by Ana Elisa Santiago
Author of
Les forces de paix ou la paix de force: Ethnographie d’une mission de paix de l’ONU en Haïti [Peacekeeping Forces or Peace by Force: An Ethnography of a UN Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti]. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: C3 Editions (2025).
In 2004, the United Nations deployed a military mission in Haiti, called MINUSTAH—Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti—and it stayed for thirteen years. Officially, it was there to restore order after a political crisis and help the country build stable institutions. But what did that mean in practice? Who decided what “stability” looked like? And whose version of Haiti was the Mission working with?
These are the questions at the heart of my book, Les forces de paix ou la paix de force: Ethnographie d’une mission de paix de l’ONU en Haïti (Peacekeeping Forces or Peace by Force: An Ethnography of a UN Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti). The book was published by C3 Éditions a—Haitian publishing house based in Port-au-Prince—because a book that asks who gets to speak about Haiti seems most at home when published in Haiti, by Haitians.
I began with a simple but troubling observation: the UN produced thousands of documents about Haiti but the Haiti in those documents looked very different from the Haiti described by Haitian activists, intellectuals, and social movements. These two versions of the same place generated very different ideas about what was wrong and who had the right to fix it.
On the UN side, Haiti appeared as a country defined by what it lacked: a functioning state, democratic institutions, an effective police force. This diagnosis justified the mission’s continued presence and presented the solution as being more intervention, more data collection, more technical assistance, more foreign boots and blue helmets on the ground.
On the other side, Haitian activists told a different story. For them, MINUSTAH was an occupation – one more in a long series of foreign interventions stretching back centuries. They spoke not of institutional weakness but of revolutionary strength. Haiti, after all, was the first Black republic in the world, born from a successful uprising led by enslaved people. That history was not a footnote. It is a living political grammar, a way of reading the present and visualizing the future.
My book explores what happens when these two versions of Haiti collide – or, more precisely, when one has the power to drown out the other. The UN’s narrative comes backed by bureaucratic machinery, institutional authority and global reach. The Haitian version lives in the streets, in pamphlets, in speeches, and in the collective memory and present-day action. The book asks what is at stake when one version becomes data, and the other is dismissed as noise.
During MINUSTAH, serious issues occurred: violence involving peacekeeping troops, cases of sexual abuse, and the cholera epidemic introduced by UN personnel. Haitian social movements repeatedly demanded accountability. Yet these claims rarely reached – or were not fully recognized within—the institutional arenas. The problem was not simply a lack of information, but the way information had to be formatted to count. Complaints that did not fit established legal frameworks or evidentiary standards struggled to circulate within the system. As a result, they remained marginal in official accounts, even though they were widely known and debated on the ground.
This is not only a story about Haiti. It is also about how knowledge is produced. International organizations operate in many parts of the world, often using standardized tools to understand complex local realities. This gap between what is experienced and what is officially acknowledged reveals how institutional processes can filter and shape lived experience.
The book also reflects on what it means to research a place as an outsider. I am a Brazilian woman. I carried out fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and in New York, following the mission’s bureaucratic machinery from another vantage point. I am not in a position to speak for Haitians – and the book does not try to. Instead, it makes visible the institutional mechanisms that silence Haitian voices in international forums, and takes seriously what those voices are actually saying.
The title plays with a double meaning in French: les forces de paix means “peacekeeping forces,” but la paix de force means “peace imposed by force.” Whether the mission brought one or the other (or both at once) is something Haitians themselves are best placed to judge.
Ana Elisa Santiago holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). Her work examines UN peacekeeping operations in Haiti and resulted in the book Les forces de paix ou la paix de force: Ethnographie d’une mission de paix de l’ONU en Haïti, published by C3 Éditions and available in print and as an e-book. The research and translation of the international edition were supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP; grant numbers 2017/03654-2 and 2024/17590-0). Drawing on ethnographic and documentary research conducted in Haiti and international policy settings, she examines how policies, institutional frameworks, and bureaucratic practices shape the relationship between global governance and local political dynamics. Her current research focuses on the possibilities and limits of local participation in decision-making processes, particularly how local perspectives are incorporated, translated, or excluded.