Better than the "Liberal Peace"? Brazilian Peacekeeping between Post-colonial Branding and Violent Order-Making

This chapter analyzes how and to what effect Brazil’s domestic liberal script and contemporary UN-mandated international interventions interact at the beginning of the 21st century. Zooming in on the causes and consequences of Brazil’s contribution to MINUSTAH—the country’s biggest peacekeeping engagement thus far—we argue that the elite-driven enactment of the liberal script in Brazil, while discursively embracing ideas of collective and individual self-determination, has produced a violent and exclusionary form of governing security. Far from seeking to provide a public good, Brazilian security governance primarily aims at safeguarding the (re-)production of a highly unequal and racialized sociopolitical order, which, in turn, negatively impacts upon people’s self-determination regarding the exercise of their personal freedom and autonomy. Our analysis reveals how Brazil’s leading role in MINUSTAH implied a traveling abroad of this violent form of governing security with negative implications for the individual self-determination of those intervened upon in Haiti.