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International Peacekeeping

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Peace Operations and the Government of Humanitarian Spaces

Paulo Esteves

Online publication date: 08 December 2010

To cite this Article Esteves, Paulo(2010) 'Peace Operations and the Government of Humanitarian Spaces', International

Peacekeeping, 17: 5, 613 628 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2010.516961 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2010.516961

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Peace Operations and the Government of Humanitarian Spaces

PAULO ESTEVES

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The article identies how the nexus between democracy, security, humanitarianism and development was built up from the 1990s. It analyses how the discourse of post-conict peacebuilding has emerged as a notable component of a liberal democratic international order. The article argues that the transformations in peacekeeping operations depend upon a specic spatiotemporal combination a cleavage between a global and a humanitarian space and the temporality of development. For South American countries, participation in peacekeeping operations became a way to assert themselves as participants of a liberal democratic international order and a reexive mode to strengthen the process of transformation of their own societies in order to be integrated into a new global cartography.

Academic reection on peacekeeping operations (PKOs) and their particular signicance in international politics is quite prolic, albeit mainly since the mid-1990s. PKOs present a unique locus for reasoning on the major changes the international system has faced since the end of the Cold War. As Roland Paris has noted, PKOs can be seen as windows that reveal a broader picture of international politics, particularly its normative and institutional transformations, the nature of the processes that ultimately manufacture the main mechanisms of global governance, and, lastly, the contours of international order itself.1 Following this orientation, some authors have considered PKOs in light of the transformations of the post-Cold War world away from a Westphalian international order.2 Very often these analyses have stressed the nexus between a liberal agenda and the transformations in PKOs.3 This article focuses on this link as well, though it will engage it as an effect of a broader transformation of the principle of legitimacy that organizes the international system as a whole. The nexus between PKOs and the rise of a liberal international order is well established. Nevertheless, the causal link between both terms is usually constrained by a very narrow understanding of power and authority. This limitation can assume two different manifestations depending on the analysts point of view. Within this focus, PKOs are seen either as instrumental to the advancement of particular hegemonic interests, or as a failed project that ignores the interests and expectations of the target population. These perspectives can complement one another. However, emphasis on one interpretation or the other (the international liberal order or the local environment) tends to lead the respective analyses towards divergent conclusions.
International Peacekeeping, Vol.17, No.5, November 2010, pp.613628 ISSN 1353-3312 print/1743-906X online DOI:10.1080/13533312.2010.516961 # 2010 Taylor & Francis

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The rst perspective attributes the transformations of PKOs to specic actors who uphold the liberal international order, these being strategic complexes or empires in denial.4 The second perspective insists on the fact that the imposition of a liberal order through PKOs does not consider the local populations point of view. In this vein, Paris calls attention to the necessity of the institutionalization of local political processes before liberalization, and Oliver Richmond to the necessity of dialogue between the international and local dimensions of peace processes.5 In both cases, power is an instrument allowing a given actor to impose its will. In the rst case, the liberal peace is an imposition that conceals particular interests; in the second peace is often based upon totalizing, universal claims that are both self-referential and under-developed.6 In either case, power is imbued with a negative value linked to imposition and particularism. As Richmond has noted, since the Cold War peace operations have become clearly subject to the search for a balance between particular and universal, and between human security and state sovereignty.7 Even in correctly identifying a new tension between the particular and the universal, Richmond did not capture the entire extent of the transformations attendant on the concept of human security. He overlooks this point precisely because he does not take into account the transformation of sovereignty as an analytical possibility. This article explores this very possibility. If one considers power in its positive form as a means of creating different modes of existence the hypothesis that the liberal international order has changed the way sovereignty must be understood, and practices of security implemented, is plausible.8 In order to investigate this notion further, I shall reinvigorate, with a Foucauldian twist, Martin Wights concept of international revolutions. Though an unexpected reading of Wights work, this account of the notion of international revolutions enables the analysis to address the relevant transformations in what Wight termed the doctrine of legitimacy and, therefore, in the very meaning of sovereignty itself. When these transformations are taken seriously, the picture changes: the balance between the particular and the universal, to which Richmond alludes, will already be established within a new notion of legitimacy. The liberal democratic revolution in fact does not establish a new such balance; it asserts a new understanding of the particular and the universal. This assertion was in fact already being made in the form of the concept of human security. The concept assumes that humanity itself constitutes a single entity encompassing all individuals, which should be organized in liberal democratic states.9 In order to be recognized as sovereign, each community needs to be organized into a liberal democratic regime. The balance between human security and state sovereignty is established with the assumption that every political community should be organized as a liberal democracy. The question is not What will be the new balance between the universal and the particular? but, instead, How are liberal democratic states authorized to act as international subjects?. Furthermore, regarding the specic question guiding this article, what are the international revolutions effects upon PKOs? And

