Life in a ‘Peace-kept’ City: Encounters with the Peacekeeping Economy

The concept of the peacekeeping economy encompasses a range of actors typically marginalized from studies of peacekeeping, but whose activities, services, and interaction with peacekeepers are far from marginal. This article aims to deepen the understanding of the peacekeeping economy by showing how different groups of people negotiate within and profit from it. Based on fieldwork in Liberia and the DRC, it is argued that the peacekeeping economy helps make visible an array of connections, activities, motivations, and understandings that cumulatively help explain some of the reactions that peacekeeping provokes locally. I also suggest that in places with robust peacekeeping economies, locals’ experience of the mission is more akin to peacekeeping-as-enterprise than it is to the preferred narrative of peacekeeping-as-protection.