ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to politicise the multiple encounters between a predefined peace operation model and everyday field realities. It discusses how a postcolonial theoretical perspective allows questioning the liberal peace model reproduced through UN peace missions. The chapter explores the material and symbolic influences of French colonialism in Haiti. It suggests that these influences, reproduced through La Francophonie, for instance, are part of the complex social terrain in which MINUSTAH operates. The chapter explores the Latin American presence in MINUSTAH in order to reflect on how mandates, practices, and values of international peace missions are always adapted, disrupted, and improvised. This chapter does not intend to romanticize the postcolonial agency, here represented by Latin American contingents, vis-a-vis neocolonial agents. It goes against the essentialist idea regarding a Latin American way of peacekeeping, presupposing a better, natural, and stable identity from which patterns of behaviour could be drawn.
