Governing Disorder

UN Peace Operations, International Security, and Democratization in the Post–Cold War Era

Laura Zanotti

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780271037615
• eBook ISBN:
  9780271072265
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The end of the Cold War created an opportunity for the United Nations to reconceptualize the rationale and extent of its peacebuilding efforts, and in the 1990s, democracy and good governance became legitimizing concepts for an expansion of UN activities. The United Nations sought not only to democratize disorderly states but also to take responsibility for protecting people around the world from a range of dangers, including poverty, disease, natural disasters, and gross violations of human rights. National sovereignty came to be considered less an entitlement enforced by international law than a privilege based on states' satisfactory performance of their perceived obligations. In Governing Disorder, Laura Zanotti combines her firsthand experience of UN peacebuilding operations with the insights of Michel Foucault to examine the genealogy of post–Cold War discourses promoting international security. Zanotti also maps the changes in legitimizing principles for intervention, explores the specific techniques of governance deployed in UN operations, and identifies the forms of resistance these operations encounter from local populations and the (often unintended) political consequences they produce. Case studies of UN interventions in Haiti and Croatia allow her to highlight the dynamics at play in the interactions between local societies and international peacekeepers.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Retheorizing the Post-Cold War International Order
• Chapter Three: Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime
• Chapter Four: Establishing a Global Biopolitical Order
• Chapter Five: Imagining Democracy, Building Unsustainable Institutions
• Chapter Six: Normalizing Democracy and Human Rights
• Chapter Seven: Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover