This dissertation offers a postcolonial reading about the new UN peace operations from the case of Somalia. The central argument is that these operations are informed by an old logic, namely: the modernization theory, which, in turn, lays its roots in evolutionary and racist theories of the nineteenth century. Thus, this dissertation suggests that these new operations are guided by the same logocentric logic that informed the European imperialism and the subsequent action of the United Nations Trusteeship Council. This research aims at destabilizing the novelty of the new peace operations through the genealogical analysis of a particular case: Somalia. It is argued that the discursive construction of the target societies of these operations as backward, failed or pre-modern creates the conditions of possibility for peace operations undertaken by the United Nations on behalf of salvation, progress and modernization of such societies. It is argued that the production of discontinuity and innovation of the new peace operations in relation to the colonial past depends on the construction of the continuity of the societies subject to these operations which are seen as under ancestral and endogenous conflicts tied to a pre-colonial past; revealing therefore the mutual dependency between the identities modern and traditional. Finally, the dissertation suggests that the recognition of the hybrid character of the postcolonial societies by the postcolonial perspectives allows us to destabilize the logocentric discourse underlying the new peace operations.