Inverting Goffman's Total Institution: Local Staff and Everyday Exclusion in Peace Operations

This article revisits Erving Goffman’s concept of the total institution to analyse how local staff experience work in a peace operation base. Drawing on interviews with former Afghan employees of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), it shows that although local staff are not physically confined, they are subjected to practices that mirror those faced by Goffman’s ‘inmates’. The article argues that in peace operation bases, roles are inverted: local staff, though mobile, are regulated, while international staff retain authority. This inversion reveals how power, rather than confinement, produces institutional effects and calls for closer attention to exclusions in peace operations.