Criminalising encounters: MINUSTAH as a laboratory for armed humanitarian pacification

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the nexus of militarised humanitarian work, governance and violence in the context of the ‘Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti’ (MINUSTAH). It draws on empirical fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s leading role in this UN mission reinforces the country’s ambitions as an emergent economic and political power on a global stage. Brazilian military and civilian actors base their claim of being uniquely qualified for urban ‘pacification’ efforts on a supposedly deeper cultural sensitivity which they assert to have developed in everyday civil–military encounters in the criminalised peripheries of Brazilian cities. By analysing the conflicting narratives in which the military, police and citizens negotiate these encounters, we argue that they allow for a revealing of the contested and often violent forms in which peace enforcement occurs.

KEYWORDS:

• MINUSTAH
• pacification
• violence
• Haiti
• Brazil
• humanitarianism

Introduction

In 2009, the UN Security Council (UNSC) and General Assembly made explicit the wish to increase the civilian and military responsibility of countries that have a relatively recent history in transition to democracy in UN Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs).¹ These ‘emergent’ countries on a global political stage – first and foremost Brazil, India and South Africa – are expected to bring in their expertise in ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’² and, in particular, an ability to restore formal state institution-centric security provision in violence-affected (urban) communities. South–South ‘partnerships among equals’ instead of Western ‘donor-recipient’ relationships³ have been pushed forward to increase the legitimacy of peacekeeping missions in general, increase their efficiency via a strengthened development-security nexus, and raise acceptance among local populations for the use of force in peacekeeping operations as they ‘target particular groups’⁴ such as internal or transnationally acting non-state armed actors.

The justification to deploy a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti was not based on war-induced ‘excessive violence’ in the country.⁵ Although most PKOs are established in response to prior war situations, the UNSC's decision on Haiti, which established the “Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haiti” (MINUSTAH), was justified by the country’s long-lasting political ‘instability’ due to the presence of gangs, drug-related crime and underlying political turmoil. In 2004, French president Chirac called his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva to discuss Brazil’s military lead of the soon to be established UN stabilisation mission to Haiti.⁶ Crucial to the instalment of MINUSTAH was a coup d’état and the subsequent forced departure of elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. The following interim government legitimated the mission by signing the Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) with the UN. This paved the way for Brazil to become the first nation of the global South to take the lead in a PKO in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil’s domestic experience with non-state armed groups in urban areas bolstered the argument in favour of Brazil’s unique eligibility to take the mission lead. As a regional actor with experience in drug traffic-related crime and unstable state institutions, Brazil seemed to be the ideal candidate.

The unique selling point (and sellable advantage) of this ‘Brazilian Way’⁷ was the alleged cultural sensitivity of Brazilian troops. This translated into concrete tactics on the ground: the decision to deploy its forces with greater contact and proximity to the local populations through ‘innovative’ practices such as seeking eye-contact with the population, or getting out of armoured vehicles to walk through the streets. By means of the transnational entanglements of militarisation of humanitarian work between Haiti and Rio de Janeiro⁸ and as an effect of the alleged spatial and cultural similarity between the two places, Brazil could learn from the mission to improve its operational-logistic knowledge for missions ‘at home’.⁹

In what follows, we question the nexus of militarised humanitarian work, governance and violence. The argument that democratic transition leads to a reduction in crime and violence, with the latter being ‘incompatible with democratic governance’ (Introduction to this volume), has been questioned convincingly.¹⁰ We wish to contribute to these insights and the overall argument of this special issue and address the productive role of crime and violence for urban governance. MINUSTAH is a case in point of security governance through criminalisation as a productive process. This materialises in and through what we label ‘pacification encounters’. These encounters, involving soldiers, police and citizens, occur in an urban space in which power is contested between several state and non-state actors, constituting a space of ‘plural orders’.¹¹ However, as the reduction of crime permeating some urban communities of Port-au-Prince has ceased to be seen as politically motivated – similar to that of Rio’s favelas – security governance by peace enforcement turns into a normative cover which obscures its own role in reproducing the conditions of violence. As a result, the image of a ‘better peacekeeper’ who is in an enhanced position to reduce crime by virtue of their alleged cultural proximity to the host community acts as a cover-up for the various forms of violence that have characterised MINUSTAH’s 13 years in Haiti.

Thus, what interests us is the way in which violence and criminalisation have come to permeate peacekeeping as a form of security governance. We approach peacekeeping as a form of ‘pacification’. Pacification, in turn, we understand as set of practices, strategies, norms and actors that materialise in the suppression of resistance. Counterinsurgency and the obstruction of crime are not the ultimate goals of peace enforcement/pacification, but they are rather productive in various ways.¹² In using these conceptualisations, we do not claim that peacekeeping or peace enforcement, and pacification are the same processes. Rather, we argue that peace enforcement (understood as a set of security practices, actors and norms) is a form of security governance which can be analysed as pacification.

This theoretical perspective to security governance, we suggest, serves to flesh out the ‘better peacekeeper’ – narrative by drawing, on a detailed analysis of how the heterogeneous actors involved represent and negotiate these encounters. Although most analysis of PKOs are based in IR-theory and focus on policy reports, we examine the narrative details of how peacekeepers (both military and civilian), turn to an interpret the concrete, embodied encounters in and through which peace enforcement matters. Additionally, we read these narratives against the background of perspectives as expressed by affected population groups in Haiti. This methodological procedure means more than adding a layer of reality to a ‘linguistic approach’ to security.¹³ It urges researchers to look at peace enforcement as an ‘enactment’¹⁴ of security. It is these enactments of security that motivate a methodological move towards the thickness of lived experiences through which criminalisation, and the production of certain qualities of the peace-enforcing actor occurs: in encounters between the military, police and citizens. In such ‘productive’ pacification, the rendering of whole population groups as criminal underlies the assumption of a legitimate presence of a foreign, in the case of Haiti, the Brazilian, military. We understand this as a process through which, in exceptional situations, PKOs and the power asymmetries on which they rest undergo a process of normalisation that, formalises violent forms of interaction between interveners and those intervened upon.

To demonstrate this, we take a closer look at how Brazilian actors engaged with the local population on the ground. Distrusting the narrative of the ‘better peacekeeper’, it is therefore necessary to base our argument on (a) a close and critical reading of this narrative, particularly as repeated in the personalised accounts of Brazilian military personnel and (b) on the ground observation, qualitative interviews and personal conversations with UN personnel, UN soldiers and Haitians affected by the continuing presence of MINUSTAH in Haiti. The latter engage with their experiences and perceptions of the peacekeepers, particularly regarding their supposedly ‘sensitive’ approach.