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what is the signicance of South American engagement in PKOs? The article addresses these questions in three sections. The rst section explores the concept of international revolutions. The second section conducts a limited archaeological exercise in order to identify the link between democracy, security, humanitarianism and development since the Cold War.10 The experiment has as its subject what will be dubbed the liberal democratic archive: a compilation of documents produced within the UN ambit that establishes a discursive connection according to which sovereignty must be understood as a predicament of liberal democratic communities, and liberal democracy is the precondition for international peace. The article argues that these regularly produced statements are constitutive of an ongoing liberal democratic revolution. The third and last section explores the effects of this international revolution upon PKOs and the signicance of South American countries participation in these operations. The article argues that the transformations that PKOs have undergone depend upon a specic spatiotemporal combination a differentiation between a global space and a humanitarian space, which are combined with the temporality of development and on a specic articulation of power relations: therapeutic policies. For South American countries, an ability to participate in PKOs became a way to assert themselves as normal states and a reexive means to strengthen the process of transformation of their own societies in order to be integrated into a new global cartography. International Revolutions? In Power Politics (1978), Martin Wight described power in a plastic sense as a way to shape authority, or, as he understood it, to construct international unity and solidarity.11 As a comprehensive model for social relations, Wight took power in its positive sense as the driving force of international revolutions. With this unexpected concept, Wight meant that an international revolution would be a blaze of conviction that reorganizes the dynamics of international politics.12 Wight set out to show that this was the case with the Protestant Reformation and the French and Russian Revolutions. For Wight, the French was the last successful international revolution. Accordingly, the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire did not mean the defeat of the revolutionary impetus. For Wight, the Holy Alliance was not able to halt the spread of a new doctrine of legitimacy: A new doctrine of international legitimacy was modifying the foundations of international society, replacing tradition by consent, prescription by national self-determination . . . The doctrine that there are no valid members of international society save those born of national self-determination triumphed when in the shock of the First World War, the military multinational empires of Eastern Europe German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman collapsed. The Versailles Settlement was the nal victory in Europe of the French Revolution over the Holy Alliance.13 The doctrine of legitimacy can be seen as the core of how Wight dened international society, in so far as it prescribes the way in which a polity should

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be organized in order to be recognized as an integral part of that society. Power politics is, in short, not only the use of force, but also the imposition of a doctrine of legitimacy according to which subjects of international system are constituted. The establishment of a certain doctrine of legitimacy implies the precarious foundation of a system that articulates and reproduces political communities in space and time. Such a structure may be called, following Foucault, a regime of power: a specic historical mode of circulation of power.14 Taking the Foucauldian reading of Wights work even further, one may conclude that doctrines of legitimacy are embedded in a regime of power in such a way that they determine not only the legitimate units authorized as constituents of an imagined international society, but also the ways in which these constituent units interrelate. In this sense, it is possible to understand how, from the late nineteenth century onwards, the international regime of power has evolved. This regime generated as its main effects rst the formation of political communities in accordance with the principle of national self-determination and second the constitution of a locus of interaction between those communities: the international system, or, as Wight preferred, international society. Put briey, the international regime of power is the necessary condition for the existence of nation states. National sovereignty has thus become the key element of the international regime of power. The national order of things15 brings with it the promise of liberation not only for citizens, but rst and foremost for humanity understood as a collection of individual nations.16 Thus, according to Rob Walker, one can understand national sovereignty as an accommodation between the universal and the particular.17 From this perspective multilateral arrangements such as collective security regimes might be viewed as mechanisms created to allow the existence of particular communities. The UN Charter, or the practices of peacekeeping, can be taken as an expression of the doctrine of legitimacy whose emergence Wight had identied in the French Revolution. Within this framework, PKOs must be seen from a broader perspective: they are techniques employed in order to reproduce the same national order of things alluded to above. In this context, the rst peacekeeping operations were conditioned by the UN Charter and underpinned by the idea of national sovereignty. From a legal viewpoint, as these operations did not take place under Chapter VII (and its suspension of sovereignty as inviolability), host state consent and the non-use of force except in self-defence became ineluctable preconditions. This framework informed the deployment of rst-generation peace operations. These political and normative constraints, together with experiences in the eld, led to the well-known guiding principles for the deployment of peacekeeping operations: impartiality, consent and the use of force only in self-defence.18 Nevertheless, by the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping operations provided an important stage for the articulation of the normative changes resulting from the end of the bipolar confrontation. This article contends that these changes should be understood as elements of an international revolution in Martin Wights sense. These changes are evident in an analysis of the mandates of peace operations. From 1995 to 2010, 25 PKOs were mandated by the UN Security Council.

