The End of Peacekeeping
Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention

Marsha Henry (Author)

9781512825237

Hardback, published 12 March 2024

208 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.333 kg

"An important, timely, and courageous book that invites us to think differently about the future of peace. Marsha Henry challenges dominant assumptions about peacekeeping as a peaceful response to war, and urges readers to imagine the prospect of an end to peacekeeping and its legacies of colonialism, militarism, and patriarchy." (Maria Eriksson Baaz, Uppsala University) "The End of Peacekeeping is a comprehensive study of peacekeeping—and interventionism, more broadly—that should be read by all students and scholars of global politics and humanitarian ethics… By assessing peacekeeping as an epistemic project, connecting across traditionally siloed missions, Henry pushes beyond the mainstream discourse on peacekeeping "problems" …and demonstrates how innate violence—colonial, sexist, and racist—is to peacekeeping rather than peacekeepers." (Margot Tudor, City St George's, University of London, London, UK)

In The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha Henry makes use of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, Henry shows how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies.
The book's intersectional analysis of peacekeeping is based on data amassed through more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork on peacekeeping missions and training centers around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. Henry demonstrates how focus on the policy and practice of peacekeeping has obscured the geopolitical knowledge project at peacekeeping's root, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. Arguing that we must recover critical theoretical contributions that have been sidelined within the field, she brings the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to bear on peacekeeping studies, whose production of empirical data and evidence continues to provide the justification and foundation for policy and global governance actions.
Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, this book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.

Chapter 1. Knowing Peacekeeping: An Epistemic Project
Chapter 2. From Civilizing Mission to Global Color Line: Coloniality in Humanitarian Work
Chapter 3. The Limits of the Singular: Intersectionality, Binaries, and Coloniality of Gender
Chapter 4. Where's the Peace? The Martial Politics of Peacekeeping
Chapter 5. For the Peacekept: Decolonizing, Demilitarizing, and Degendering Peacekeeping
Chapter 6. Toward Archives and Ends
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments