in their communities—as mandated by the WPS agenda—with the paternal impulse working from both the international missions and local communities to limit women's engagement. The WPS framework holds that women can exert agency even in the context of the particular vulnerabilities they face in conflict and post-conflict contexts, and that they have valuable contributions to make to local and national decision-making and peace processes. It is unsurprising that there have been so few gains in convincing peacekeepers and policy-makers to ensure the full and active participation of women in peace processes, when those same people receive training that reinforces the idea that all adult women in conflict contexts are so vulnerable they cannot make choices for themselves about which relationships they enter into.

The Bulletin's framing of power, which positions UN/NGO personnel and local populations at opposite ends of a power spectrum, also undermines localization efforts. Despite evidence that developing relationships with local populations is critical for achieving peacekeeping objectives,⁴⁴ peacekeepers have been ‘gradually discouraged from having any contact with them’ to prevent sexual misconduct.⁴⁵ This sentiment is echoed in the narrative prominent among some peacekeeping contingents that local women are tricksters and temptresses, cynically seeking opportunities to ensnare peacekeepers and then accuse them of abuse or exploitation in order to access compensation.⁴⁶ To ‘protect’ themselves against the ‘threat’ thus posed by local women, peacekeepers may seek to maintain distance—with the double effect of both flipping the narrative of vulnerability in relation to sexual exploitation and abuse, and reinforcing the false stereotype that allegations are likely to be made in order to fraudulently access compensation. Indeed, senior military officers have promoted this view in several peacekeeping trainings I have observed. These assumptions—which seem grounded in both misogyny and the motivation to protect institutional reputations—no doubt affect the way individuals or troop-contributing countries that hold them handle misconduct allegations; an issue that warrants further attention.

While greater separation from communities might help reduce sexual misconduct, such separation would likely have serious consequences for mission effectiveness. One international agency representative interviewed argued that peacekeepers and humanitarian actors ‘have a protection mandate, but how can they pretend to protect if they don't know or understand how people are living? If they don't have any engagement with how the community are feeling the effects of conflict?’⁴⁷ Autesserre's work underscores the importance of connection with and understanding of local communities for effective peacekeeping.⁴⁸ It shows how connection can counterbalance the paternalism in how peacekeeping creates hierarchies of knowledge about what needs to be done and how that might exclude local perspectives.⁴⁹ Others have shown how critical local perceptions of legitimacy are for mission effectiveness, and how important local engagement with peacekeeping processes is to perceptions of legitimacy.⁵⁰ During interview, Hassan Nuhanović, a UN translator for Dutch peacekeepers at Srebrenica and genocide survivor, highlighted the effects of separation between local communities and international personnel. He argued that a ‘wall’ of social separation and racist attitudes by some peacekeepers who ‘looked down on the local population’ were largely responsible for the peacekeepers' abandonment of Bosniaks to genocide at Srebrenica. He suggested that the peacekeepers were ignorant of local culture and history, and brought with them ‘prejudice and dislike’ for a population they did not understand. Their separation in everyday life from Bosnians compounded this racism and lack of empathy for the situation Bosnians were in, leading not only to their actions at Srebrenica, but also to their everyday attitudes of disrespect to Bosniaks who worked with and for them.⁵¹ Simić's research echoes this, showing how prohibiting consensual relationships between adults ‘may encourage racism, discrimination and stigmatisation’ and create ‘“antagonistic relationships” between local populations and peacekeepers’.⁵²

By construing the power differential between local communities and UN/NGO personnel as inherent, singular and totalizing, the Bulletin first reinforces conservative gender norms by framing women as perpetually and uniquely vulnerable and reinscribing gendered power imbalances, and, second, denies women agency in an era of WPS, laying the foundation for a deeply detrimental separation between local and international personnel. A non-fraternization rule would amplify these consequences. Moreover, the institutional framing of exploitation and vulnerability opens space for institutionalized paternalism to flourish in the way the international community relates to local communities in practice.

