ABSTRACT The military and diplomacy would be two sides of a coin, two means of following the national interest. Regarding the security-development nexus, that should not be different: soldiers and diplomats are subordinate to the governments to which they respond. This article aims to compare how the nexus is articulated by Brazilian diplomacy and armed forces in official speeches and documents. The main hypotheses are that (1) a great deal of congruence is to be expected, and (2) different audiences would require Foreign and Defence Ministries to shape the security-development nexus differently. To investigate these hypotheses, the article relies on combined content and discourse analysis. The results indicate that the security-development nexus is differently articulated by diplomacy and the military, depending on their audiences and objectives.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2023.2201807

Two sides of a coin? The security-development nexus in Brazilian diplomacy and military

Participating in UN peacekeeping missions used to be seen as an appropriate way to improve civil-military relations in countries where armed forces held undue political power. Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship cautions that sending troops to increasingly coercive peacekeeping missions can contribute to a deterioration of civil-military relations. How can this variance in outcomes of peacekeeping deployments be explained? Taking stock of the existing academic debate on socialisation processes in peacekeeping and comparing the cases of India and Brazil, this article argues that military role conceptions are a key factor for understanding the effects of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries. 

What Difference Does it Make? UN Peacekeeping’s Impact on Civil-Military Relations in Troop-Contributing Countries

The Military Mystique

Introduction

ABSTRACT Brazil led the military contingent of MINUSTAH during the 13 years of the mission and was also the largest contributor with troops for this mission. This paper argues that what has been described as the ‘Brazilian way’ of civil-military relations in that peacekeeping mission is illustrative of the Brazilian association between notions of security and development at home. The mandate for MINUSTAH is actually representative of Brazilian efforts to promote new paradigms in UN peacekeeping operations going beyond short missions in order to address the roots of the target country’s issues and ensure long-term progress. Nevertheless, if such discourse does hold merit in terms of the deeper approach to peacekeeping it encourages, this approach involves military actors beyond the security realm, into development activities, as visible during MINUSTAH. This paper describes the implications of uncoordinated military-led humanitarian initiatives and demonstrates that this security-development nexus, as it exists currently in Brazil and in the way it is exported by Brazil into peacekeeping operations like MINUSTAH, jeopardises the country’s capacity to build sustainable civilian institutions and mechanisms for longer-term recovery and development.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14678802.2023.2216154?needAccess=true&role=button

Brazil in MINUSTAH: exporting a domestic understanding of civil-military relations to a UN peace operation

As the Brazilian Armed Forces are increasingly deployed outside the realm of defence against external threats (in tasks such as peacekeeping, public security, and migration management), military doctrine on Civil-Military Coordination and Cooperation (CIMIC) has emerged as a body of ‘technical knowledge’ which would support their interactions with various civilian actors. This is expressed in frequent demands by military officers for the development of a ‘Brazilian CIMIC doctrine’ reflecting both the accumulated knowledge of international partners, such as NATO and the UN, and their own experience in the ‘field’, as in their recent engagement in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). We argue that the progressive institutionalization of CIMIC military doctrine recently observed in the country reinforces a perspective according to which several domains of action traditionally attributed or led by civilian actors are seen as a legitimate part of the so-called ‘mission’ of the Brazilian Armed Forces. As a result, political disputes concerning civil-military relations and the role of military organizations outside the realm of external defence are reduced to technical challenges of coordination and cooperation between military officials, civilian state agencies and the Brazilian society. In this article, we discuss this trend by analysing the development of military doctrine on CIMIC within the Brazilian Army, and its connections with their increasing engagement in peacekeeping, public security, and migration management at home and abroad. 

Victória M. S. Santos

Papers

Civil-military relations as a ‘coordination problem’? doctrine development and the multiple ‘missions’ of the Brazilian Armed Forces