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A non-exhaustive compilation of these mandates shows the following distribution of tasks: (i) public security 80 per cent; (ii) elections 60 per cent; (iii) rule of law 44 per cent; and (iv) public administration 45 per cent (understood as the administration of institutions and state agencies or reform of the state apparatus to conform with the model of good governance prevalent within the UN system).19 After the Cold War, a signicant number of operations incorporated elements of post-conict peacebuilding. The next section will identify what is dubbed the liberal democratic archive based on a set of recurring statements around the concept of liberal democratic sovereignty. This archaeological experiment will furnish the tools for understanding how the discourse of post-conict peacebuilding has emerged since the end of the Cold War as a signicant component of a liberal democratic international revolution in Wights sense. This allows for the perception of a gradual process of transformation of peacekeeping operations under the tenets of the liberal democratic peace. Throughout this process, tasks related to peacebuilding gained centrality. Security, Humanitarianism, Development and the Liberal Democratic Revolution The changes in peacekeeping practices were consistent with a broader shift in the international system towards a new understanding of peace, security and, above all, the meaning of sovereignty. Following Wight, it can be argued that by the end of the Cold War an international revolution was on the march. This section explores the discursive practices that have shaped liberal democracy as the ethical direction of this new international revolution. It is argued that the merger between security, humanitarian and development practices has three main effects: the consolidation of a new model of political community that supplements and modies the principles of self-determination and sovereign equality; the production of a new spatiality along with the lines of the liberal democratic credo; and the rise of therapeutic practices to transform and govern the new borderlands, among which peacekeeping operations are prominent. The analysis begins with an archaeological experiment exploring the discursive transformations in the security, humanitarian and development elds, which seeks to understand how the liberal democratic polis has emerged as a principle of legitimacy at the international level. This is followed by the treatment of the two other effects, spatiality and therapeutic practices. January 1992 marked the rst time a UN Security Council (UNSC) session was attended by heads of state and government. The session was an apt occasion to evaluate new ways of strengthening the provisions of the Charter, particularly the UNs capacity for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping. The Councils concerns regarding the transformations of the international order after the Cold War and the ensuing reform of the UN reform were the result of ongoing debates, reected inter alia in the Agenda for Peace (1922), on necessary changes in practices in the security, humanitarian and development elds.20 In the humanitarian arena, for instance, practices of assistance had been transformed since the Biafran famine, breaching classical principles in favour of a more comprehensive approach.21

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In December 1991, the adoption of General Assembly resolution 46/182 initiated the process of institutional innovation within the UN system. The resolution presented some innovations that led to further transformations of humanitarian practices and expanded the scope of humanitarian assistance, which was then understood as a process that should involve three different phases: emergency, rehabilitation and development. According to the 1991 resolution, There is a clear relationship between emergency, rehabilitation and development, In order to ensure a smooth transition from relief to rehabilitation and development, emergency assistance should be provided in ways that will be supportive of recovery and long-term development. Thus, emergency measures should be seen as a step towards long-term development.22 Each phase would constitute a distinct moment in the process of humanitarian assistance, with its own characteristics and problems. For the process of humanitarian assistance to succeed it would be necessary to direct each of the actions and steps towards the ultimate goals: development and, as I shall argue, democracy. The link between humanitarianism, development and democracy would rst be made in Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghalis Agenda for Peace.23 Therein, Boutros-Ghali understood the end of the Cold War as a victory for liberal democracy: In the course of the past few years the immense ideological barrier that for decades gave rise to distrust and hostility has collapsed . . . Authoritarian regimes have given way to more democratic forces and responsive Governments.24 The progress of liberal democracy and the growing number of countries that had adopted this regime was taken as an impetus towards a new conguration of the international system. An Agenda for Peace presented new discursive chains that led to a new series of statements on the international system, its purposes and the means to achieve them. Here, those chains will be mapped against the enunciation of the newly perceived threats. The rst threat, nationalistic rivalry, has a generative role, since the rest of the list can be deduced from it. In fact, the rst 11 paragraphs of An Agenda underline the relevance of democracy, state sovereignty and the democratic government of state sovereignty, in order to achieve peace and security, cooperation and integration, and nally prosperity. Democracy is the primordial element in this chain of statements. The new emphasis on democracy and the containment of nationalism assumed a necessary fusion of democracy and sovereignty. The connection between democratic regimes and international security is clearly established in paragraph 59, which deals with the UNs role in post-conict peacebuilding: There is an obvious connection between democratic practices such as the rule of law and transparency in decision-making and the achievement of true peace and security in any new and stable political order. These elements of good governance need to be promoted at all levels of international and national political communities.25 The amalgamation of security, development and democracy also appeared quite clearly in An Agenda for Democratization (1996).26 The document presented democracy as a system of government which embodies, in a variety of

