Peacekeeping or keeping peace by force: ethnography of a UN peacekeeping operation in Haiti

Abstract

This doctorate degree research project proposes to held an ethnography about MINUSTAH - Mission Nations Unies por la Stabilisation en Haiti - in order to reflect on the peacekeeping operations promoted by United Nations' (UN) Security Council. As one of the main features of MINUSTAH is multidimensionality - that is, the presence of civil, military and police components - the ethnography proposed here also intends to be multidimensional. More specifically, I intend to analyze the multidimensional aspect that characterizes MINUSTAH, that is, the combination of civil, military and police components, as well as to held a conceptual mapping of peace, showing how this concept runs through the several elements of this kind of operation also the effects it yields. In this sense, it will be bespoken the institutional apparatus that raises around these missions, in other words, the technical, financial and human resources which are necessary to build and keep the peace and, mainly, the notions passing through and supporting it, like good governance, development, freedom, human rights and democracy. At the proposed research, the analysis of the peacekeeping operations held by UN (also their fails and (dis)continuities) must converge to the same focus: to evidence the own rationality of this kind of intervention by focusing on the perspective of the actors involved to MINUSTAH both in Haiti and at the UN's headquarters in New York. (AU)