ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the historical trajectory of Indonesian participation in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions. Peacekeeping is perceived as a strategic instrument to project Indonesia’s foreign policy presence to the world. The question is how does peacekeeping correlate with the military’s institutional interests? This part demonstrates that the generic notion of ‘professionalization through international mission’ should be examined in a critical way. The Indonesian military has explicated the contribution of territorial commands for the soldiers deployed abroad for UN peacekeeping mission. It has projected parallelism of peacekeeping mission and territorial commands, in which the expected consensus is that the former would not flourish without the latter, and vice versa. In this sense, the missions have provided justification for TNI to politically defend its organizational interests from external criticism. By emphasizing its utilities on international missions, TNI has subverted the professional (and democratic) dimension within peacekeeping mission into a political instrument to justify the maintenance of territorial commands.
