Abstract

‘What peacekeepers think and do’ is about how and why different national armies display recurring and systematic variation in the way they behave in operation. Ruffa focuses on how four different national contingents behave during their daily military activities in a peace operation, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, launched after the Israeli–Hezbollah war in 2006. The author argues that variation in different armies’ daily military activities (e.g. force protection, civil-military coordination and operational activities) is consistent with the way these armies perceive the operational environment they face. She also shows that the way this environment is ‘constructed’ is consistent with the previous experience of these armies in the country of operation.