Taming Chaos: A Foucauldian View of UN Peacekeeping, Democracy and Normalization

In confronting a proliferation of unpredictable post–Cold War threats, UN peacekeeping attempts to maintain order by normalizing the international arena. Normality is identified with democracy; non-democratic regimes are considered as potential menaces. Pro-democracy peacekeeping is an instance of an international regime that aims at taming chaos through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms directed at reforming the institutions of potentially disorderly states and at steering their behaviour through multiple mechanisms of surveillance and reward/punishment. However, international normalization encounters resistance. The article analyses the UN methods in Haiti and Croatia and recommends prudence in applying standardized instruments in diverse local situations.