We examine how said cultural sensitivity, seen as one particular aspect of ‘proximity’, has played out in this mission and has been perceived and contested by local populations in Port-au-Prince. Brazilian leading military personnel advertised the Haitian context as a testing ground to improve Brazil’s humanitarian-military approach, emphasising its similarity to domestic strategies of ‘pacification’ (Section 2). We critically examine these claims and operations and point towards the use of ‘pacification’ encounters as both a military strategy and a governance metaphor (in Section 3) that intends to normalise political violence by state actors. We distinguish various forms of violence emanating from these encounters and demonstrate how the latter have become moments and spaces of shifting power asymmetries between pacifying intervenersand those intervened upon (Section 4). We conclude by detailing the ‘productive’ criminalisation by pacification as a specific form of security governance.

Pacification as urban security assemblage

Brazil’s prominent role in the UN mission to Haiti was designed early on. The dynamics prior to the deployment of the mission in April 2004 and Brazil’s role therein can be best described using a push-and-pull metaphor. On the one hand, at the turn of the millennium Brazilian foreign policy clearly outlined hemispheric aspirations, claiming a prominent role in the Americas and beyond. Those aspirations manifested themselves most notably in the bid for a permanent seat on the UNSC. The military leadership of a peacekeeping operation as essential to US foreign interests as the Haitian one was seen to serve as a stepping stone to meet that goal. On the other hand, as many members of the military – from ordinary Brazilian soldiers to the Force Commander of MINUSTAH – pointed out, Brazil ‘was asked’ to fulfil the role of leading the UN military in Haiti and thus simply served its duties to the international community.

Nonetheless, taking on a key leadership role in MINUSTAH became productive for Brazil in two ways: Internally, by providing an opportunity to improve operational–logistical knowledge by learning from military operations for the domestic performance of pacification¹⁵; and externally, by reinforcing its claim as the strongest Latin American power in geopolitical terms. Brazil’s domestic experience with urban insecurity has been broadly commented on with Rio de Janeiro becoming a well-researched site for security and police studies.¹⁶ With escalating numbers of drug-related killings, police brutality and different forms of violence, predominantly in and around favelas,¹⁷ the Brazilian metropole has been portrayed as caught up in war-like political instability. It thus was repeatedly produced as a security concern by a large machine of international academics, NGOs, and policy analysts all seeking to make sense of its ‘battlefields’.¹⁸ The most famous answer to Rio’s situation was framed in a three-letter acronym, UPP. Implemented in 2008, the Unidades de Policia Pacificadora, or Pacification Police Units have been led by the Security Ministry of the State of Rio de Janeiro and stood under the command of the Secretary of Security of Rio de Janeiro, José Mariano Beltrame. The programme foresaw the installation of strongholds with durable police structures in several of the city’s favelas, combined with different kinds of social work and prosocial institutions. The police programme’s laboratory character – defining the first favelas of intervention as testing grounds for further strategic programme refinements – was compelling from the beginning.¹⁹ In addition, almost one decade of pacification refined the conception of urban security. The results were integrated in an updated version of the operational guideline published by the Ministry of Defence, the Guarantee of Law and Order, Garantia de Lei e Ordem, that regulates the deployment of the military in domestic spheres.²⁰

The laboratory, however, was not confined by domestic or intra-urban boundaries, but framed Brazil’s strategies abroad. Brazil’s ‘Peace Manual’²¹ names security agents’ experience as an exportable expertise and as a military normative guideline. In addition, it defines the humanitarian character of pacification that has prepared Brazil’s military for taking leadership in UN peace building and – enforcement missions.²² In MINUSTAH’s ‘robust mandate’, and throughout the 13 years of the mission’s existence,²³ the Brazilian military has headed the military component of the multidimensional intervention, staging military, police and civil agencies of different backgrounds. Moreover, this strong engagement was in line with Brazil’s growing geopolitical claims in general and the bid for a permanent seat on the UNSC in particular. MINUSTAH became an opportunity to prove the country’s capacities for international leadership and military intervention, as well as to deploy its military force under the scrutiny of international norms and agencies.²⁴

Adding to such competence, Brazil’s ‘postcolonial condition’ configured the military–police and civil–military strength.²⁵ Conducive to cultivating this advantage was the enactment of security by Brazilian actors on the ground. Supposedly free from the imperialist image of, for example, French, US-American or Canadian agents, Brazilians then would ‘do’ pacification better than their ‘Northern hemispheric’ partners, further adding to their perceived competencies as more receptive peacekeepers in encounters with the local population. On this basis, Brazilian actors claimed to be enjoying greater acceptance by the local population.

The Brazilian military defines coordinated interaction of military, police and humanitarian actors as well as local leaderships (‘lideranças’) as imperative to both effectiveness and legitimacy of peace operations.²⁶ In particular, the ‘Peace Manual’ (EB20-MC-10.217) defines the ‘approximation’ (‘aproximação’) of diverse actors as an ongoing process objective throughout the pacification. In this jargon, approximation refers to the routinising of social encounters between residents, police, military, and humanitarian aid personnel, the objective of which is to raise the effectiveness of the urban pacification/security assemblage. In peace operations in urban environments, which are characterised by a complex web of civil and military actors, the direct contact with other actors, and in particular the population, is presupposed as a necessary condition for a successful operation.²⁷

The three-step strategies exercised in urban warfare in international peacekeeping missions and in domestic ‘urban pacification’ show similarities: First, the military determines a territory as a ‘theatre of pacification’. This ‘theatre’ is highly contested among several actors (including gangs and militias). Second, as the military enters the territory it employs stop-and-search operations and installs strongholds, aiming to, third, gain knowledge of the ‘human terrain’.²⁸ As a human-material-geographic complex, the control of this terrain depends on both physical and cultural ‘proximity’. In the urban territories of intervention in both Brazil and Haiti, where multiple authorities co-exist, the fostering of confidential civic–military bonds became keys to siphoning-off popular support from gangs and their leaders. Approximation is thus both a military strategy and a governing tool of pacification. Moreover, it functions as a signifier by which a specific Brazilian way of militarising social relations in the context of stabilising seemingly ‘ungovernable areas’ abroad and at home is justified.