Paternalism and coloniality

Racism not only figures as an unexpected outcome of the regulation of sexual relationships between UN/NGO personnel and those they serve, but has deeply shaped how those relationships are interpreted institutionally and in practice. This reveals the third key consequence of the Bulletin's framing of exploitative sex, namely that it restructures paternalism in ways that entrench imbalances of power between local communities and the organizations mandated to ‘protect’ them, reproducing colonial patterns of dealing with sex and sexuality. The Bulletin's approach to addressing the ‘inherent power imbalance’ between peacekeepers and the peacekept has the paradoxical impact of compounding that power imbalance in practice, reinforcing racist dynamics that have long characterized how the global North has perceived and policed the personal and sexual choices of people in the global South. This has clear echoes of the ‘civilizing missions’ used to justify colonial expansion—which imposed missionary laws regulating sex and sexualities in the name of morality, civility and protections—and illustrates the durability of racial paternalism in the practice of international peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. Barnett defines paternalism as ‘the attempt by one actor to substitute his judgement for another's on the ground that it is in the latter's best interests or welfare’ and notes that this definition has three core elements: care; an ethic of consequences; and power.⁵³ In the context of the response to sexual exploitation, the intersection of this—which might in other contexts be called liberal paternalism—with the way the Bulletin as an institutional artefact recreates colonial power dynamics between international actors and local communities produces a novel form of institutional racial paternalism. Importantly, this is about the dynamics between institutions and local people, rather than individual peacekeepers, the majority of whom hail from the global South. In fact, colonial tropes persist in relation to assumed perpetrators as well, where supposedly ‘unprofessional’ or ‘undisciplined’ peacekeepers from the global South are often taken to be the primary perpetrators of sexual misconduct because they account for the greater number of cases, without due regard for the reality that peacekeeping is disproportionately performed by global South peacekeepers while global North states limit their ‘boots on the ground’, and that northern peacekeepers have also been implicated in egregious abuses.⁵⁴

There is significant normative baggage in the way ‘good’ relationships are conceived and how that affects institutional assessments of the extent to which a relationship is exploitative, which ignores locally and culturally specific norms and expectations. As a result, there is an ‘othering’ of the constraints and systems of power in which women in conflict or crisis contexts find themselves, as if similar dynamics do not shape the choices of women in the global North. During interviews with humanitarian and peacekeeping personnel, it seemed that the standard for a relationship with beneficiaries to be considered non-exploitative was that it reflects a long-term monogamous commitment, ideally codified through marriage and often producing children that are raised in the context of the family unit. (The Bulletin's exemption for sex with children in cases of legal marriage also reflects this.) People often used such examples as the exception to show what did not constitute sexual exploitation, when relationships between foreign personnel and local women were discussed: I heard many variations of ‘but not all of these men were exploitative. I know of one couple, they got married, they now live in [the woman's home town/the man's home country], they have children and they love each other’. This standard reflects conservative gender norms and expectations that are prevalent worldwide, not just in the societies into which peacekeeping and humanitarian missions are deployed. It reinforces the logic that a relationship between a local woman and foreign peacekeeper is valid only if and precisely because it ended in the heteronormative ideal of marriage and children. It privileges this sexual morality at the expense of safeguarding local women's ability to make choices about their lives, needs and desires, which means that anything less than that presumed gold standard of relationships, when it occurs in the context of a power imbalance, is considered unacceptable. This puts relationships that may be based on consent, mutual satisfaction, desire and even affection or love, but which have transactionary elements, in the category of exploitative sex—even though such ‘exchanges’ may be considered natural or expected should they occur in relationships in other contexts, where a couple's earnings and wealth are considered collective regardless of who did the earning. Perhaps most strikingly, this standard enforces onto local women an ideal of ‘good relationships’ which they have not chosen, and may in fact feel harmed or oppressed by—and it does so hypocritically, given that these norms are not institutionally enforced on the foreign women (and men) working within international organizations. As Otto notes, this approach is driven by sexual negativity—the belief that sex is dangerous and destructive unless within the context of a narrow set of socially approved ‘excuses’⁵⁵—rather than by deeper commitments to human rights and social justice.⁵⁶