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institutions and mechanisms, the ideal of political power based on the will of the people.27 According to this report, since the end of the Cold War, processes of democratization had spread across the globe. The comparison with the period of decolonization is very revealing: Just as newly independent states turned to the United Nations for support during the era of decolonization, so today, following another wave of accessions to statehood and political independence, Member states are turning to the United Nations for support in democratization.28 Sovereignty is not about building authority, but rather about democratic means of exercising authority. This interpretation justies why peace-keeping mandates entrusted to the United Nations now often include both the restoration of democracy and the protection of human rights.29 This connection gave rise to a new process of resignication of security and humanitarian norms and practices. While humanitarian practices had been congured as a process involving relief, rehabilitation and development, security practices had also been described as a multi-step equation. In the An Agenda for Peace, preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conict peacebuilding were imagined as composing an entirely new strategy for maintaining international security not only in its traditional sense, but in the new dimensions presented by the era ahead.30 More than a conuence of agendas and areas of concern, security and humanitarian practices were supposed to be consistent with the strategic goal of building liberal democratic states and with the ethical imperative of peace as conceived of by Western powers. The same process was being replicated in the development arena. An Agenda for Development (1994) added a developmental component to the equation,31 a component already implied in the transformational perspective on security and humanitarian issues. More accurately, one can identify an earlier iteration of the idea that development would be the pathway to freedom: the rst Human Development Report. In the 1990 report, human development was conceptualized as a process of enlargement of peoples choices, consistent only with a democratic regime. As Mahbub ul-Haq stated in May 1990, development should comprise a democratic commitment: additional choices, highly valued by many people, range from political, economic and social freedom to opportunities for being creative and productive, and enjoying personal self-respect and guaranteed human rights.32 From the human development perspective, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) sought to address, in 1993 94, the problems of development as security issues. The concept of human security, as stated in the 1994 and subsequent reports, inserted the security and development agendas into the liberal democratic discourse.33 According to ul-Haq, the concept of human security had several impacts, among them the construction of a system of global governance capable of promoting preventive pro-active development.34 The concept of human security assumed a developmental perspective that gave sense to processes implicated in humanitarian as well as in security practices. In both cases, development particularly development oriented towards the making of liberal democratic states and market economies would be the goal of international interventions. Instead of stabilization, development would

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provide the fundamental conditions to prevent future disasters. Concepts such as, inter alia, the democratic sovereign state and human security do not represent a previously constituted reality; on the contrary, they forge new types of visibility, truth and modes of existence. The above brief archaeological experiment allows the identication of a dissemination of liberal democratic vocabulary into various elds of practice, creating a new normality, or at least a new set of normalities oriented by something that had always been considered normal: the liberal democratic state.35 This suggests the occurrence of an international revolution in Wights sense. The liberal democratic state was viewed as the normal political formation around which different patterns of political organizations could be established, distributed and operated. The multiplication of indices and rankings for development and security throughout the 1990s was conspicuous. Starting with the Human Development Index, a vast array of indices have tried to establish a norm, that is to say, a distribution of differential normalities.36 From the fully developed liberal democratic state to the failed state, these indices have been able to identify and discriminate different types of politial communities and integrate them into the same line of normal distribution. This process, dubbed normation by Foucault, allows the identication of normal and abnormal political communities and, above all, the management of so-called abnormality in terms of its transformation towards the fullment of a liberal democratic model.37 Peacekeeping operations were adapted to the new requirements of an international revolution that had established a normal distribution of democratic states. The next section discusses two relevant aspects of peacekeeping operations after the liberal democratic revolution: a new spatiality that is implicated through its normation practices, and its main justicatory component a therapeutic policy. Moreover, bearing in mind the concept of international revolution, it will be possible to point out the signicance of South American engagement in PKOs. Liberal Democracy, PKOs and the Government of Humanitarian Spaces The concept of international revolutions helps analysts to understand the transformations of security practices, especially PKOs. This section will explore the effects of a liberal democratic international revolution on PKOs. It begins by discussing the changes in the spatiotemporal coordinates of the international system after the Cold War, in order to identify their repercussions for peacekeeping practices. Since An Agenda for Peace, these practices have suffered radical changes. Indeed, the international revolution has compressed territorialized and national space into a single place by means of a link between bounded societal units and a widespread sense of global continuity.38 The document indicated a new conjunction of forces that has allowed the revolutionary impetus to cast both the globe as a space of socio-political experiences and, as demonstrated below, humanity as a unity of belonging and expectations. Rearticulating space and time and recreating the relationship between the universal and the particular,