Analysts and commentators emphasise the structural similarities between urban marginalised areas in Rio de Janeiro and Port-au-Prince. This equation is based on the assumption that both contain spaces which are characterised by the presence of heterogeneous actors struggling over authority and a typically crime-related use of violence to enforce loyalty and political support or otherwise exert intimidating force. Commenting on the assumption of this territorial similarity, Hoelscher and Norheim-Martinsen define these ‘marginal urban areas’ as ‘sites of a virtual absence or overwhelming presence of the state, with the threat of force by non-state or state actors embedded in both contexts’.²⁹ As both state and ‘non-state’ actors are being ‘embedded’ in governing marginal urban areas, they do not act upon diametrically opposed goals: The most ‘unstable’ and crime-intensive communities in Haiti, such as Bel Air and Cité Soleil, were said to show a strong activity of politicised criminal gangs in opposition to the government, pointing towards similar peculiarities in domestic urban battlegrounds as in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo.³⁰

The supposed similarity justified the label of a ‘laboratory’³¹ in peace enforcement strategies and tactics, a process which sufficed to form the phrase of a ‘Brazilian Way of Peacekeeping’.³² The ‘Brazilian Way’ usually summarises the essential benevolence of Brazilian soldiers which, together with an openness towards ‘the other’ in everyday interaction, combines with a quasi-natural cultural proximity of many Brazilian soldiers born in poor favelas to those living in similarly marginalised communities in Haiti. On a structural level, relating to the specific ‘Brazilian Way’ Brazil also coined the concept of ‘Responsibility while Protecting’ as opposed to the traditional ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine of UN peacekeeping to institutionalise Brazil’s new role in peacekeeping.³³ The slogan of the Brazilian military, ‘braço forte, mão amiga’ the ‘strong arm and the friendly hand’ is pivotal to this particular branding of a new kind of peacekeeping methodology. By internationally exporting models of locally and democratically ‘responsive policing’,³⁴ a set of public security and civic actors jointly perform their version of cultural awareness, based on superficial assumptions of similarity between urban settings. Police officers and NGO workers promote themselves as drivers for cultural transformation. They thereby contribute to a flattening of cultural difference and of context-specific forms of political and social organisation of local communities. Brazil and its police model are increasingly commodified and legitimacy is cultivated remotely through the country becoming a member of the transnational policing community.³⁵ Policing models, through transnational circulation, gain legitimacy when branded as ‘silver bullets’³⁶ for seemingly similar contexts. Branding here refers to a discursive reiteration of the (to be pacified/policed) places’ similarities, thereby pretending to act locally, yet in an allegedly context-independent jurisdictional void.

Pacification then is a process through which military and civil actors attempt to establish concerted control over a defined territory, yet, in conflictive ways and with partially contradictory objectives. Territorial control refers to the ability to decide over the distribution and allocation of resources, including infrastructure, consumable goods, and security. Pacification thereby unfolds as a multi-directional form of governing territory ‘on the margins of the state’.³⁷ As such, pacification is not a linear process towards establishing territorial sovereignty centred on ‘the state’, but a political space in which several actors interact in playing out converging or conflicting interests. Sovereignty, then, is always in the making, stabilised and destabilised through the interactions of diverse actors. Conceptualising territorial sovereignty as an ‘urban security assemblage’³⁸ is particularly useful in the present case as it takes into account the emergent and dynamic nature of the pacification process. This decentralisation of sovereignty envisions a search for the struggles for credibility, confidentiality and legitimacy between partially opposing, partially allied actors. In this sense, we understand urban pacification as a relational, pluralised, and dynamic process in which various actors attempt to dominate the micro-space of (pacification) encounters.

Against this background, the next sections examine how cultural sensitivity, acclaimed as being Brazil’s unique selling point, is justified by its architects and plays out and is perceived on the ground. By placing the priority on the direct encounter, armed humanitarian pacification further sifts good from bad citizens and criminalises marginalised subjects.

The analysis draws on 38 in-depth interviews conducted in Haiti and Brazil. Interviews in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, were conducted during two fieldtrips of a total of eight weeks in 2016. Respondents included UN employees of civilian and military components, especially of the Brazilian battalion (BRABAT), as well as Haitian activists, journalists, NGO employees and intellectuals. The interviews have been conducted in Portuguese, English, Haitian Creole and German. Interviews in Rio de Janeiro were conducted in 2016. Participants included former members of Brazil’s civilian and military components of the UN mission, and NGO workers.

Approximation as humanitarian-military methodology

This section focuses on Brazil’s narrative of a humanitarian-military approach to ‘pacification’. Here, we will further characterise the laboratory as a way of framing exportable expertise through the rendering of the civil-military encounter as an uncontested, formal interaction. By comparing reflections of Brazil’s military, police and NGO representatives, we demonstrate the use of ‘pacification’ encounters as both a military strategy and a governance metaphor. This section starts by spanning the transnational space between Rio de Janeiro and Port-au-Prince in which approximation has been strategically employed to qualify Brazil’s competences as an emerging peacekeeper. The section then discusses approximation in pacification encounters between professionalisation and informality. Lastly, we demonstrate how approximation contributes to the normalisation of these encounters in transnational pacification.

Proximity as Brazil’s unique selling point

In an evaluation report of MINUSTAH, Captain Cerqueira, former trainer for Civil Issues at the Centro Conjunto de Operações de Paz do Brasil (CCOPAB), highlights the particularity of Brazilian troops:

We were enjoying the profound confidence and sympathy of the Haitian population. All our initiatives were perceived positively and have been highly welcomed by the population. This enabled our soldiers to approximate the Haitians and establish a mutual relation of confidence and respect.³⁹

The troop’s accessibility to the local population in the streets of Port-au-Prince is pointed out as the unique selling point of the Brazilian military by Cerqueira. Encounters, foregrounded as a central element of Brazil’s self-acclaimed success-story, were acted out in routinised day-to-day and face-to-face approximations. Translocating the lessons learned from decades of best-practices in community policing efforts in various favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the military enacted its narrative of success through a routinised performance of a caring strong-hand.⁴⁰ The permanent presence via strongholds in the territory defined as ‘conflagrated’ (CCOPAB, 2015) responded to a said necessity of showing permanent physical presence in the territory. It was considered innovative in the context of UN-peace enforcement missions. The strongholds facilitated the deployment of continuous ‘ações cívico-sociais’ (ACISOs), or civic–social interventions, such as football tournaments, providing dental care or hair-cuts in the streets.⁴¹ Although humanitarian action is usually assigned to humanitarian agents working as such in the field, the actual training coordinator at the CCOPAB foregrounds them as pivotal to Brazil’s ‘innovative’ approach:

The same soldier “who uses lethal force is the same guy who uses humanitarian assistance” [English in the original citation]. This enables a better interaction with the population. The population already knows this specific squad or soldier when he uses force and rather perceives him like […] “Oh, he uses lethal force because he had no other choice”. So, this enhances the understanding, or the “acceptance” [English in the original citation].⁴²

According to the training coordinator, the Brazilian troops have been particularly apt at exercising this hybrid role of the humanitarian soldier precisely due to their in vivo training in pacification missions in Rio de Janeiro: first in the occupation of the favela Morro da Providencia in 2007, then in the Complexo do Alemão in 2010, a conglomeration of various favelas in the North of the city. When the troops entered those areas, the strategic deployment of routinised everyday interactions, such as chitchatting with residents on the street or the acquisition of food or drinks from the local shop gave the troops sufficient credibility to use life-threatening force on other occasions.

