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PEACEKEEPING OPERATES WITHIN A CONTEXT of neo-liberal power and capital.3 This context draws on and reflects older traditions of colonialism and patriarchy that valorize unequal treatments of race, gender, class, and culture. Although peacekeeping by multilateral agencies like the United Nations (UN) may provide a crucial service by ceasing violence (at least temporarily) in conflict-ridden societies, these agencies also reinforce a neo-liberal world order that is, on the whole de-historicized, leaving in place an old colonial script in which the West saves hapless refugees from their fates.4 Peacekeepers as individuals may face an identity crisis of masculine warrior versus feminized peacekeeper,5 but peacekeeping as an enterprise intensifies a particular strain of neoliberal global governance that remains unquestioningly white, male, and bourgeois.
ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU is Lecturer and Coordinator of Graduate Internships at the University of Houston, Clear Lake, and founder and director of the Global Change Institute, an NGO headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus. L.H.M. LING is a Core Faculty Member in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at New School University. Dr. Ling currently heads a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary research team to study the linkage between UN peacekeeping and sex trafficking.
Copyright 2003 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs
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Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
tions.13 Kathryn Bolkovac, for example, was an American working for the Virginiabased DynCorp, a private security company contracted to the International Police Task Force (IPTF) in Bosnia. She was fired after reporting to her company and the U.S. State Department that other officers had participated in a prostitution racket. In 2002, she won a case of unfair dismissal against the State Department.14 That same year, the UN held a conference in Turin, Italy on the problematic connection between prostitution, sex trafficking, and peacekeeping missions.15 To stabilize a conflict-ridden area, UN peacekeepers arrive with ample resources, prestige, and institutional power. But when the peacekeeping high command excuses prostitution and its related businesssex traffickingwith the attitude that boys will be What kind of global governance boys, they exploit such resources and goodwill, and, consequently globalize sex and violence. In- is the international community deed, sex trafficking by military personnel un- licensing in the name of peace, dermines the very notion of security, given the border-defying spread of sexually-transmitted dis- justice, and order when women, eases (STDs),16 a generation of children sired and girls, and boys are trafficked abandoned by peacekeepers,17 and the emergence daily for pleasure and profit? of sex networks such as, Nicosia-Famagusta,18 Budapest-Kosovo, 19 Dili-Darwin, 20 Phnom Penh-Bangkok,21 and the northeast triangle of Honduras-El Salvador-Guatemala.22 Sex trafficking also comes home, literally and figuratively, to haunt the domestic population with HIV/AIDS, other STDs, and child prostitution.23 Peacekeepers complicit tolerance of or active participation in sex trafficking robs local citizens of any recourse to redress their grievances. Not only have these citizens suffered the traumas of war, poverty, genocide, and dislocation but they have experienced, also, the disintegration of local governments and society. In many cases, international organizations, such as the UN, remain their only hope for a stable, responsive civil society. When this last resource fails, where can they turn? In other words, what kind of global governance is the international community licensing in the name of peace, justice, and order when women, girls, and boys are trafficked daily for pleasure and profit? SEX IN THE MAINSTREAM Mainstream analysts would answer: world order. For this reason, they subordinate sex trafficking to what they consider to be matters of higher priority, such as global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue states, balance of power, globalization, and so
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the Internet, magazines, and tourism brochures, also collaborated in the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates based on current data that up to 500,000 women a year are brought into Western Europe and forced into the sex indus- The International Organization for Migration (IOM) try. Other estimates place the figure as high as one estimates based on current data that up to million. 29 Every eco- 500,000 women a year are brought into Western nomic unit, after all, Europe and forced into the sex industry. Other must ensure its survival under privatization and estimates place the figure as high as one million. liberalization. Where former socialist economies once provided cradle-to-grave welfare, newly capitalist enterprises now seek to streamline their budgets by eliminating workersthose deemed too old, inadequately skilled, and requiring maternity leaves and child-care expenses. Such cuts largely target women. Even those women who could find employment in the formal economy face unequal wages, job discrimination, and outright sexism in the workplace.30 In conventional development theory, fusing race with sex comes from an older 137 and widely naturalized understanding of colonialism and patriarchy.31 Nearly five centuries of Western colonialism and imperialism have left us with two, interrelated legacies: a militarized enrichment of the haves by the have-nots32 and a racializationcum-sexualization of the Other.33 As Cynthia Enloe has demonstrated, the U.S. entertainment industry propped up Carmen Miranda as a symbol of U.S.