The End of Peacekeeping

Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention

Marsha Henry, Marsha Giselle Henry

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781512825237
• eBook ISBN: 9781512825244
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

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