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the globe and humanity are new categories providing new guidance for practical life: Globalism and nationalism need not be viewed as opposing trends, doomed to spur each other on to extremes of reaction. The healthy globalization of contemporary life requires in the rst instance solid identities and fundamental freedoms . . . Respect for democratic principles at all levels of social existence is crucial: in communities, within states and within the community of states. Our constant duty should be to maintain the integrity of each while nding a balanced design for all.39 These forces articulated in An Agenda for Peace are made visible in so-called global governance practices.40 The clearest synthesis of these governmental ambitions was Our Global Neighbourhood (1995).41 While An Agenda for Peace enunciates some governmental techniques preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, suggesting a broader denition of security (further developed, as shown, in the concept of human security) Our Global Neighbourhood designates the referent object of security. The document calls attention to the shared space (the globe) and to its inhabitants (humanity): The global neighbourhood we have today is, like most neighbourhoods, far from ideal; it has many imperfections. Its residents are not all fairly treated; they do not have the same opportunities . . . This reaction does not disprove the emergence of a neighbourhood, but it does pose a challenge to its governance to reduce alienation among neighbours.42 The visibility humanity gains as a community is possible not only because it assumes the existence of a global space and a synchronic temporality. Once there is a single place and a shared time (or a coeval space of experiences), there can be a community. After the Cold War, humanity was replacing nations as a community of reference.43 Indeed, as seen, democracy, security, humanitarianism and development were melded together into an amalgam that could be found in the very idea of global governance.44 It is in this sense that global governance is not an instrument devoted to governing the globe, but primarily a set of techniques designed to build the globe as a continuous space, generating the sense of global continuity alluded to by Roland Robertson.45 Alongside the transformation of the international space into a global continuity it is possible to identify, in late modernity, the reconguration of temporality. As Manuel Castells has noticed, forging a global economy means building a planetary real time.46 The expansion of markets across the globe has as its condition the homogenization of time and the dismantling of previous historicity. A present without time, or without temporality, is a hallmark of late modernity.47 The new spatiotemporal coordinates underpin the international revolution generating a system of sovereign liberal democratic states. In this context, global governance became a strategy to integrate the liberal democratic polities, and to transform backward societies. South America became a region in transition: from authoritarian to liberal democratic regimes; from closed to integrated

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market-oriented economies. The integration/transformation dynamic allows the expansion of the practices of mobility within the international system: the free ow of goods, services and people. These practices were authorized by the operation of global governance techniques. Such techniques articulate new discourses and make visible new practices to guide, shape and foster specic types of not only states, but also other polities, as well as individuals. It sets up standards of behaviour for individuals and models of institutions to be implemented and followed by all good members of the international community.48 But what about the bad members? What about those communities that do not follow the liberal democratic credo and, therefore, cannot be integrated into the global landscape? Once they do not t the liberal democratic model, they are not integrated into the international system: they do not take part fully in the global realm. These communities (be they labelled failed, rogue or fragile states, or simply regions characterized as complex emergencies), they are actually outside the international itself. These regions constitute the by-product of the global effect: the humanitarian space. By developing global governance techniques, the system creates its own boundaries, new frontiers demarcating the distinction between the democratic states, which give form and meaning to the globe and those regions that do not adhere to it at least not yet. The new boundaries that separate what is inside and what is outside the international system establish new exclusionary processes creating the humanitarian space as a space beyond the globe. The archaeological reading of the liberal democratic archive allows the identication of the growth of a quasi-autonomous space, designed to contain and transform non-democratic states and societies. The humanitarian space has its roots in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and 1977. The Conventions established specic territorial spaces for humanitarian actions: certain areas should enjoy special protection even in the midst of ongoing conict. In this way, safe, neutralized or demilitarized zones could be established through the agreement of belligerent parties (states) in order to protect wounded combatants and civilian populations. The Conventions established the principles that would guide humanitarian action. Among these principles is the requirement of prior consent of the parties in a given conict. The space designed for the deployment of humanitarian aid was, in that sense, an enclave between the parties, in which those who were neutralized or hors de combat (wounded, civilians, prisoners of war) could be assisted. The creation of protected spaces where humanitarian aid could be deployed was fully congruent with an international order based on sovereign nation states.49 In the 1990s, however, Rony Brauman, former president of Medecins Sans Frontieres, coined ` quite a different denition. For him, humanitarian space was a space of freedom in which we are free to evaluate needs, free to monitor the distribution and use of relief goods, and free to have a dialogue with the people.50 In comparing these two denitions one sees the distance between them, which corresponds to the distance between a space authorized by sovereign states and designed to provide humanitarian aid, and a space created by a given idea of the organization of humanity and designed to provide continuous assistance, free