However, approximation was not only a ‘learnt’ military strategy. Approximation, on its way to permeate civic–military encounters, accumulated its persuasive power precisely by virtue of being a cultural characteristic of the Brazilians, as the director of the NGO Viva Rio, explains:

Foreigners do not have experience with this kind of proximity between the military, any military, any police officer in Rio de Janeiro and the population. It is our thing. And I think that this proximity was important in order to deploy a very similar approach in Haiti, given the similarity of the situations [of Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro, the authors] which was not considered in the first place. On the contrary, there was a lot of violence and confrontation. Yet, the assumption of similarity had much more to do with our culture and cultural affinity, than with a military doctrine. However it was turned into a doctrine in the course of the mission.⁴³

On this basis, approximation was first enacted in the urban security assemblage between local leaders, criminals, and residents and as form of creating trust and support and then evolved towards a military guideline. A trainer of the Pacification Police units affirms that both military interventions in Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro had allowed for developing personal interaction as a crucial element of a successful ‘methodology’:

It was nothing else than proximity policing. […] And despite being part of an army, they [Brazil’s troops, the authors] were capable of interacting with the population, to obtain information from the population like: ‘Look, that guy there is this and that hidden drug leader’. In this sense, the peace operation in Haiti was very positive for us. Because it gave us, the BOPE [Batalhão de Operações Policias Especiais, Special Police Operations Unit, part of the Military Police, the authors] the confirmation that our methodology works: a methodology that is based on the recognition of the population.⁴⁴

In this passage, approximation is foregrounded as a ‘methodology’ to identify criminals, which the Brazilian army had learnt from the military police. Approximation thus meant to instrumentalise the ‘non-criminal’ resident of a given area, and to integrate him or her into a functional urban security assemblage of cultural trait, military guidelines, the street, and the soldier.

Professionalism encounters malleability: proximity as an ambiguous signifier

There is a consensus among involved NGOs, police and military actors that urban Haiti and Brazil showed strong similarities regarding the usefulness of approximation as a governing tool in urban pacification.

Contrary to this positive interpretation of the mutually reinforcing humanitarian and military natures of activities, a former police manager in Rio de Janeiro maintains that the linear model of pacification – in the sense of envisaging an end state – is erroneous.⁴⁵ As he points out, approximation depends on negotiation and compromise:

If you interpret the pacification of territory in a teleological way you assume to already know what to do before getting there. But reality is unforeseeable. […] Everything can happen; things you did not expect. You don’t have this linearity; it is not just pacification for the sake of pacification. It’s utopic and causes enormous frustration when you let it being turned into a political discourse.⁴⁶

The former police manager alludes to the Brazilian military’s discursive reinforcement of pacification as inevitably leading to stability. Against this background, the major contribution of the ‘UPP laboratory’,⁴⁷ in his view, has been providing the opportunity to improve and differentiate practices of approximation. These, properly evaluated by using anthropological concepts, would make Brazil a better pacifier by learning how to ‘deconstruct monolithic representations of the other’.⁴⁸ Acting in an ‘intelligent’ way, the former police manager explains, meant to give ‘legitimacy’ to the transformation of those violent and crime-driven communities. Such legitimacy, however, could only be achieved by making the ‘pacifying’ actor (police or military) aware of the presence of local norms and responsive to the causes of the population’s animosity.

In an interview, Sergeant Edison explains how such malleability in adapting to local norms sustained intelligence work. Sergeant Edison had served in the military occupation of the Providencia favela in Rio in 2007, in Port au-Prince in early 2010 and then in the occupation of the Complexo do Alemão in late 2010. He arrived in Port-au-Prince one week after the earthquake. Although obtaining knowledge was based on a declared catalogue of normative guidelines, defined in the Guarantee of Law and Order,⁴⁹ it could only be successful when acting ‘off the track’ (‘alem do protocolo’).⁵⁰ He continues that, compared to other armies, ‘such as the Americans, the French, or whoever, we do have this capacity to adapt our conduct according to the situation and people’s way of living.’⁵¹

He speaks of a very efficient preparation at the CCOPAB that foresaw the capacity to moderate in day-to-day conflicts when bringing ‘the law into the favela’.⁵² Returning to the laboratory character of transnational pacification, he emphasises that the flexible quality in adjusting ‘manners to encounter the Haitian resident’⁵³ has facilitated his personal experience in Alemão.

In principle, Mayor Heliano backs this impression. Mayor Heliano, at the time of the interview, worked as an instructor for troops to be sent off to Haiti. He served in MINUSTAH during the earthquake, and took part in the occupation of the Maré (2014–2015), a conglomeration of various favelas in the North of Rio de Janeiro. He underlines once more how the mastery of adequate practices of approximation embraced both the strategies of the police and the military. However, he also cites ‘approximation’ as a value to distinguish the military’s ‘superb reputation’⁵⁴ from the police. In case of turbulence or open resistance, the police would react unanimously fatal, disregarding personalised information and thus treating everyone equally as ‘if he were a criminal’.⁵⁵ Approximation, as practice, put certain constraints on the urban pacification assemblage, particularly because it formalised a necessarily ‘informal’ behaviour of ad hoc decisions. The police, due to its history of local interdependencies with leaderships and gang members, was not in the position to adopt similarly neutral forms of encounter, he explains. In this manner, approximation became a defined space of affective engagement with the social environment, including local hierarchies and norms. Approximation thus had an ambiguous character:

Everything is political. You have to be cautious. We have to watch out not to get involved and lose [their] confidence. You cannot foreclose that, but you also cannot get involved. It’s complicated to approximate oneself. Not too close. You have to know certain things, while at the same time, you also should not know certain things in order not to get involved too much. Otherwise you will lose trust.⁵⁶

Proximity needed a large component of cultural sensitivity, and was employed as a malleable box of legitimate practices from which the individual soldier had to choose the adequate one for each situation. Approximation, however, while being a local precondition to accumulate social credibility, connected the personal encounter to the broader, global assemblage of peacekeeping, as can be illustrated by quoting Sergeant Edison again:

The American says “we have to apprehend that person”, and he goes and apprehends regardless of the situation. But, the Brazilian will enter, will talk, will find a way (dar um jeito), and then will apprehend, yes. But he will apprehend in a softer way than the North-American. And this made the UN give Brazil the position of the head of this mission.⁵⁷

Being ‘malleable’,⁵⁸ added an informal element to the Brazilian 'way'. Approximation functioned as a signifier that held peace operators’ actions in a limbo between professionalisation and informality. Informality in the way encounters were shaped during interactions in the field became an explicitly stated, legitimate and strategic quality of approximation. By making social interaction a central pillar of the routinised catalogue of stabilisation practices, approximation thus became an ambiguous tool box.

Proximity as a signifier of normalisation

Based on peacekeepers own accounts, the capacity to build proximate bonds was one of their core qualities. However, on the one side, this sellable quality downplayed expressions of discomfort against the presence of the military to mere inanimate side-effects in the security assemblage. On the other, and as an effect of this seemingly unquestionable legitimacy of pacification by approximation, the peace enforcer’s sensitivity offered the ‘good’ citizen the choice to decide and show on ‘which side’ of a clear-cut line he/she positioned him/herself. In this narrative, the encounter served as a metaphor for managing conflicts; an approximation which covered-up the contested nature of, and consequently normalising, violent forms of interaction between the military/police and citizens in the transnational pacification project.

