Assembling UN Peacekeeping and Counterterrorism in Ghana

This article contributes to understanding local security practices in urban Africa by examining links between international peacekeeping and local policing in Tamale, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region. It uses the concept of assemblage to suggest that while experiences, skills and lessons gained from consistent engagement in United Nations peacekeeping may be detected in local policing in Tamale, their effects on everyday policing are in practice limited. This is due to the central role of traditional authorities in local security and general political interference in police matters. Local policing in Tamale is an assemblage of formal (police and military) and informal (chiefs and community leaders) security arrangements, with the latter, especially, dictating how crimes should be dealt with. This makes it next to impossible for the police to do their job without interference. The article examines how non-state or traditional actors shape policing and security provision in Tamale, and what space is available for police officers to use the skills they believe they have learned in peacekeeping missions. The paper shows through empirical analysis how local policing is shaped more by kinship and politics than international principles of human rights and democracy.

Section: Translating Peacekeeping Experiences and Practices Into Loca...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic Peacekeeping Practices in the Tamale Metropolis

Abdallah¹,

Aning²

2022

“…Others, such as Operation Calm Life (see Edu-Afful, 2022), which is active in major urban areas including Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, are intended to curb armed robbery and violent crime. Operation Cow Leg was established in response to tension between farmers and migrating herders in northern Ghana (see Alhassan & Asante, 2022), while Operation Conquered Fist, mainly a counter-terrorism response, has been established to patrol activities on the northern border (Christensen & Edu-Afful, 2019:4; also see Christensen, 2022).…”

Section: The Context Of Policing (Before And) After Peacekeepingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Assembling Peacekeeping and Policing in Ghana

Albrecht¹

2022

By exploring the case of Ghana, this special issue provides two perspectives on UN peacekeeping that until now have been underdeveloped in the literature. First, rather than taking a mission and its host country as the analytical point of departure, the contributions in the special issue focus on how peacekeeping has shaped domestic security in Ghana – a consistent contributor of security personnel to peacekeeping since 1960. Second, instead of focusing on the military component, attention is paid to the link between peacekeeping and law enforcement, and thus how policing – as carried out by the state-sanctioned Ghana Police Service, Ghana Armed Forces and a range of non-state actors – intertwines with and is partially shaped by practices, ideas and discourse that can be traced back to mission deployments. Theoretically, the concept of assemblage is used to frame how peacekeeping stretches across state boundaries and intersects with the politics and practices of domestic security provision. Both at a state institutional level, and in day-to-day policing by individual police officers, order-making practices and discourses are constituted by the assembling of a multitude of logics and historicities that integrate and assimilate as well as contradict and oppose one another. It is how the experience of peacekeeping becomes part of and shapes these ever-evolving assemblages that the contributions to this special issue investigate. Changes may be institutional and macro-political but are as often deeply personal and individualised, with implications for how security personnel perceive and practice their roles.

“…However, before any decision is made to initiate or internally deploy officers on operations, a threat assessment is conducted by the three combat commands; namely, the southern, central and northern commands as well as the training command, with support from armoured reconnaissance, artillery, engineer and signal regiments. In recent times, a special forces brigade has been created to help deal with internal and external threats including terrorism (Interview, brigadier general, Northern Command, Tamale, 18 Sept 2020; for more on counterterrorism, see Christensen, 2022). Of the three commands, two are responsible for ten regions while the remaining one is in charge of six.…”

Section: Ghana's Peacekeeping Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regarding information sharing, the military component of internal operations has been used variously to detect the root causes of domestic security infractions and to help sensitise and inform local residents on the effects of these security challenges. In recent years, as security threats have become more complex with terrorism, violent extremism, vigilantism, and transnational organised crimes, the military has become even more vital in dealing with internal security (Edu-Afful & Allottey-Pappoe, 2016;Aning, 2007b;Christensen, 2022). The GAF is the most cohesive and best organised security organisation in Ghana and is expected to improve internal security, not least by the public, when it deploys.…”

Section: Security Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Anatomy of Ghanaian Domestic Military Operations: Exploring Operations Vanguard and Calm Life

Edu-Afful¹

2022

This article focuses on the under-researched and under-discussed domestic security implications in Ghana of military participation in international peacekeeping operations. While there is appreciable awareness and knowledge of the role of peacekeepers in reducing conflict in host countries, very little attention is given to their actions when they return home. The money, training and combat experience emanating from peacekeeping are likely to have considerable institutional, policy, operational (tactics, techniques and procedures) and political consequences in their home countries. In Ghana, especially, peacekeeping training and combat experience provide tools that can be used for internal security interventions. Increasingly, there has been a change in policy in Ghana where the military is involved in several local security operations. This policy shift has seen the creation of a number of joint internal operations involving the military and the police. Based on fieldwork in Ghana, the article explores two major internal operations: Operation Calm Life (to combat armed robbery) and Operation Vanguard (to combat illegal mining). The study shows how diverse dimensions of experience from peacekeeping have practical implications for shaping domestic security provision.