-Latin American relations precisely because she distracted attention from U.S. power politics in the region, particularly from the unholy alliance between multinational corporations such as the United Fruit Company and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).34 The term banana republic cleverly referred to the desired commodity, the CIA-corporate manipulations of regional and local politics, and the lack of fortitude shown by local states under U.S. hegemony. Today, neo-liberal globalization has defused this potent symbol of Latin American shame and U.S. hegemony into a highly successful clothing chain store. Thus, the market trumps politics, and further consolidates the neo-liberal world order. Local patriarchal elites seethed against such injustice from the West but excused their own rape and pillage of internal Others in the name of tradition, religion, development, or entitlement. National industrialization strategies institutionalized this order of female exploitation by selling women as docile, cheap, and expendable laborwhether for a factory at home, a household overseas, or a brothel anywhere.35 One rationale overrode all objections: the patriarchal family/state must be
Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
such as Chiapas, in order to stabilize their mutual investments. Indigenous women in war-torn countries like Guatemala face another kind of invisibilization. Fearful of being identified as dissidents, guerrillas, or terrorists, they opt for anonymity which makes them more vulnerable for sex trafficking, especially in frontier areas.43 Consequently, women are caught between a lack of proof of citizenship, with which they could ask for reparation of damages (the term used in government documents), and the fear of revealing their identity as Indians, or nonwhites, thereby facing discriminatory treatment from the very governmental agencies from which they seek protection.44 Peacekeeping encapsulates and reframes this global political economy of colonial power relations, neo-liberal marketization, and economic militarization. Ever since the disastrous intervention of U.S. peacekeeping in Somalia in 1993, when gleeful Somali bandits dragged the corpse of an U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, industrialized economies have been reluctant to send in their own troops for peacekeeping missions. African Business reports that [d]eveloping nations now contribute more than 75 percent of the 30,000 troops involved in 15 missions world-wide while the U.S., Japan and the European countriessupplying scant numbers of ground troopspay 85 percent of the UNs US$3 billion peacekeeping budget.45 Thus, cash-rich, firstworld governments are subcontracting cash-poor, third-world states so to provide troops for peacekeeping operations that sustain, basically, first-world geopolitics in the name of first-world material interests. Officials like to minimize the complicity of the state and international apparatuses of power in the sex trafficking industries. For instance, Gennadi Lepenko, Chief of Interpol-Kyiv, Ukraine, claims that womens groups want to blow this [the problem of sex trafficking] all out of proportion. Perhaps this was a problem a few years ago. But its under control now.46 Yet, sex trafficking in Ukraine is undeniably profitable. Only one year prior to Lepenkos statement, local police busted a prostitution ring between Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. In March 1999, in Sevastopol, Ukraine, two men and a woman, using the firm Sight as a cover, were arrested for selling 200 Ukrainian women and girls, aged 13-25, for the sex industry in Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus. The traffickers were intercepted as they attempted to send more women to Turkey by ship. The traffickers received US$2000 for each woman. The women were held in bondage until they repaid their expenses. If they complained their debt was tripled.47 Such profits invariably beget violence. This violence, in turn, falls unevenly on those branded expendable. The globalization of desire industries, like sex trafficking, spreads such human branding throughout the world.48 But capitals constant search for more sources of cheap labor alters the subjects of branding and their internal hier-
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Only systematic constructions of identity at a macro-structural level could allow such blatant asymmetries in profits and exploitation to be tolerated, maintained, and perpetuated. IDENTITIES: RACIALIZATION OF MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES Ashis Nandy has written on the impact of British colonialism on colonizer and colo-
Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