As Sergeant Marcos emphasises, not only despite but rather because of the closer cultural proximity with Cariocas (residents born in Rio de Janeiro), the occupation of Rio’s favelas was significantly more complicated. Sergeant Marcos served in the occupation of the Alemão as paratrooper. In Haiti, he served as an engineer for eight months in 2012. Comparing Bel Air to the Alemão, Sergeant Marcos points out that gang leaders enjoyed less support from the local population than in Rio where violent encounters between the troops and residents occurred far more often:

Here in Rio, if you occupy a favela and arrest someone, be it for offense or for stealing, you have to get into the vehicle very quickly and leave right away. […] Because, if you stay around, a discussion will start, relatives will come, a friend will join in, the neighbour, and other residents.⁵⁹

Sergeant Marcos points out that such escalation occurred precisely in those ‘cultural contexts’ that were assumed to be familiar to the soldiers. He explains such negative reaction as resulting from an external imposition of new everyday norms, which were perceived as illegitimate. In Rio more so than in Bel Air the peacekeepers’ presence was protested against, he states. By means of this negative juxtaposition, he not only negates rejections of MINUSTAH by Haitian individuals and collectives (see next section), but also reinforces the well-established imaginary of the crime-ridden favela. On top of that, to him the reproaches result from the deeply embedded criminal structures of Rio’s shantytowns, which protect the gang leaders:

So the gang leader enjoys a certain protection there. He lets no one steal in his neighbourhood. The drug dealer has to reach out to his fellows – he sometimes helps a family, he gives money, small amendments. He is sympathetic to the population.

The adolescents, they are raised to carry a weapon, guns, doing security there, on the streets, for the drug traffic. But you see, they were kids and now they are adolescents. Now, when you see a policeman, or the military patrolling and apprehending him [the drug trafficker, the authors], the population will protest immediately. Despite knowing that he is a drug dealer, that he is involved in the drug traffic, they will stand up for him.⁶⁰

This passage highlights the manner in which pacification, in this particular instance of South–South cooperation can be seen, through its normalisation, as being characterised by the de-legitimisation of potential resistance or discomfort. In the eyes of this interviewee, long-established personal kinship relations complicated pacification in Rio de Janeiro. As the quotation makes clear, the enacting of proximity was not sensitive or empowering for the ‘beneficiaries’ of pacification. Such downplaying of a potentially legitimate refusal of pacification made no reference to the complex local social and political structures. Moreover, it generalised ‘the favela resident’ as (supporter of) criminal subjects. The interviewee’s description of Guarantee-of-Law-and-Order (GLO) practices applied in Rio de Janeiro thus exemplifies a non-reflective law and order politics which leaves the generalised criminalisation of favelas, as drowning in a culture of criminality, intact.

To sustain Brazil’s unique capability of approximation, the drive to downplay pacification to singular moments of civic–military encounters underlies the interviewees’ narratives. The next section questions this managerial way of narrating events of experienced discomfort from the perspective of Haitian residents. We therefore introduce views from Haiti, challenging the assumptions made by Brazilian military experts in Brazil, including narratives from Brazilian soldiers based in Haiti, other UN personnel, NGO staff and members of Haitian organisations, activists, and residents.

Contesting the ‘proximity’: ‘they come here as occupants’

Brazil was the main public face of the UN mission to Haiti, precisely because Brazil provided the largest troop contingents. The majority of Brazilian soldiers were garrisoned in the capital Port-au-Prince. Due to the high degree of centralisation of the country, most political discourse is created and practised in Port-au-Prince. Even though there is relative autarky, autonomy, and dissociation between different sections and components of the UN mission, this is largely an inside perspective. From the outside, the general impression Haitians held of MINUSTAH is that of mostly white people, sitting in white SUVs. As will be shown in this section, Haitians did not necessarily differentiate between a Brazilian soldier and one from another country. Yet, critique against the mission in general also targeted its Brazilians contributors. Consequently, in what follows we will discern some general critique aimed at the presence of MINUSTAH in Haiti. We will then pick up on the earlier assumptions regarding the similarities of context used to promote the unique competencies of Brazilian soldiers in confronting urban violence in Haiti. Narratives of solidarity, the winning over of hearts and minds of Haitians as a specific quality of the Brazilian military will be highlighted and contrasted with Haitian perspectives. This section closes by presenting the dark sides of proximity: the acts of sexual exploitation and abuse committed by MINUSTAH personnel against Haitians.

The general raison d’être of the UN mission as a whole was intensely debated in public discourse in Haiti over the past decade. A number of Haitian organisations continuously demanded the complete withdrawal of the mission from Haiti, among them peasant organisations, community organisations, women’s organisations, but also lawyers, journalists, politicians, students, and artists.

The main counter narrative on MINUSTAH was that the UN mission acted as an occupying force from the beginning. ‘MINUSTAH is an occupying force. It is immoral to accept any kind of occupation’, a member of a Haitian activist group claimed. This impression is inherently bound to the political circumstances of the forced departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and the course of action of MINUSTAH soldiers against his supporters in the following years. The violence of their interventions, the manifold military raids into communities such as Cité Soleil, Bel Air and Fort National, especially between 2004 and 2006, the number of victims are burnt deep into the collective memory of Haitians.

It is exactly this sense of occupation that makes the difference in comparing reactions among residents of Rio and Bel Air as done by Sergeant Marcos in the former section. Whereas Sergeant Marcos meant to prove the unique proximity of the Brazilian army to the Haitian population, arguably the opposite is the case: First, Haitians often do not shy away from energetic discussions on a wide range of subjects, from the price of water to government affairs, with all sorts of authorities. The most likely reason why residents of Bel Air did not intervene in the apprehension of individuals is the sheer asymmetry of power. They were confronted with an army of a foreign country, whose soldiers were perceived as occupants and remained strangers to them. They were better armed and better trained than most armed forces they were exposed to in the past. ‘30 guys with weapons are not a challenge to an army’, the Force Commander of MINUSTAH explicated. Second, other than in confrontations in Rio de Janeiro, there was no common ground for communication. At best, CCOPAB taught Brazilian soldiers words such as ‘hello’, ‘stop’, ‘come here’ and ‘good bye’. Besides, they lacked the language proficiencies to discuss more complex issues with residents. The actual lack of contact to the local population during the last years of the mission – to be explicated later on in this section – further limited the possibility for approximation and exchange.

In discussing the relation between Brazilians and Haitians with a variety of UN personnel and Haitian individuals, it turned out that the narrative of the Brazilian particularities in peacekeeping is first and foremost a Brazilian narrative, emic to their self-portrayal applied outside of Haiti.

