Motivation and Peacekeeping
Multilateral peacekeeping is an increasingly important way that the international community responds to violent conflicts within and between states. Studying peacekeeping requires transnational, multisided investigation, which is increasingly important for anthropology. Despite this, there have been few anthropological studies of peacekeeping. This paper extends an ongoing program of anthropological research on peacekeeping. This paper uses psychological reversal theory to interpret ethnographic data collected from the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization. Individual actions in peacekeeping are linked in a mutually implicative process to broad-scale patterns of peacekeeping legitimacy and effectiveness. The analysis presented here creates a theoretical scaffolding to connect the analysis of motivation at an individual level to a cultural inversion account of peacekeeping at higher levels of social organization.