Statebuilding in Haiti: Violence & the Changing Nature of UN Intervention

• In Event: Statebuilding

Abstract

Why do some UN peace operations last for more than a decade, but still struggle to achieve their core mandates? Straightforward explanations emphasizing the nature of the preceding war, the difficulty of managing post-conflict elections, or the resources available to the peacekeeping mission do not account for why some UN operations achieve peace in a relatively short time, while others do not.

In this paper, I argue that the UN’s shift from impartial peacekeeping to active statebuilding undermines the organization’s ability to develop exit strategies, causing missions to become drawn out. To support this argument, I draw from primary mission reports, commander memoirs, and contemporary political histories to trace the evolution of MINUSTAH, the UN’s multidimensional peace operation in Haiti.

The paper makes three main contributions. First, it analyzes an international intervention into an urban conflict rather than a rural civil war, which speaks to a growing area of research on organized urban violence. Second, it presents a focused analysis of a UN mission outside of Africa, which has been the geographic focus of many recent evaluations of UN peacekeeping. Third, it integrates insights from the statebuilding, state formation, and external intervention literatures to characterize the changing nature of UN peacekeeping, and the consequences of this transformation.

Author

• Stephen Edward Moncrief, Yale University