UN personnel challenged the assumption that Brazilian soldiers would be in an advantageous position confronting the Haitian population due to socio-cultural and socio-historic similarities. The Program Manager of the Community Violence Reduction component of MINUSTAH, a Haitian national, for example stated that: ‘Haitians do not see it like that. They don’t make a difference between Brazilians and MINUSTAH. They don’t see Brazilians as particulars. Us who we understand politics and diplomacy and administration, we have a certain way to look at what the Brazilians are doing’.⁶¹

The Force Commander, a Brazilian Lieutenant General, agreed by pointing to a processual dynamic. In the beginning a special image of ‘Brazilianess’ brasilidade made a difference, but ‘now it’s similar to the Chilean soldiers, Uruguayan soldiers. [… ] When I go to Cap Haitian… the people watch the soldiers from Chile, Uruguay, Peru, the behaviour is the same between Haitians and Brazilian soldiers in Cite Soleil for example. It is equal, it is not different [English in the original citation]’.⁶² Here, the head of the MINUSTAH military also pointed to another important aspect: the different phases of intervention. While the early period of MINUSTAH, 2004–2006, was marked by violent confrontations between UN military and supposed Aristide supporters, including manifold counter-insurgency operations under a DDR (disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration) mandate, it was between 2006 and 2010 that the UN military, specifically Brazil, could emphasise its strategic style of peacekeeping through approximation. After the recuperation from the 2010 earthquake – causing the greatest single loss in personnel in all UN history⁶³ – the role of soldiers as humanitarian agents could be strengthened. The mandate has restricted the executive power of the UN military ever since. ‘Today military is more of a deterrent’, a high ranking MINUSTAH official stated.

The supposed similarities of contexts between favelas in Rio de Janeiro and precarious neighbourhoods in the Haitian capital were also challenged by the Brazilians themselves. The Security Coordinator of the Brazilian NGO Viva Rio in Haiti for example clearly stated that,

I don’t agree. There are some things that are similar. You think of the poverty, okay, poverty, violence, but the reason for the high level of violence is completely different for instance from Rio de Janeiro. The main purpose of violence in Rio de Janeiro is drug trafficking. It is not because of politics. […] Haiti is not a violent country, if you compare Haiti with other countries, with Brazil for instance. Brazil may be the most violent country in the world now… [English in the original citation].⁶⁴

The Force Commander traced the connection between gang violence and the mission’s objectives:

The security problem in Haiti is not one of gangs. We are not here to solve the problem of gangs. The gang problem has to be solved by the police. I will not use an army to combat gangs. 30 guys with weapons, to an army it is not a challenge. […] In Brazil you have more powerful gangs than in Haiti since 2004. The problem in Haiti is the coup d’état. […] We are here to maintain a stable environment […] not to attack fight gangs in Cité Soleil. So many soldiers to combat criminals in Cité Soleil? It’s a joke [English in the original citation].⁶⁵

As for the inherent gains of the Brazilian engagement with MINUSTAH, according to the Force Commander, the preparation and training for future peacekeeping missions was one of the main objectives of Brazils leading role in the mission, next to the more general improvement of military strategies. The appointment of one of his predecessor, General Santo Cruz, as Force Commander of the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) in 2013, can be seen as an outcome of his military achievements in Haiti.⁶⁶

When discussing the presence of the Brazilian military in the country, the accounts of Haitians suggested that the specific role Brazil occupies within MINUSTAH was subordinate to the general assessment of the mission. Nevertheless, there were some factors that contributed to the image of Brazilians in Haiti. The main popular reference to Brazil as a country and to the Brazilian soldiers in Haiti was soccer. The vast majority of interviewees, Haitian and Brazilian alike, referenced the sport as an important aspect of the relation between the two countries. The Haitian admiration for Brazilian soccer was and still is beyond limits. Haitians are considered fanatiks of the Brazilian way to play the game. The MINUSTAH administration knew well how to take advantage of this passion. One of President Lula’s first actions was to send the Brazilian national soccer team (‘seleção’) to Port-au-Prince in 2004, also to help the Brazilian military with disarmament. Tickets to see the game were only handed out in exchange for weapons. This form of ‘soccer diplomacy’ forms part of the Brazilian strategy to apply not only excessive force but also a form of ‘soft power’ and can also be seen as a tool to distract from the root causes for the urban violence encountered in Port-au-Prince.

In addition, Brazilian diplomacy also tried to work the narrative of a common Latin American heritage. President Lula himself drew the picture of Brazil’s engagement in MINUSTAH as an act of solidarity with Haiti. In comparison to the soccer narrative, the solidarity imaginary did not sit well with Haitians. The coordinator of a Haitian women’s rights organisation stated as follows:

There are organizations all over the Caribbean and Latin America, created to show solidarity to Haiti. The same countries sent military here. They kill people. They shoot at demonstrations. They tear people not quick enough to understand the implications into their agreements. And then they say, look, this is Esquivel, he comes to Haiti to show his solidarity. But it is the same military, Esquivel’s military, that shoots at demonstrations. It is a fraud. It is their strategy to destroy the relationships between people.⁶⁷

A Haitian journalist added another dimension to the civil-military figurations of MINUSTAH:

They instrumentalise the concept of solidarity and say Brazil is here because of solidarity, whereas in reality they are an occupying force. […] If it would be South-South solidarity they would not partake in the massacres in Cité Soleil. […] But they come with military and NGOs that collect the information for the military. That is the exact role that Viva Rio plays in Bel Air and other poor parts of town.⁶⁸

The Brazilian NGO Viva Rio was initially invited to come to Haiti by MINUSTAH because of the work they did in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2007, they work in close cooperation with the UN mission and it’s civilian and military entities. Their focus area is Bel Air, one of the parts of Port-au-Prince considered an Aristide stronghold in 2004. Their main form of intervention is ‘rapprochement’, approximation. They implement social projects within the community to establish relationships of trust. Even though the Security Coordinator of the organisation assured that they would not give personal details on residents like names for example to MINUSTAH, they do report on certain incidents related to security issues. In that sense, Viva Rio is a MINUSTAH proxy to the objective of ‘gaining knowledge of the human terrain’, as suggested in the ‘Peace Manual’ of the Brazilian military.