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from the interference of non-democratic sovereign states. Although sustained by reference to a common humanity, humanitarian spatiality is generated in opposition to the global space. The humanitarian space cannot be integrated until its full normalization, or, in Foucaults terms, it has been normated. Until then, the boundaries between the global and the humanitarian must be secured. The merger of security, humanitarian and development practices should be understood considering the double mandate of contain and transform. This is perhaps why peacekeeping operations and humanitarian and development assistance have became so alike. In fact, considering the tasks performed in these three different types of operations (for instance, a multidimensional peacekeeping operation, a cluster-based humanitarian operation and a development operation oriented towards democratic governance), one nds not only complementarity, redundancy and coordination but also a common therapeutic logic informing each. Therapy, as Judith Butler argues, intends to integrate an abnormal being into an established social world in which it must conform to a large-scale set of norms.51 Therapeutic techniques must be understood taking into account the different positions of the therapist and the patient. Therapeutic practices are underpinned by a grammar of power in which a certain class of people emerges who care for and minister to the souls of others and whose task is to cultivate them ethically and to know and direct the conscience of others.52 Although this kind of power relation, which Foucault terms pastoral power, has Christian roots, it has survived in modern and late modern institutions. The asymmetry between the shepherd and the ock translates, in this situation, into subordination, obedience and nally guidance.53 The shepherd is someone who knows the ock better, occupying an authoritative position from which each member of the herd can be guided towards redemption and salvation. The ock, in turn, occupies a position of apathy: the will that has renounced itself and continuously renounces itself.54 As Butler points out, by accepting the knowledge about themselves that is offered, those whose souls are administered in this way come to accept that the pastor has an authoritative discourse of truth about who they are, and come to speak about themselves through the same discourse of truth.55 The humanitarian space constitutes a therapeutic situation: a space for therapeutic policies, where peacekeeping operations have achieved a central position. Multidimensional peacekeeping operations represent, in this sense, the most advanced therapeutic experience. The last document composing the liberal democratic archive is United Nations Peacekeeping Operations Principles and Guidelines, also known as the Capstone Doctrine. Issued in 2008, the doctrine states that the main functions of multidimensional PKOs are to: a) Create a secure and stable environment while strengthening the states ability to provide security, with full respect for the rule of law and human rights; b) Facilitate the political process by promoting dialogue and reconciliation and supporting the establishment of legitimate and effective institutions of governance;

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c) Provide a framework for ensuring that all United Nations and other international actors pursue their activities at the country-level in a coherent and coordinated manner.56 Driven by a therapeutic logic, peacekeeping operations require a depoliticized space in order to advance their political project by means of scientic techniques. This is why humanitarianism offers the perfect spatiality for the deployment of PKOs. Within the humanitarian space, peacekeepers can legitimately pursue their goals, grounding their deeds in the rhetoric of protection. Alongside humanitarian spatiality, multi-dimensional PKOs reproduce a developmental temporality, according to which democratic institutions and governance are fostered in the eld. Moreover, as an effect of the new global cartography the humanitarian spatiality is a way to reinforce the integrative/transformative logic of global governance, attracting the good members even those being transformed to take part in the therapeutic processes. For South Americans in particular, engagement in PKOs became a means of self-assertion as part of a broader project of shaping the globe as a single place. The signicance of South American engagement in PKOs is the acceptance of the new liberal democratic principle of legitimacy that has underpinned international politics since the Cold War. Hence, when South American countries take part in PKOs therapeutic techniques, they are affected in two ways. First, from a transformative perspective, the participation in PKOs became a reexive way to reshape domestic institutions and practices, especially those related to public security. Second, from the integrative side, to participate in PKOs was a way to ensure that South America would have a place in the new global cartography. To full their developmental ambitions, PKOs adopt the vocabulary of capacity-building in order to promote alien institutions as if they were actually local. UN technicians have named this process promotion of local ownership.57 It has a therapeutic accent precisely because it supposes that locals the ock will acknowledge the shepherd as having the knowledge and the means necessary to integrate them into the globe. This is why the Capstone Doctrine values legitimacy, credibility and ownership as success factors or new principles for PKOs. Legitimacy and credibility referred not to the international system or to deploying states, but to the population in the eld: The manner in which a United Nations peacekeeping operation conducts itself may have a profound impact on its perceived legitimacy on the ground. The rmness and fairness with which a United Nations peacekeeping operation exercises its mandate, the circumspection with which it uses force, the discipline it imposes upon its personnel, the respect it shows to local customs, institutions and laws, and the decency with which it treats the local people all have a direct effect upon perceptions of its legitimacy.58 Legitimacy and credibility are critical requirements of a therapeutic enterprise. To be legitimate and credible, a multidimensional operation must carry out the mandate established by normal states with the consent and the faith