Stern's powerful account of investigating an allegation of sexual exploitation by a humanitarian worker in north-eastern Nigeria illuminates these issues.⁵⁷ In response to a spate of pregnancies among women who were either unwed or whose husbands had been in detention for years, local elders formed a patrol that sought to ‘catch misbehaviour’ at night. At midnight one Saturday, the patrol burst into a woman's tent, and took photographs of her with her lover, who worked for an international humanitarian organization. It emerged that the pair had been in a months-long relationship, said they were in love and wanted to marry, but the elders were enraged that their approval had not been sought before the relationship began. Stern noted the widespread prevalence of sextortion in the camp, but this case was different, seemingly about two adults having consensual sex. Stern recounted the interview:

She told me she had met the man at the water pumps. He had helped her on a number of occasions—allowing her to skip the queue, saving her hours of waiting. He promised he would buy her food and clothes, which over the coming months he did. When I asked why she became involved with him, she said it was because she and her children needed assistance, which he could provide. They grew close, saw each other every day and began discussing marriage.

After the patrol burst in, they were forbidden from seeing each other. I asked how she felt about their relationship ending. She began to cry. She said, ‘I feel very bad, because since then I do not receive any assistance from him. Now I have no one to assist me.’ She explained how badly women with no husbands struggle. This is why she, like many, have relationships with NGO men—so they might ‘stand up for them’ and help them find what they need in the difficult [camp] environs.⁵⁸

This example showcases the consequences of the current approach to exploitative sex, which collapses the distinction between exploitative sex and consensual relationships negotiated in the context of imbalances of power where those involved are satisfied with the arrangements and do not feel violated. Although there may be exchanges, they have a notably different character from transactions that are extorted, and although consensual, they may not reflect romantic love but represent a woman's only short-term solution to greater ease in a difficult and grossly patriarchal system. It also shows what happens when organizations assume a duty to protect women that prioritizes control at the expense of care. In so doing, organizations can overlook individual women's agency, failing to see how women may make shrewd choices in difficult contexts, and that limiting individual women's exercise of creative agency may be experienced as harm in itself.

Kolbe's report on transactional sex between peacekeepers and Haitians similarly documents the complexity of factors that shaped women's choices around engaging in sex with peacekeepers, and the often shrewd decisions women made about who they had sex with and under what circumstances. Kolbe found that women in poorer rural areas were likely to engage in transactional sex when faced with an acute basic need, for instance for shelter, baby care items, medication, household items or shoes.⁵⁹ In contrast, women in urban areas were more likely to have engaged in relationships that fell into the category of ‘relationships with beneficiaries’ characterized by imbalances of power, recounting longer processes of ‘seduction and courtship’ preceding initial sexual encounters. Women identified engaging in such sex both for things they needed (food or school fees) as well as things they wanted (such as new phone or jewellery). In one striking testimony, a 30-year-old woman said:

All women have to choose a man … I chose men that give me what I need. I give them sex and they give me money. They give me food. They pay for my child's school fees. They pay when I got [sic] to the clinic. Whatever I need, I just have to ask. To tell you the truth, my friends are all jealous! They have a man who just gave them a baby. He might not buy milk the baby needs. For me, I am lucky and my friends know it! I do it, take what I get from him, and he leaves. I don't have to cook for him or wash his clothes.⁶⁰

These vignettes provide useful insights into the intersecting pressures and motivations that shape some local women's choices to have sex with UN/NGO personnel. There are transactions, but the woman involved engaged in them after considering her own needs and the effects of engaging in such sex or not. These women are not two-dimensional victims of sexual harm; their lives and choices challenge the Bulletin's ‘conflation of many different forms of sexual exchange with sexual violence’.⁶¹ Some cases may fall even further from the transactional realm: in Bosnia, several interviewees suggested that some Bosnian women deliberately sought out romantic relationships with peacekeepers from European countries in order to build new lives elsewhere after the horrors of war, but emphasized that this should not be seen to delegitimize those relationships.⁶² The Bulletin therefore stands to limit women's agency in its current form.

