As illustrated above, Brazil’s participation in peace operations is intend-ed to increase the country’s global influence and illustrate a diplomacy of solidarity. It does so from within a foreign policy with a revisionist view of international institutions. While continuing to support multilateral
initia-66 Lira Goés and Oliveira Júnior, p. 424.
67 United Nations, Department of Peacekeeping Operations, New Horizon Report, 2010, available at: www.
un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/newhorizon.shtml. Accessed 1 April 2011
tives, Brazilian diplomacy has sought to create alternative sources of global power (BRICS) to counter the hegemony of the industrialized states of the North Atlantic ambit. It has connected its rise in influence to a role as a voice of the global South and has prioritized its relations with the develop-ing world, includdevelop-ing (importantly) through South-South cooperation. As such, it has been critical of the Northern-dominated “liberal peace” that underlies modern reconstruction operations, seeking instead to develop its own model of peacebuilding that allows the country to attain security goals through development means. Using these latter means becomes a policy necessity not only because this is where Brazil’s policy strengths lie (tied to the fostering of the country’s international profile through soft power), but because of the country’s limited capacity for force projection and its histori-cal attitudes towards the use of force.68
Brazil is highly sceptical of the utility of the use of force as a means of conflict resolution, relying instead on the peaceful negotiation of disputes through diplomatic means. This stems from both the success of this ap-proach on the South American continent—Brazil has not been involved in a territorial war for over 140 years—and of the historically interventionist stance in its region of the United States and major European powers, as evi-denced in the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary. Brazil’s historical experience has seen it more likely to be intervened upon (by the West) than to intervene upon others (in the South).
Correspondingly, in its diplomatic positions today the country categori-cally does not support interventions using military force. Until it took on a major role in MINUSTAH the country did not engage in any Chapter VII peace operations and, despite the nature of the Haitian mission, this rhe-torical position continues today. A UN Security Council mandate is seen as
68 This argument is developed in the author’s publications: “Brazil and R2P: Does taking responsibility mean using force?,” Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2012); pp. 3-29; “Out of South America to the globe: Brazil’s growing stake in peace operations,” in South America and Peace Operations: Coming of Age, London, Routledge, 2013; pp. 85-110; and “Brazil’s peacebuilding in Africa and Haiti,” Journal of Interna-tional Peacekeeping, 2013.
a necessary prerequisite for any forceful intervention and, even when such authorization is present, it is no guarantee of Brazil supporting, or even accepting, a given mission. To name a few cases, alongside strongly repu-diating the US-led non-UN interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Brazil did not vote in favour of, and did not participate in, the interventions in Rwanda, Kosovo and Libya, and does not favour, at the time of writing, military strikes against the Syrian government.
Operation Unified Protector and the other military operations in Libya in 2011 transformed Brazil’s already significant scepticism of the motives and utility of recent Western-led military interventions into profound mis-trust. Of particular importance in this respect was the manner in which Se-curity Council Resolution 1973 was proposed and passed in that chamber;
the process excluded BRICS representatives from much of the drafting and negotiation of the text. These diplomats (and others) later felt manipulated by assurances given at that time that the Resolution’s permissive text would not be used as grounds for regime change.
The uncertain long-term aftermath of the Libyan intervention, its ex-plicit use of the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), and the marginalization of BRICS states during its negotiation and implementa-tion were all important factors in motivating Brazilian diplomats to submit to the UN in November 2011 a non-paper entitled “Responsibility while Protecting.” In this document Brazil voices its conceptual support for the R2P doctrine together with its mistrust over its recent practical implemen-tation. The text itself was less innovative than the important step it repre-sented for the country’s willingness to play a leading mediatory role in the debate between North and South over intervention issues. Unfortunately, this promising initiative was abandoned before it could bear its most im-portant fruit as the touchstone for a productive and necessary discussion.
Together with growing concerns over foreign powers’ presence in the South Atlantic, a number of factors—the foreign policy purpose of
par-ticipation in peace operations; the country’s increasingly revisionist stance with regard to the distribution of power within international institutions;
and its concerns over the ultimate motivations and utility of recent West-ern-led interventions—came to the fore in the discussions held at the Rio Closed High-Level Roundtable on which the chapters of this volume are partly based. Several participants were not able to identify extensive areas of (interest-based or normative) common ground to serve as the basis for cooperation in the field of peace operations and intervention.
Alongside significant divergences in material capabilities and geographi-cal focus, these missions appear to serve fundamentally different normative and political purposes for NATO and Brazil, indeed serving as one of the areas where the lack of correspondence between these actors’ interests and outlooks is most clear. NATO’s historical experience is grounded in a belief in the possible utility of military force in attaining humanitarian goals. As one Brazilian diplomat pointed out, Brazil’s has been very different, lead-ing the country to seek to make its contribution in a form more coherent with its own capabilities and priorities: through development cooperation, poverty reduction and an emphasis on social justice rather than military alliances. Accordingly, whereas there was little consensus in the Rio round on direct cooperation in the realm of peace operations and intervention, the possibility remains that both parties might be active players in a global division of labour in the peace building field, where the strengths of both might be brought equally to bear.