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of the abnormal region. The mission has to create a therapeutic situation in which international and local expectations can be met. Once more the development vocabulary helps to understand how this might occur. As seen, the Capstone Doctrine rates efforts towards the promotion of local and national ownership as a success factor for PKOs. It suggests that these efforts not only reinforce the perceived legitimacy of the operation and support mandate implementation, they also help to ensure the sustainability of any national capacity once the peacekeeping operation has been withdrawn.59 The correct understanding of the local environment allows peacekeepers to include a variety of social actors in the peace process and, subsequently, the development process. None the less, the document is quite clear about the dangers of taking seriously the promotion of local ownership: a mission must be careful to ensure that the rhetoric of national ownership does not replace a real understanding of the aspirations and hope of the population, and the importance of allowing national capacity to re-emerge quickly from conict to lead critical political and development processes.60 Consistent with a therapeutic logic, peacekeepers are presented as privileged interpreters of the populations will and aspirations. When international will and local aspirations do not match, locals should be persuaded to follow the liberal democratic path. In truly eighteenth-century liberal democratic style, the document then gains a Rousseauian accent: The mission will need to manage real tensions between the requirement, in some instances, for rapid transformational change from the status quo ex ante, and resistance to change from certain powerful actors who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The ownership of change must be built, rst, through dialogue. Political, nancial and other forms of international leverage may be required to inuence the parties on specic issues, but those should only be used in support of the wider aspirations for peace in the community.61 Multi-dimensional operations always assume that there will be a juncture at which the wider aspirations for peace in the community will echo the model that emulates the liberal democratic revolution. This juncture is the black box of therapeutic policies, including PKOs. Adopting a problem-solving perspective, this meeting of goals is the dening moment of successes or failures. Critically speaking, this desired juncture helps us to understand how the international system has been producing its own outside.62 This article has argued that this pretended conuence is a sign of how therapeutic policies in general, and multi-dimensional PKOs in particular, have been implemented along with a normation curve, with the intent of transforming different levels of abnormality into normal polities. The therapeutic logic follows a stringent script: emergency, recovery, development; or peacemaking, peacekeeping, peacebuilding. Different labels, employed in different elds, designate the same process of guiding an abnormal society through the normation curve. In both cases the making of a liberal democratic state is to be the passport to further integration into the global realm. As the

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Capstone Doctrine reminds its peacekeepers, the aim must always be to restore, as soon as possible, the ability of national actors and institutions to assume their responsibilities and to exercise their full authority, with due respect for internationally accepted norms and standards.63 UN guidelines do not allow peacekeepers to forget their mission: the exercise of full authority has to conform to internationally accepted norms and standards; it has to be modelled by the new principle of legitimacy the liberal democratic state.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Research for this article was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientco e Tecnologico [National Council for Scientic Development and Technology], Brazil. I would like to thank Lia Frota e Lopes for her enduring support, and Jens Bartelson, Rob Walker, Iver Neumann and Benjamin de Carvalho for their comments on previous versions of the article. Finally, I would also like to thank Kai Michael Kenkel and Michael Pugh for their comments.