As Kolbe illustrates, there is a continuum of sexual interactions, spanning from emotional coercion to rape that ‘exists in [sexual exploitation and abuse] interactions as well as in traditional sexual and romantic relationships’.⁶³ Local women may make shrewd choices about the extent to which they will engage in activities for the benefits they offer; this is at odds with the Bulletin's construction of a gold standard for relationships that revolves primarily around heteronormative ideals of love. As Kolbe's study found, ‘though romance is highly desired by Haitian women, feelings of love are frequently subjugated to concerns of economic stability and educational background when engaging in dating relationships’. These calculations and concerns were equally applicable to relationships with Haitian men and foreign peacekeepers: Kolbe's interviewees generally agreed that financial transactions were common in most sexual relationships in Haitian culture. She documents that ‘[a] man's sexual satisfaction is the goal of a romantic liaison while women, in general, expect a romantic connection as well as tangible goods or behaviour from those with whom they have sex’, and shows how women made considered choices about who could provide the best exchange in relationships—with foreign peacekeepers often preferable to local men, who had less disposable income and perpetrated higher rates of domestic violence.⁶⁴ This is not to suggest that women make these choices in a vacuum: Kolbe's interviews with young women who engaged in such relationships found that they described them as ‘boyfriend-like’ in acknowledgement that they were not based on love—as ‘boyfriend’ relationships with local men tended to be—but that women were also motivated by the need to contribute to their family's well-being and enhance their or their children's educational prospects, which they pursued at the expense of potentially more romantic but less supportive relationships with local men.⁶⁵ This resonates with Jennings' work, which distinguishes between ‘prostitutes’ who engage in sex work professionally, usually organized by a pimp or madam, ‘hustlers’ who engage in situational or ‘survival’ prostitution on an ad hoc basis to obtain the necessities of life, and ‘homegirls’ who are not engaged in prostitution in an organized or survival context, but rather attempt to develop mutually beneficial relationships with a foreigner, which might sometimes revolve around ‘love’.⁶⁶ Acknowledging the diverse motivations individual women have in seeking out sex with foreigners creates space for women to be recognized as independent subjects, in contrast with colonial perceptions of ‘third world women’ as passive and vulnerable beneficiaries encouraged by the Bulletin's current framing.⁶⁷ It also creates room for the points and mechanisms of exploitation to be more clearly recognized and responded to, allowing distinctions to be seen between the very different form that sexual relationships in the contexts of power imbalances may take.

These examples demonstrate that, by assuming that all sex that occurs in the context of power imbalances is inherently exploitative, the Bulletin in practice glosses over the considered choices individual women make and ignores that sex is constituted in specific social and historical circumstances and that the politics around it shifts as circumstances do.⁶⁸ The Bulletin asserts that the presence of transactional elements or power imbalances invalidates the love, care or simply pragmatism that may characterize relationships, and it requires organizations to enact care for ‘vulnerable’ women through controlling the relationships they are able to pursue. It holds local women to a higher standard of motivation for entering a relationship with foreigners than is applied to relationships with men in their own community, or indeed, to relationships that same foreigner may have with women from his own community. It constructs through exclusion a gold standard for ‘good’ relationships, which not only may not reflect local cultural expectations, but also embodies a conservative sexual morality for which no consensus exists globally. Policing the sexual choices of women in the global South in this way perpetuates and restructures patterns of the institutional paternalism that characterized colonial engagements in the global South and that belies the reality that power in human relationships is rarely totalizing and singular, but complex, multidirectional and produced through the interactions of multiple systems of power.

Conclusion

This article has investigated the effects of the UN's zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation, focusing on the controversial standard that discourages relationships between staff and beneficiaries because of ‘inherent power imbalances’ and on the intersection of that standard with broader prohibitions on transactional sex. I asked what the trajectory of the rules can, in practice, tell us about their underpinning assumptions about both sex and local communities, and I traced the roots and ramifications of coloniality and paternalism in the Bulletin. I have shown the counterproductive implications and effects of the Bulletin's framing of exploitative sex, and demonstrated that, paradoxically, its attempt to address the ‘inherent power imbalance’ between UN/NGO personnel and local people compounds that power imbalance.