nized alike.52 An underdeveloped heart, he discovered, chilled both parties. The colonizer aimed to justify his violence against the Other, while the colonized sought to prove his manhood to the former. The resulting exaggerated or hyper-masculinity denigrated all associations with femininity: women, feelings, intellection, welfare, and homosexuality. The interaction between British colonialism and Indian culture, Nandy emphasized, brought out recessive strains in Because such liberation typically conflates coneach. Within Indian culture, hyper-mascu- quest with desirewhether it is defined as national linity brought to the security, monetary reward, or sexual release foreground a stylized, prostitution and sex trafficking become an almost warrior esthete that elites used to mimic logical conduit. British manhood. Within British culture, hyper-masculinity heightened undercurrents of sexism, racism, and a false sense of cultural homogeneity that invariably spilled into banal violence for release. Over time, these recessive strains became dominant and naturalized in both cultures. So, too, peacekeeping shares with colonialism the capacity to reconstruct identities. Peacekeeping not only keeps the peacethat is, ensures the containment of violencebut it also configures race, gender, class, and culture to suit the hyper-masculine, propertied classes of the neo-liberal world order. Jan Jindy Pettman, for instance, notes the re-masculinization of the Australian government vis--vis Asia when sending peacekeeping troops to East Timor.53 She cites an interview with Prime Minister John Howard in which he celebrates Australias renewed military muscle in East Timor, thereby shaking off the previous administrations pro-Asian, appeasement policies even while serving as deputy sheriff in the region for the United States. (Howard later retracted this statement.) We are European, Howard stated, [We are part of ] Western civilization with strong links to North America but here we are in Asia54 Indeed, the fantasy of a Western, hyper-masculinized Self rescuing the Native, (frequently a feminized Other), has long preoccupied colonial imagery.55 Historically, White men have liberated native women, to justify Western colonialism and imperialism in the guise of virile benevolence.56 One oft-cited motivation for the Bush administration to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, is to improve the lives and welfare of the local women. Interestingly, the administration made no such commitment to women in the United States or those in Afghanistan and Iraq before 9/11.57 Because such liberation typically conflates conquest with desire whether it is de-
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thinking, Lets get out. They brought it all on themselves.68
Even within this construct of the Self as Peacekeeper white mythologies operate.69 Peacekeepers who were men of color felt pressure to conform to the implicit white standard in the field (we are superior, you are barbaric). An Aboriginal peacekeeper in the Canadian mission rationalized his killing of Somalis through two orders of racialized masculinity: The white man feared the Indian. So, too, will the black man.70 For these peacekeepers with uncertain access to dominance in the hierarchy of racialized masculinities and sexualities, their enactment of violence shows that they, too, qualify as men.71 CONCLUSION: NEED FOR NEW FOCUS AND ACTION Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN, has called for more women in peacekeeping.72 Scholars and activists reiterate the need to address, in particular, the increasing connection between peacekeeping, prostitution, and sex trafficking.73 More women personnel in peacekeeping may help, but our analysis indicates that more in-depth research is required. Specifically, there needs to be a growth in understanding about how the following processes interrelate:
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Local-Regional-Global Interactions: (a) How does the economy at local, regional, and global levelssupport or intervene in this nexus of sex and violence? (b) What are the structural and cultural implications of the UN subcontracting cash-short Third World states to provide the peacekeeping labor for what is effectively first-world geopolitics and geo-economics? (c) How do we deal with peacekeeping as a transnational project and the globalization paradox it produces: that is, peacekeeping seeks to maintain borders even as peacekeeping itself crosses them? (d) What is the relationship between sex trafficking overseas and what happens at home? Identity-Formations: (a) How do race, gender, class, and culture figure in the relationship between peacekeeping and sex trafficking, especially when applied to situations of conquest and desire? (b) Where do Self and Other stand in this discourse and what has disappeared from it? (c) How do local norms (e.g. Cambodian saying: men are gold, women are cloth), interests (e.g. need for cash), and institutions (e.g., the state, NGOs) comply with this culture of insecurity and exploitation? (d) What is the hierarchy of racialized masculinities, femininities, and sexualities at the nexus of peacekeeping and sex trafficking? (e) What is the relationship between citizenship, national rights/entitlements, and human rights especially for those who are not recognized or treated as citizens?
