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Imagining Democracy, Building Unsustainable Institutions: The UN Peacekeeping Operation in HaitiVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA This article employs theoretical tools devised by Michel Foucault to explore the political rationale, technologies of government, and unintended consequences of UN efforts at statebuilding and democratization in the context of the peacekeeping operation in Haiti. It aims to offer an empirically oriented contribution to the study of the modalities of international intervention in the post-Cold War period and the effects of transplanting institutional models. The article shows that the UN's political imaginary can be traced back to the texts that guided the reform of punishment institutions in Classical Europe. The United Nations saw its effort at statebuilding as centered upon making local institutions disciplined, visible, and centralized. The failure of the UN to achieve its stated goals is appraised in the contingent modalities of the encounter between an ethnocentric political imaginary that takes for granted that modalities of government can be transplanted with benign effects and local conditions of extreme poverty. The article concludes that, while purporting to build an independent, democratic, and well-functioning state, unreflectively imported political models foster disorder and dependence. They also reinforce the instruments of control and conditionality in the hands of international actors, thus fostering the carceralization of international spaces.
Key Words: Haiti • disciplinarity • international intervention • statebuilding • carceralization
Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 5,
539-561 (2008) |
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