Professor Louisa Lombard awarded NSF, Wenner-Gren and Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation grants for her project “Ethics in Wars of Protection

January 29, 2018

Louisa Lombard has been awarded research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation for her project, “Ethics in Wars of Protection.” The research explores how military peacekeepers understand themselves as ethical actors. Peacekeeping has become the signal means of conflict mitigation in the world, and it has recently undergone radical shifts. No longer just keepers of signed peace agreements, peacekeepers today are asked to enforce and protect in the midst of ongoing hostilities — effectively, to participate in war and be impartial. Based in peacekeeper training centers in Rwanda and India, deployment sites in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the research will show how peacekeepers develop ethical compasses to navigate a work landscape that has such divergent moral signposts, and the tensions and unexpected responsibilities they assume, sometimes despite themselves, while war grinds on.