Those leading the shift towards a non-fraternization rule seem to be motivated by a desire—and a perceived duty—to better ‘deal with’ the ongoing problem of impunity for sexual misconduct in humanitarian and peace operations, as well as the challenges of implementing the current policy; it is easy to see the appeal of a technical ‘fix’ to the ‘problem’ through the adoption of a simpler and more stringent rule that governs sexual interactions. However, adopting such a rule would amplify the already serious unintended consequences of the Bulletin's treatment of exploitative sex. These include: homogenizing women as a group and rendering them perpetually and uniquely vulnerable, thereby reinforcing local patriarchal gender orders and obscuring the other systems of power that produce vulnerability to exploitation; denying individual women choice and agency in complex political and social contexts, thereby undermining localization and WPS efforts; and restructuring institutional paternalism in unhelpful ways, entrenching the imbalance of power between local communities and the organizations mandated to ‘protect’ them.

I have furthermore shown that imperatives of governance feminism have seen the protection of local communities from harm perpetrated by those sent to serve them shift from a project of feminist solidarity, grounded in human rights principles and an analysis of gendered power, towards a dutiful enaction of care through the exertion of authority over local communities.⁶⁹ This article has laid bare the tension between care and control in how the international community responds to sexual misconduct by UN/NGO personnel, and has illustrated how the current rules embody paternalistic assumptions that the outside actors know best how to identify and respond to sexual exploitation. Recognizing the underlying paternalism both in the rules themselves and in how they are implemented helps illuminate how they are experienced by peacekept communities. It also allows us to see the durabilities of colonial assumptions about expertise, gender and governance (and thereby the imperatives of care and control for states and state-like actors) and how they have continued to operate through the structures of post-colonial institutions and orders: in this case, the UN's zero-tolerance policy and the assertion that it is the obligation of benevolent organizations to establish and enforce the boundaries of (un)acceptable sex between consenting adults. Wrapped up in these assertions is the myth of impartiality that is central to the peacekeeping project (and to varying extents, the humanitarian project), and which supposes that such missions can isolate themselves from local politics. Numerous sources suggested to me that the strongest reason for a non-fraternization policy was to prevent international missions being seen as partial to any particular group;⁷⁰ this disregards the realities of social, economic and political economies in the hybrid communities that exist when large international missions work within and live alongside local communities.

My analysis suggests that, instead of articulating stricter rules around consensual sexual relationships and doubling down on the carceral approach to regulating potentially exploitative sexual relationships between consenting adults, there is a need for a more honest reckoning with the power dynamics between peacekeepers and locals more broadly—in other words, not just in the sexual realm—and for more proactive efforts to redress the material and structural conditions that shape the choices made by local people around transactional sex. Recognizing that the very fact that foreign personnel are present creates dynamics that play out in various ways—including in employment, housing and caring practices and intimate relationships⁷¹—is critical to navigating the inevitable power disparities created when international missions are deployed. Numerous scholars have outlined a nuanced understanding of the spectrum of transactional, exploitative and consensual sex by considering it in relation to the broader peacekeeping economies and normative environments that create the motivations and conditions in which individuals make choices around their participation in sex which may be exploitative.⁷² Instead of sharpening the focus on the details of the Bulletin or emphasizing the inherent vulnerability of all individuals in host communities, this body of work widens the lens, challenging the totalizing narrative of sexual harm and illustrating the broader systems of power that create the contexts in which some individuals are exploited, while others make clear-eyed choices about engaging in sexual interactions and transactions in less-than-ideal material circumstances. Dismantling paternalistic assumptions of inherent vulnerability and the hallmarks of legitimate relationships is critical, as is challenging the governance feminist impulse to enact solidarity and care through carceral responses that collapse diverse sexual interactions into sexual harm and regulate the intimate lives of peacekept communities. Equally important are efforts to materially address the structural conditions of poverty and patriarchy to which some women respond by using their creative agency to facility enrichment and/or well-being through sexual relationships.

As Jennings has argued, the Bulletin presents sexual exploitation and abuse as exceptional and a technical glitch, rather than something that arises as a result of how peacekeeping works, and how peacekeeping missions relate to the communities they have been sent to protect.⁷³ This article has shown how the discouraged relationships standard fundamentally shapes interactions between local people and international personnel not only in the sexual realm but in all spheres, by embedding power imbalances and paternalism in the practice of peace and humanitarian operations.

Footnotes

Author notes