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* We are grateful to Clifferd Dick, Jeannette Graulau, Nicole Lindstromn, Ken Payumo, and Augusta del Zotto for their helpful comments on this paper. Ann-Lou Shapiro and Michael Cohen kindly read and
Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
commented on an earlier version of this paper. We especially thank Elizabeth Callender for making this publication possible. Our thanks, also, to Keith Stanski for his insightful and prompt editing. We assume full responsibility, of course, for the contents herein. 1. T. Domi, UN prostitution scandal: the UN mission in Bosnia comes under fire for allegedly trying to cover up a prostitution scandal. Institute for War and Peace Reporting 21 July 2000. 2. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa, 27 August -1 September, 2001. 3. In this article, we focus on multilateral peacekeeping only, although our argument applies to peacekeeping by individual states as well. 4. Malkii cited in Sherene Razack, Clean Snows of Petawawa: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia. Cultural Anthropology 15(1) 2000: 5. 5. See, for example, Volker Frankes examination of psychological dissonance experienced by U.S. peacekeepers in Somalia and Kosovo, compared with their military training at West Point. Franke, Volker. Forthcoming. The social identity of peacekeeping. In Thomas W. Britt and Amy B. Adler (eds), The Psychology of the Peacekeeper. Westport, CT: Praeger. See, also, Whitworth, Sandra. Forthcoming. Militarized masculinities and the politics of peacekeeping: the Canadian Case. In Ken Booth, (ed.) Security, Community, Emancipation. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 6. For this reason, some human rights activists and scholars now argue that economic well-being should be considered a human right. See, for example, Fortman, Bas de Gaay and Berma K. Goldewijk, God and the Goods (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1998). 7. See, for example, Kimberly Chang, and L.H.M. Ling, Globalization and its Intimate Other: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong. In Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring, (London: Routledge, 2000): 27-43. 8. Peacekeeping activities include military and police activities; protecting and delivering humanitarian assistance; offering negotiation and good offices; strengthening the rule of law; training and restructuring of local police forces, monitoring human rights; voter education and other electoral assistance; and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants. UN 2002. Women, Peace, and Security. Study submitted by the Secretary-General pursuant to Security Council resolution 1325 (New York: United Nations, 2000). 9. See, for example: International Organisation for Migration (IOM) 1996. Trafficking in children: exploitation across borders. Trafficking in Migrants Quarterly Bulletin (10). Geneva: International Organization for Migration; IOM 1997a. Trafficking of Women to Countries of the European Union: Characteristics, Trends and Policy Issues. Paper presented at the Conference on Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation, Vienna June 1996; IOM 1997b. Prostitution in Asia Increasingly Involves Trafficking. Trafficking in Migrants Quarterly Bulletin (15). (Geneva: IOM, 2001). Trafficking in Migrants Quarterly Bulletin special issue April (Geneva: IOM). 10. Actual numbers of those trafficked by UN peacekeepers are hard to come by given the clandestine nature of the enterprise. Nonetheless, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has reported on peacekeepers illicit activities in this area for different parts of the world, particularly Eastern Europe. See the IOMs website (http://www.iom.int/). 11. William J. Kole and Aida Cerkez-Robinson, UN Police Accused of Involvement in Prostitution in Bosnia. Associated Press, 28 June 2001. 12. Adriatik Kelmendi, Kosovo Prostitution Flourishes: UN Struggles to Break Up Lucrative Prostitution Racket. BCR (230) 28 March 2001. 13. Times of India UN Peacekeepers Fuelling Women Trafficking. 11 April 2001. 14. Tony Robson, Bosnia: the United Nations, Human Trafficking and Prostitution. World Socialist Web Site 21 August 2002. <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/aug2002/bosn-a21.shtml> 15. Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) and United International Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI). Trafficking, Slavery, and Peacekeeping: the Balkan Case. Conference for International Experts. Turin, Italy. 19-20 May 2002. 16. Stephan Elbe, HIV/AIDS and International Security. Paper Presented at the Workshop on Peace-