Viva Rio, much like other NGOs affiliated to MINUSTAH, profits from the so-called Quick Impact Projects coordinated by the Civil Affairs component. It is a particular strategy of the UN to disperse projects with relatively small funds, with the aim ‘to improve the trust of the population to the mandate of the mission’, as the Chief of Civil Affairs stated in 2016. Those projects are carried out in partnership with the Brazilian military. Another Civil Affairs officer added the following on the collaboration efforts between military and civil forms of engagement:

At the start of the mission Brazil was very active, they undertook a lot of those quick impact projects. And they really helped to win the hearts and minds of the population.⁶⁹

Thus, this strategic approximation, congruent with the Brazilian practice of ACISOs, was not a Brazilian particular but an overall rationale of the multidimensional objectives of MINUSTAH. What MINUSTAH describes as ‘winning the hearts and minds’, a concept originally deriving from British counter insurgency tactics in Malay in the middle of the twentieth century,⁷⁰ is perceived as the infiltration of Haitian society by Haitian activists:

MINUSTAH did not come for peace like they said. They came and entered every interstice of the country. They know every corridor. They know everything. They offer small economic projects, small social projects through which they penetrate the society. […] If you give money to a decidedly poor community, it does not matter how much, it is money. […] the message is that you are saviour.⁷¹

In this perspective, MINUSTAH was taking advantage of the economic challenges the majority of Haitians are faced with. As women are considered the pillars of Haitian society and sustain the Haitian economy, they are especially vulnerable:

They come here as occupants. […] Someone who works in an organization will know what ‘occupant’ means. But a woman who needs money to feed her children will not question the occupation. She sees a man who approaches her and offers her money. Lajan pa gen koule okipan [Money does not bear the colour of the occupant, the authors]. She will take the money to take care of her children, to satisfy the needs of her family.⁷²

The most substantial Haitian allegations against MINUSTAH concern cases of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) committed by MINUSTAH personnel. This particular form of violence is a serious problem in nearly all peacekeeping missions despite the official 2003 ‘zero tolerance’ policy of the UN.⁷³ Particularly. the missions in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) have shown high number of allegations.

In Haiti, too, many cases of sexual misconduct committed by MINUSTAH soldiers were recorded. Those allegations range from transactional sex, similar to that described by the quote of the director of a Haitian women’s rights organisation above, to sexual assault, statutory rape, rape and gang rape. The collective sexual abuse of an 18-year old Haitian man by UN peacekeepers in 2011 triggered international outrage. The incident became public because the perpetrators filmed the event. In April 2017, Associated Press published an investigation on a child sexual abuse ring institutionalised by MINUSTAH peacekeepers. Over a period of three years, between 2004 and 2007, at least 9 Haitian children have been repeatedly and systematically sexually abused by at least 134 peacekeepers. An internal investigation of the UN found the claims made by the children credible and corroborated by independent forensic evidence.⁷⁴ Although 114 of the peacekeepers have been repatriated, not one was tried in his country of origin. This scandal and the possibility for it to happen, facilitated by structural shortcomings on the side of the UN, is perceived as a ‘culture of impunity’ by Haitians. It minimises the legitimacy of the mission and contributes to its low overall approval rate in the local population.

This is a general problem within MINUSTAH. In comparison to contingents from other countries and also in relation to the size of the Brazilian battalions – Brazil provides around 40% of the overall force level, the number of sexual misdemeanour perpetrated by Brazilian soldiers is relatively marginal, according to the official data of the Conduct and Discipline Unit of the UN, available since 2010.

Yet, also consenting sexual relations to Haitians left their marks: The same lawyer that has been demanding that the UN compensate the victims of the Cholera epidemic introduced by the UN in 2011 is currently supporting Haitian single mothers in their fight for acknowledgement of paternity and child support for their so-called ‘MINUSTAH babies’.

As a result of those activities, in the past years all MINUSTAH soldiers, Brazilians included, got confined to their military bases. Although in 2011 and 2013 MINUSTAH soldiers could be encountered out on the beach, in bars and restaurants, the situation changed considerably after that. During the time of the 2016 fieldwork, Brazilian soldiers were not authorised to leave the military base except for patrol, commute or for the ACISOs. One MINUSTAH official described the situation as a ‘lock-down’ of the troops due to misdemeanour. This lock down also effectively limits the potential for what was described as Brazil’s ‘unique selling point’ earlier on in this article.

To sum up this section, the Brazilian battalions might have had other strategies, ACISOs included, to approximate the population than contingents from other countries. Yet, in the eyes of Haitians, they remain what they are: foreign soldiers working for the UN mission. The ‘Brazilian way of peacekeeping’, contributing to the socio-economic well-being of Haitians through small projects, was engrained in the activities of the UN components Civil Affairs and Community Violence Reduction all along. However, when it comes to criticising the structural deficiencies of MINUSTAH as an act of occupation, the particular nationalities of the soldiers did not play a role.

Conclusions

We conclude by discussing the ‘productive’ criminalisation by pacification as a specific form of security governance.

The laboratory metaphor was a productive governing metaphor in this narrative, as laboratories are ‘built to destabilise or undo’ the ‘very difference between inside and outside.’⁷⁵ Framing the learnable methodology in the curriculum of urban pacifiers, the ‘theatre of pacification’ (cited above) became a transnational test-tube to ‘improve’ military strategies and practices. First and foremost among them was approximation. In this laboratory setting, the local power structures were bracketed out. As Brazil’s armed humanitarian forces built a transnational laboratory of pacification, they were also forming an operational vocabulary in which approximation became a contested, ambiguous and silencing signifier. This signifier, however, seems to foster assumptions of developing ‘best practices’ of pacification in and through South–South cooperation. Brazil’s armed actors incorporated the methodology of approximation and insights into their formal arsenal of pacification weapons. Approximation may be a vehicle to an improved understanding of the other, yet in effect, it addressed this other from the assumption of a ‘holistic culture’.⁷⁶ Seen through this narrative, the interventions in Rio and Port-au-Prince were, from the perspective of the pacifier, de-politicised.

Finally, given the increasing entanglement of humanitarian and militarised forms of intervention as practised by the Brazilian military, the latter profits from the moral imperative and the subsequent ‘moral untouchability of humanitarianism’.⁷⁷ This is especially the case in Haiti, a country continuously described as a place of complex and protracted humanitarian crisis. A place located within such an imaginary is an ideal site to test the normalisation of pacification through the inclusion of humanitarian forms of engagement by the military and its allies alongside the violence(s) inherent to them.

Criminalisation, and an accompanying upsurge in violence, became intrinsic ingredients of MINUSTAH as a transnational project of security governance. Crime and violence were not opposed to this security governance, but rather productive in the sense of transforming (violent) tactics of peacekeeping/pacification. The imaginary of a criminal environment – similar to the one known ‘from home’ – permeated the everyday encounters between the troops and the local population. In this sense then, MINUSTAH’s version of pacification did not only put the ‘culturally sensitive’ encounter centre stage, but also reinforced the criminalisation of subjects and territories. In addition, this export, we argue, is a form of violence in that it generalises the criminalisation of populations of certain territories.

At least partly, there seems to be a gap in how the objectives of the mission as well as the similarities of context are perceived. This gap divides not only Haitian and non-Haitian perspectives, but also military currently on mission in Haiti and the architects and proponents of the Brazilian way located in Brazil. The unique selling point of successful cultural immersion was also questioned by Brazilian actors. Especially, in the last years of the MINUSTAH intervention, the possibilities for UN soldiers to approach Haitians in any other role than strictly military have been drastically limited, mainly due to the high number of alleged cases of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Next to the spread of the Cholera epidemic, resulting in the death of over 10,000 Haitians and the infamous role the UN took in it, it is those cases of abuse that reduced the legitimacy and the acceptance of MINUSTAH in the country since 2010. These cases of actual violence pinpoint the chasm between the promotion of strategic approximation of the local population and the violence enacted through normalising the figure of the friendly pacifier.

