In the End of Peacekeeping (Penn Press 2024), I argue that the foundational thinking and practices of United Nations (UN) are patriarchal, colonial and martial and that as a result, abolishing peacekeeping is the only way forward. The book proposes that peacekeeping is an epistemic power project. What does this mean? Peacekeeping can be simply defined as a militarized, global governance response to conflict, which is interested in maintaining ceasefires or upholding peace agreements and acting as a deterrent to armed violence. But peacekeeping is not just a neutral or benign response to war—it is a knowledge system that conveys ideas, values and beliefs about where conflict takes place and who needs protection. In this way, peacekeeping is both about representations of the global north and south, as well as those who are the beneficiaries of such humanitarian interventions—the ‘peacekept’ (Henry 2024). We might ask, what does a UN Security Council (SC) decision to establish a peacekeeping operation in Haiti, for example, tell the world about Haiti and Haitians? What do peacekeepers report in their observations as blue-helmeted agents? And what do those ‘kept’ by peacekeepers say about their experiences of security or insecurity? In this way, the establishment and maintenance of peace support operations (PSOs) is a site of different forms of knowledge construction about, and by, the UN, the peacekeepers and the host populations. This knowledge is the backdrop to the power that UN peacekeeping holds and exercises over those living and working within PSOs—it is the way in which this knowledge is operationalized that justifies the mission of peacekeeping which has evolved from keeping the peace, to protecting and developing certain postconflict spaces.
Scholarship on gender, race and the martial in peacekeeping has given us the tools to critically analyze the foundational thinking and practices of such humanitarian activities. Writing by Cockburn and Žarkov, Whitworth and Razack in the early 2000s demonstrated the endurance of military thinking and ideology, patriarchal organizational structures, and colonial violence in peacekeeping practices in the contexts of Bosnia, Cambodia and Somalia. These authors, along with many others, challenged peacekeeping by drawing on feminist and gendered theories of masculinities, anti-militarist activism, and cultural critiques of Eurocentric humanitarian interventions that reflected racial supremacy and colonial legacies. Why then, has peacekeeping persisted in much the same way as it did when originally designed after the Second World War? Despite efforts to increase the number of women peacekeepers (Karim and Beardsley 2019), improve the training of peacekeepers (Holvikivi 2024), and tackle peacekeeper violence (Westendorf 2020), UN peacekeeping remains a male-dominated enterprise that promotes martial values and colonial thinking in its everyday manifestations. One important example of this outlined in the book is in how peacekeepers regularly drew on their ‘martial habitus’ or military embodied training to both ‘civilize’ and ‘empower’ the peacekept to become security subjects. Some peacekeepers attempted to instill in the peacekept a sense of financial and physical independence that was wholly based on Anglo-American and Eurocentric ideas of frugal spending/saving and adopting self-defense tactics, despite these being unsuited to the temporal and spatial conditions for host populations. Similarly, female peacekeepers did not provide ‘alternative’ models of femininity, as most were inculcated into militarized masculinity behaviors and tended to conform to martial institutional structures rather than carve out their own unique place within the peacekeeping landscape.
Examples throughout the book demonstrate that degendering, decolonizing and demilitarizing peacekeeping is not possible in practice because the foundational epistemology—the knowledge project that is peacekeeping—is dependent upon androcentric, colonial and militaristic ideologies and cultures. In resisting structural transformation, abolitionist thinking and action becomes compelling. Crenshaw et al., in recent work taking intersectionality forward, suggest that women’s vulnerability at the hands of the police (in the US context) needs to be made visible in any anti-carceral and abolitionist thinking (Crenshaw et al., 2015). Critiques of policing might serve as an inspiration for those attempting to reform peacekeeping—but to little avail. Peacekeeping as either a knowledge project, a power practice or global governance necessity in a conflictual world has its roots in sexism, racism and militarism—why then save it when abolishing it might be the best response to conflict in the current era?
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Marsha Henry is the Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women, Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute at Queen’s University Belfast.
