No place for cosmopolitan peacekeeping: South America and its prevailing strategic culture of security
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Date
2024
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Routledge
Abstract
This chapter shows that even new institutionalized security arrangements have failed to bring about a fundamental transformation of South American strategic security cultures that would allow for the creation of a regional peacekeeping policy. It begins by explaining the first premise of the theoretical puzzle the chapter is concerned with: structural, systemic pressure for change in the policy domain of peacekeeping. It discusses alternative explanations to the one about culture advanced. Efforts to build regional peacekeeping capacities can be separated into general initiatives and those specific to MINUSTAH. It's regional security culture of clinging on to the principles of non-intervention and peaceful conflict resolution, regional cooperation, declaratory regionalism, summitry, multilateral exercises, and bilateralism worked against change as it limited space for new ideas to take hold. Changing conditions at the global level led to the development of regional peacekeeping capacities in Europe and Africa. Eventually, countervailing incentives rendered traditional approach of regional activism with little substantial integration well and alive.