The deployment of the armed forces for policing in Brazilian cities increased in 2017.⁷⁸ Despite the factual increase in regular police presence and of a de facto implementation of social programmes, extraordinary police violence continues to pervade marginalised areas of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s security forces, considered among the most violent in the world measured by extra-judicial killings,⁷⁹ have failed to reduce homicides rates in the last few years. In addition, killings of civilians, either by police forces or during military interventions in marginalised urban areas, remain high. In the face of renewed military and police occupation of Rio’s favelas, at the time of writing this article, the sustainable outcome of (attempting to) learn from context-specific responsive (community) policing during Brazil’s UN-engagement, must be doubted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung [Transnationales Peacebuildingals Süd-Süd-Kooperation: Brasiliens MINUSTAH-Engagement in Haiti]; and the H2020 European Research Council [337974].

Notes on contributors

Frank Müller

Frank Müller is a political scientist and a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Centre for Urban Studies of the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on housing and securitisation in urban Latin America and beyond. He has studied land conflicts, ‘pacification,’ and protests against involuntary resettlements in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.

Andrea Steinke

Andrea Steinke is an anthropologist. In 2016, she obtained her doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin with an ethnographic study on faith-based humanitarian interventions in post-earthquake Haiti. Since then, she has been studying the UN stabilisation mission in the context of humanitarian governance in Haiti.

Notes

1. Amar, Global South to the Rescue; Mathur, Role of South-South Cooperation.

2. Assembly, ‘Report of the Secretary-General.’

3. Mathur, Role of South-South Cooperation, 5; Harrison, South-South relationships.

4. Karlsrud, ‘The UN at War.’

5. Muggah, ‘The Effects of Stabilisation.’

6. Pinheiro, ‘A atuaçao militar brasileira.’

7. Call and Abdenur, ‘A “Brazilian Way”?’.

8. Müller, ‘Entangled Pacifications’; Müller and Müller, ‘Im- and Export of Counterinsurgency’.

9. CCOPAB, CCOPAB E Operações de Paz; Hamann and Costa Leite, ‘Brazil’s Experience in Unstable Settings’; Hirst and Nasser, ‘Brazil’s Involvement in Peacekeeping’.

10. Goldstein and Arias, Violent Democracies in Latin America; Müller, The Punitive City.

11. Arias and Barnes, Crime and Plural Orders.

12. Neocleous, ‘On Pacification’; Rigakos, Security/Capital.

13. Bigo, ‘Afterword’, 195.

14. Isis and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship.

15. Hoelscher and Norheim-Martinsen, ‘Urban Violence and Militarisation of Security.’

16. Carvalho, ‘A Política de Pacificação’; Cano et al., Os Donos Do Morro; Freeman, ‘Raising the Flag’.

17. Igarapé, ‘Homicide Monitor.’

18. Graham, ‘The Urban “Battlespace.”’.

19. Denyer Willis and Prado, ‘Process and Pattern in Institutional Reforms’, 236.

20. Ministério, Garantia da Lei e da Ordem.

21. Ministério, Operações de Pacificaçao.

22. Santos, ‘Brazil’s Rising Profile.’

23. MINUSTAH ended in October 2017. It was replaced by MINUJUSTH, the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti, a smaller mission without military components.

24. Kenkel, ‘Out of South America’; Hirst and Nasser, ‘Brazil’s Involvement in Peacekeeping’.

25. Kenkel and Cunliff, Brazil as a rising power.

26. See note 22 above, 3–7.

27. Ibid., 3–7f.

28. Ibid., 3–8.

29. See note 15 above, 962.

30. See note 5 above.

31. Hamann 2015, Brasil e Haiti.

32. Vianna Braga, ‘MINUSTAH and the Security Environment’; Kenkel, ‘Out of South America’; Call and Abdenur, ‘A “Brazilian Way”?’.

33. Müller and Steinke, ‘Responsibility while Protecting?’.

34. Blaustein, ‘Community Policing’, 252.

35. Ellison and O’Reilly, ‘Policing goes global’, 338.

36. (O’Reilly, 2015), ‘Branding the Brazilian Pacification’.

37. Das and Poole, Margins of the State.

38. Hönke and Müller, ‘Governing (In)security’, 391; Diphorn and Grassiani, ‘Securitizing Capital’, 434.

39. Cerqueira, Coordenação civil-militar, 25.

40. Bennet, ‘Asserting the Presence of the State’.

41. Interview with the director of Viva Rio, Viva Rio, Rio de Janeiro, 13 May 2016.

42. Interview with training coordinator, CCOPAB, 28 May 2016.

43. Interview with director of Viva Rio.

44. Interview with former trainer at the BOPE, 20 May 2016.

45. See also Manual de Pacificação, EB20-MC-10.217, 1–1.

46. Interview with former Head of Executive Staff of the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro, 9 May 2016.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. See note above 22.

50. Interview with Sergeant Edison, CCOPAB, 21 May 2016.

51. Ibid.

52. In original: ‘fazer a lei da favela’, interview Sergeant Edison, 21 May 2016.

53. In original: ‘maneiras de abordar ao morador Haitiano’, interview Sergeant Edison.

54. Interview Mayor Heliano, CCOPAB, 28 May 2016.

55. In original: ‘como se fosse bandido’, interview Mayor Heliano.

56. Interview Mayor Heliano.

57. Interview with Sergeant Edison.

58. Ibid.

59. Interview with Sergeant Marcos, CCOPAB, 28 May 2016.

60. Ibid.

61. Interview with UN personnel, 8 July 2016.

62. Interview with Force Commander, 8 November 2016.

63. Katz, The Big Truck.

64. Interview with security coordinator of Viva Rio, 12 July 2016.

65. Interview with MINUSTAH Force Commander, 8 November 2016.

66. Harig and Kenkel, ‘Rising powers’.

67. Interview with coordinator of Haitian women’s rights organisation, 3 November 2016.

68. Interview with journalist, 8 November 2016.

69. Interview with UN Civil Affairs Officer, 1 July 2016.

70. Dixon, ‘Hearts and Minds?’.

71. Interview with NGO coordinator, 3 November 2016.

72. Ibid.

73. Curran, More than Fighting for Peace; Fürer, Sexual exploitation and abuse by United Nations peacekeepers.

74. UN Investigation report MINUSTAH.

75. Latour, ‘Give me a Laboratory’, 143.

76. McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, 37.

77. 7 Fassin, Noli Mi Tangere.

78. Amnesty, International Report.

79. Denyer Willis, The Killing Consensus; French, ‘Rethinking Police Violence’.