As outlined, the peacekeeping myth involves the belief that peacekeeping is an ethically and practically distinct use of military force, set apart by its intention to create peace, rather than its means (militarised coercive force). This distinction positions peacekeeping as apolitical and functions to legitimise military interventions made in the name of keeping or making peace. Understanding peacekeeping as myth is a means to understand structural manifestations of military power; the peacekeeping myth reifies militarism through its ideological legitimation of violence. Part of the peacekeeper myth's appeal is because it shares ontological assumptions of mainstream international relations, including belief about the inevitability of violent conflict and the need for militaries to cease conflict through violence. Exploring peacekeeping as mythology helps to illustrate how violence is legitimised through discourses about the necessity of military force to create political change and about the value of militaries as essential institutions for creating peace and security.

Like all myths, the peacekeeping myth does not look the same across time and space because it contains culturally specific and fluid adaptations. In other words, the culturally specific values linked to the peacekeeping myth, and the manifestations of militarism that accompany this, vary across different spatial and temporal contexts. Cultural values shape military institutions and in turn shape how processes of militarisation, militarist ideologies and broader systems of martial politics unfold. We cannot comparatively measure militarisation's effects because of the ways cultural values shape military institutions and how this variably manifests across time and space (Lutz 2002: 275). Therefore, to illustrate how a particular manifestation of the peacekeeping myth has been used to legitimise militarism, military violence, and warfare in culturally specific ways, I now turn to an exploration of the peacekeeping myth in Canadian politics.

Myths develop in nuanced ways across cultural contexts and the Canadian peacekeeper myth is no exception. Canada's peacekeeping myth builds upon mythologised assumptions about UN peacekeeping, but manifests as the widely believed narrative that Canada's military is uniquely suited for international peacekeeping, exemplified by the state's role in the formation of early UN peacekeeping, its prominent Cold War contributions, and the presumed Canadian political ethos that aligns with a peacekeeping praxis. An examination of Canada's version of the peacekeeping myth illustrates the development, longevity and immutability of this myth in national context. The Canadian peacekeeping myth is perpetuated because it signals positive symbolism about Canada's place in the world.