Missions of Disillusionment: Everyday Narratives and Affective Politics among Chinese Peacekeepers

UN peacekeeping is routinely narrated through a cosmopolitan idiom of shared purpose, yet the lived experience of compound life often diverges sharply from that promise. Anchored in this tension, this article examines the social world of the compound and the affective texture of everyday peacekeeping. Drawing on biographical interviews and rare field access to Chinese contingents, it combines process tracing of recruitment, selection and training with interpretive analysis of everyday narratives. This article traces how disillusionment emerges within the compound itself, a space we argue is internally fragmented, foreclosing the shared sociality and meaningful sense of international mission assumed by UN peacekeeping rhetoric. China’s state-centred deployment system projects domestic bureaucratic logics into mission space, fostering high intra-unit cohesion and low cross-national openness, creating ‘bubbles within the bubble’ that fragment compound life along national lines and normalize forms of isolation that sustain disillusionment. While these mechanisms are not exceptional, the Chinese case offers a revealing lens through which to rethink the tension between military logics and the multinational lifeworld of peacekeeping. By shifting attention from the international–local divide to inter-national partitions, the article contributes to everyday peacekeeping studies and offers insights into the social and affective politics of the peacekeeping camp.