The Linkage of International and Internal Security – Brazilian Contributions to United Nations Peacekeeping Operations and their Effect on the Domestic Security Sector

The globalized nature of ´new security threats´ has contributed to the rising demand for South American states to participate in increasingly robust peacekeeping operations. Brazil is a prominent example of this paradigm change in South America, particularly with leading the military component of peacekeeping forces in Haiti. Moreover, members of government and Armed Forces see the peacekeeping experience as an exercise for fighting criminality within Brazil. Drawing on a field trip to military units that were deployed both in peacekeeping as well as in internal missions, this paper aims to deal with the consequences of peacekeeping for civil-military interactions in Brazilian public security. With the blending of police and military tasks being a defining character of Brazil´s peacekeeping missions and training, I aim to assess if this is going to reinforce the “militarization of public security” inherited from the authoritarian past by the “police-ization” of the military in internal missions.