Documents and personnel in UN peacekeeping operations: Haiti as portrayed in bureaucracy

Abstract

This project for an internship abroad is part of a wider PhD research which proposes to carry out an ethnography of MINUSTAH - Mission Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti - in order to reflect upon the peacekeeping operations promoted by the United Nations' (UN) Security Council. Given that one of the main features of MINUSTAH is its multidimensionality - that is, the presence of civil, military and police components - the ethnography here proposed also intends to be multidimensional. More specifically, I intend to analyze each component that characterizes MINUSTAH, in order to carry out a conceptual mapping of peace, showing how this concept runs throughout several elements of this kind of operation, as well as to reflect upon the effects it yields. In the first year of research, I conducted field research among Brazilian Military Officials and academics involved with MINUSTAH, as well as ethnographic research with UN official documents. Up to this point, the research has allowed for the observation of MINUSTAH's strategic level from the documents, its operational level from the planning of the military component and its tactical level through official military reports. However, I intend to analyze not only the content of the official papers but also the relations around them. In order to verify the procedures involved in producing of documents, during the period of research abroad I will interview UN agents in the offices of New York. In the following stages of research, I will carry out fieldwork in Haiti among Haitian NGOs and government officials who have interacted with MINUSTAH. By comparing three points of view- Brazilian military officials, UN experts and Haitian professionals -, I intend to analyze how the articulation between the field and the institutional world takes place in the producing of documents, and how peace is conceptually produced by such articulation, engendering (unforeseen) institutional and social effects in Haiti. (AU)