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This book questions the optimistic reading of police peacekeeping often found in both academic and policy circles. Lou Pingeot provides an in-depth study of UN intervention in Haiti to show how a single site can help to shed light on how policing functions globally.

In the face of the repeated failure of international peacebuilding to build peace, one strand of the literature argues that failure can only be understood by 'zooming in' – by focusing on peacebuilders, the local populations they purport to help, and the relationship between them. This article draws on the insights of this literature to argue that international peacebuilding should be understood as an instance of structural injustice. Studies of the encounter between international interveners and local populations tend to focus on the differences between these groups and their problematic relationship. I argue that 'zooming in' reveals much more than the differences between interveners and locals: it uncovers how their relationship presents parallels and similarities with others, such as the relation between colonizers and colonized. The relationship between internationals and locals is problematic not because of each group's characteristics and their difference, but because of the social positions they relate from. These hierarchical social positions give some groups the power to intervene in the lives of others. The article argues that the encounter between internationals and locals should be 'de-exoticized' and that hierarchy, rather than difference, should be at the centre of the critical peacebuilding literature.

AbstractThis article develops an International Practice Theory (IPT) approach to United Nations peace operations through the study of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). MINUSTAH saw the introduction of new practices within the context of a UN peace operation, namely the use of joint military-police forces to conduct offensive action against armed groups that were labelled as 'gangs'. While more objectivist problem-solving approaches would argue that the UN mission was simply adapting to the situation on the ground, an IPT lens reveals that there was considerable struggle to integrate these new practices within the repertoire of peacekeeping. The article argues for the benefits of applying an IPT lens to peace operations while proposing to develop theoretical and methodological approaches that have been less prominent in IPT. Theoretically, it posits that IPT can better articulate practice and discourse by paying more attention to what actors say about what they do.

Abstract
Why are some practices available to some actors in world politics, but not to others? In this theory note, we develop a theory of agency as positionally distributed: In global politics, the action potentials of groups and individuals vary depending on their location in the macrostructures inherited from common histories of colonial domination and exploitation. We contribute to the understanding of subordinate agency by exploiting the many synergies between International Practice Theory and Postcolonial Theory. Where the former sometimes struggles to capture deep macrostructures, the latter emphasizes the constitutive effects of coloniality. Conversely, where the postcolonial gaze faces the aporia of giving voice to the subordinate, a practice approach helps make sense of the indexicality of agency, including defiance and subversion. Based on these complementarities, we develop a structural concept according to which agency, including subordinate forms, is a relational effect of an unequal playing field characterized by centuries of (post)colonial dynamics. Overall, the theory note helps explain why the very same practices, such as border crossing, seem to be distributed unequally across groups depending not on their competence but on their position in social and international structures such as the North–South divide or the global color line.