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NOTES 1. Roland Paris, Broadening the Study of Peace Operations, International Studies Review, Vol.2, No.3, 2000, pp.11 19. 2. Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams, Introduction: Thinking Anew about Peace Operations, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, 2004, pp.1 15. 3. See, e.g., Alex J. Bellamy, Paul Williams and Stuart Grifn, Understanding Peacekeeping, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004; David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul and beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, London: Pluto Press, 2002; Chandler, The Responsibility to Protect? Imposing the Liberal Peace, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1 2004, pp.5981; Francois Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobiliz ation of Ideology, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; Mark Dufeld, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Books, 2001; Roland Paris, Echoes of the Mission Civilizatrice: Peacekeeping in the PostCold War Era, in Edward Newman and Oliver Richmond (eds), The United Nations and Human Security, New York: Palgrave macMillan, 2001, pp.100118; Michael Pugh, Peacekeeping and Critical Theory, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, 2004, pp.39 58; Oliver Richmond, UN Peace Operations and the Dilemmas of the Peacebuilding Consensus, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, 2004, pp.83101; Oliver Richmond, The Transformation of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 4. Dufeld (see n.3 above); David Chandler, Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building, London: Pluto Press, 2006. 5. Roland Paris, At Wars End: Building Peace after Civil Conict, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Oliver Richmond, Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace, Millennium, No.38, 2010, pp.66592. 6. Richmond, Transformation (see n.3 above), p.226. 7. Newman and Richmond (see n.3 above), p.39. 8. On positive power, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 9. Mahbub ul-Haq, Reections on Human Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 38. 10. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row, 1980. 11. Martin Wight, Power Politics, New York: Continuum, 1978, p.36. 12. Ibid., p.85. 13. Ibid. 14. Foucault (see n.10 above). 15. Liisa Malkki, Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations, Diaspora, Vol.3, No.1, 1994, pp.41 68. 16. Jens Bartelson, Visions of World Community, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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17. R.B.J. Walker, Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations, in V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992, p.189. 18. Ramesh Thakur, The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Ramesh Thakur and Albrecht Schnabel, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Ad Hoc Missions, Permanent Engagement, New York: United Nations University Press, 2001. 19. Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). 20. United Nations, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peacekeeping Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to the Statement Adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992, New York, 1992, at: www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace. html, United Nations. 21. Mark R. Dufeld and John Prendergast, Without Troops & Tanks: The Emergency Relief Desk and the Cross Border Operation into Eritrea and Tigray, Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1994; Chandler, Kosovo to Kabul (see n.3 above); Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping (see n.3 above). 22. UN doc. A/RES/46/182. 23. United Nations (see n.20 above). 24. Ibid., p.2. 25. Ibid., p.15. 26. United Nations, An Agenda for Democratization, New York, 1996. 27. Ibid., p.1. 28. Ibid., p.2. 29. Ibid. 30. United Nations (see n.20 above), p.5. 31. United Nations, An Agenda for Development, New York, 1994. 32. UNDP, Human Development Report 1990. Concept of Measurement of Human Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p.10. 33. See Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, New York: Zed Books, 2002. 34. Ul-Haq (see n.9 above), p.42. 35. On the problem of normalities and normation, see Michel Foucault, Michel Senellart, Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de ` France, 1977 78, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 36. Ibid., p.67. 37. Ibid., passim. 38. Ronald Robertson and JoAnn Chirico. Humanity, Globalization, and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Exploration, Sociological Analysis, Vol.46, No.3 1985, pp.219 42. Although Robertsons concept of globalization as the production of a single place still makes use of such categories as system and unities, I want to preserve here, rst, the sense of permanent change due to processes of reciprocal relativization between self/society and humanity/ world and, second, the resilience of bounded societal units, which appear misleading. 39. United Nations (see n.20 above), p.6. 40. Dufeld (see n.3 above). 41. Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood: Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 42. Ibid. 43. See Anne Caldwell, Bio-sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity, Theory and Event, Vol. 7, No.2, 2004, at: http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.qub.ac.uk/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7. 2caldwell.html 44. Laura Zanotti, Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance, Alternatives, Vol.30, No.4, 2005, pp.46188. 45. Robertson and Chirico (see n. 38 above), p.237. 46. Manuel Castells, European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy, New Left Review, Vol.21, No.204, 1994, p.21. 47. Manuel Castells, The Information Age the Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 48. Iver Neumann and Ole Jakob Sending, The International as Governmentality, Millennium, Vol.35, No.3, 2007, pp.677 701. 49. Hikaru Yamashita, Humanitarian Space and International Politics: The Creation of Safe Areas, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

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50. Johanna Grombach Wagner, An IHL/CRC Perspective on Humanitarian Space, Humanitarian Exchange Magazine, No.32, 2005, at: www.odihpn.org/report.asp?ID=2765 51. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 2004, p.84. 52. Ibid., p.161. 53. Foucault et al. (see n.35 above), pp.17582. 54. Ibid. 55. Butler (see n.51 above), p.162. 56. United Nations, Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. Principles and Guidelines, 2008, p.19, at: http://www.peacekeepingbestpractices. unlb.org/Pbps/Library/Capstone_Doctrine_ENG.pdf. 57. See Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Carlos Lopes, Khalid Malik and UNDP, Capacity for Development: New Solutions to Old Problems, London: Earthscan, 2002; Carlos Lopes and Thomas Theisohn, Ownership, Leadership, and Transformation: Can we do Better for Capacity Development?, London: Earthscan, 2003. 58. DPKO (see n.56 above), p.36. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p.40. 61. Ibid. 62. R.B.J. Walker, The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International, Ephemera, Vol.6, No.1, 2005, pp. 3457; Walker, Lines of Insecurity, Security Dialogue, Vol.37, No.1, 2006, pp.6682. 63. DPKO (see n.56 above), p.40.