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40. See, for example: Beverley Mullings, Fantasy Tours: Exploring the Global Consumption of Caribbean Sex Tourisms. In New forms of consumption, Mark Gottdiener (ed), 227-250. Boulder, Co: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., and Lim, Lin Lean (ed.) 1998. The Sex Sector. (Geneva: International Labor Office). 41. Anna M. Agathangelou and Tamara Spira. Militarization and Economic Restructuring: The Politics of Gender and Race in the Former Yugoslavia and the U.S.-Mexico border. Forthcoming. 42. Elvia R. Arriola, Voices from the Barbed Wires of Despair. De Paul Law Review, 49, 2000 :729815. 43. Norwegian Refugee Council. 2001. Global Internally Displaced People Database, December. 44. Graulau, op.cit.. 45. UN Peacekeepers: Warriors or Victims? African Business January 2001. <http:// dspace.dial.pipex.com/icpubs/ab/jan01/cover1.htm> 46. Lepenko quoted in Donna M. Hughes, The Natasha Trade-the Transnational Shadow Market of Trafficking in Women. Journal of International Affairs 9 2000. 47. Ibid., 6, citing Newsline 3(2). 48. Kateryna Levchenko, Combat of Trafficking in Women and Forced Prostitution: Ukraine, Country Report. (Vienna, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, 1999). Barry, Kathleen. Female sexual slavery. (New York: New York University Press, 1979). 49. Agathangelou, forthcoming, op.cit.. 50. Ibid., 6. 51. These interviews come from Agathangelou, forthcoming, op. cit.. 52. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. (Delhi: Oxford, 1988). 53. Jan Jindy Pettman. Manly Foreign Policy: Australian Peacekeepers in East Timor, 2002 op. cit. 54. Quoted in Pettman, Ibid., 5. 55. See, for example, L.H.M. Ling, The monster within: what Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter can tell us about terror and desire in a post-9/11 world. Talk given at the Humanities Center, (Harvard University, 7 March 2003). 56. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson and I. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997): 271-299. 57. Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Afghani Womens Resistance Organization: Bin Laden is Not Afghanistan 14 September 2001 <http://www.ucolick.org/~de/WTChit/ RAWA.html> 58. L. Olsson, Gendering UN Peacekeeping. (Uppsala University: Department of Peace and Conflict Resolution, 1996). 59. Bridget Byrne, Rachel Marcus, and Tanya Power-Stevens, Gender, Conflict, and Development: volume II, case studies: Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Algeria, Somalia, Guatemala and Eritrea. Bridge Report, No. 35, 12. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands, 1996). 60. Ibid., 102. 61. Razack, op.cit., 2. 62. A. P. Farley, The Black Body as Fetish Object. Oregon Law Review 76 1997: 457: 535. 63. Razack, op.cit.; Olsson, op. cit.. 64. Partha Chatterjee, Beyond the Nation? Or Within? Social Text 56(16)3 1998: 67-70. 65. Ibid., 67. 66. Razack, op.cit., 5. 67 Quoted in Brown, Major Russell R. Voluntary Statement of Major Brown, Electronic file, control no. 000762. In Information Legacy: A Compedium of Source Material. (Ottawa: Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia, 26 April 1993). 68. Quoted from Donna Winslow, The Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia:A Socio-Cultural Inquiry. A Study Prepared for the Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia, (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1997): 237-238. 69. Razack, op.cit., 5.
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