| Summary/Abstract |
In 2013 the United Nations applied two new peacekeeping instruments, the Intervention Brigade and unmanned aerial vehicles, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This article argues that the significance and novelty of the Brigade and UAVs for UN peacekeeping are not only attributable to their technologically advanced and robust capacities, as maintained in previous accounts. Most importantly, these instruments also function as the harbingers of a new paradigm for peacekeeping—sovereignty building. The current technological turn of UN peacekeeping is only an epiphenomenon of a more profound paradigm shift in UN peacekeeping toward sovereignty building. Sovereignty building can be defined as an emerging set of peacekeeping practices that aims to create or reinforce four constitutive elements of sovereignty, which have previously been sidelined in state building; namely, sovereign agency (the political will of the host government), sovereign space (the area of supreme state authority), related sovereignty (the sovereignty network of subregional and regional peers), and popular sovereignty (the protection of the population).
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