In analyzing Brazil’s contribution to the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), this paper assesses the United Nations’ turn towards stabilization and the role of actors from the Global South in this process. This development, we argue, allows the material contributions of Western intervenors to be downscaled, but at the same time opens up opportunities for the larger contributing states from the Global South. Accordingly, this enables increasingly assertive actors from the Global South, like Brazil, to use UN peacekeeping missions as an opportunity for pursuing their own geopolitical ambitions. In drawing upon the results of empirical fieldwork in Brazil and Haiti, we point towards the ways in which the UN's turn towards stabilization created multiple geopolitical opportunities for Brazil that ultimately converged with the geopolitical interests of Western actors. On top of this process, this refers in particular to the US and its search for new ways of making peacekeeping-cum-stabilization more ‘local’, less costly, and more legitimate. This geopolitical convergence of interests, we demonstrate, transformed Haiti into a laboratory for a variety of actors from the US and Brazil that were interested in experimenting with new forms of militarized interventions.
