With “The End of Peacekeeping,” Marsha Henry has written a timely and important book that raises key questions about peacekeeping as an epistemic project and an international practice. The central argument in the book is that United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping is implicit in reproducing global inequalities and should therefore be abolished. This is a perhaps a bold position to take, but you do not necessarily have to agree with the abolitionist conclusion to get something out of reading this book. Henry’s analysis is crafted on the basis of a solid engagement with peacekeeping scholarship and almost 20 years of (field) research on peacekeeping in various contexts. The book contributes to debates in International Relations and peacekeeping studies, as well as subfields such as gender and international relations and feminist peace studies.
The book provides a very good review of critical peacekeeping literature, through which Henry positions the book and its contributions building on previous feminist, critical race, and antimilitarist theories in peacekeeping studies. She argues that important critical scholarship has become marginalized in recent scholarship (an example is Razack’s 2004 study of Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, as well as work by scholars such as Whitworth, Cockburn and Zarkov), and that peacekeeping studies should make an effort to include more critical and under-cited scholars. This re-centering of scholarship and perspectives that have been marginalized constitutes an important contribution of the book and is a reason why the book deserves a broad readership among peacekeeping scholars.
Throughout the book, Henry situates her own critical approach in opposition to what she calls “problem-solving” scholarship, which she argues is mainly concerned with measuring peacekeeping’s (internal and external) effectiveness. Such pragmatic or reformist approaches to peacekeeping practice emerged from 2010 onwards and view peacekeeping as a flawed but necessary intervention into conflict. In the book, these approaches are contrasted with abolitionist (critical) alternatives which expose peacekeeping as “a male-dominated, colonial, and militarist power-project that needs to be abolished” (p. 4). While I am not sure divisions are always as neat as they are sometimes portrayed in the book, Henry is certainly right that different approaches exist in the field. It is perhaps worth noting that divisions between more problem-solving and critical approaches are not unique to peacekeeping studies (any field that is close to practice will have this, I would argue).
However, a key to understanding Henry’s strong positioning can be found in her understanding of peacekeeping as an epistemic project—as a powerful project of knowledge production. Her critical analysis seeks to unveil peacekeeping (both practice and scholarship) “as an epistemic project that actively produces knowledge about peacekeeping, peoples, and practices and as such maintains global systems of power and inequality including heterosexism, colonialism, racism, and militarism” (p. 3). She uses feminist, critical race, and antimilitarist theories as tools to shed light on what has been marginalized or rendered invisible in recent scholarship. The result is a well-crafted analysis that reminds us of the ways that peacekeeping contributes to producing and reproducing inequalities and can even cause harm.
One aspect of this, and an important contribution of the book, is that it provides great examples of how to do intersectional analysis. In Chapter 3, Henry takes us on a journey to places such as Haïti and Liberia, and among peacekeepers from (among others) Uruguay and India. Her intersectional analysis of peacekeeping and in particular the experiences of male and female Global South peacekeepers is excellent and demonstrates the limitations of a binary or solitary focus on gender. But Henry’s analysis is not only concerned with the experiences of peacekeepers. The book also analyses the position of those she calls the “peacekept,” a term which she uses consciously “to draw attention to the ways local people are acted on by peacekeeping organizations and peacekeepers” (p. 133). She argues that the peacekept, understood as the nationals of the country/ies where peacekeeping missions are deployed, are marginalized in peacekeeping scholarship, for example through an excessive focus on the safety of peacekeepers or when military peacekeepers are ordered to avoid fraternization with local population.
Henry’s book is also highly timely and important as it contributes to ongoing political debates. In recent years, we have witnessed a decreasing willingness among Western countries to deploy peacekeepers and fund expensive multidimensional peacekeeping missions, and no new missions have been deployed by the UN since 2014. This has led to debates within the UN system, among member states, and among scholars and practitioners about the future of peacekeeping. The book offers a refreshing and important perspective into these debates. But this is perhaps also where the main challenge for Henry’s argument and those of critical scholarship comes in: If we conclude that we must abolish peacekeeping because it is sexist/gendered, colonialist, racist, and militarist—are we then not describing most (if not all) international practices? How then, do we decide which ones to abolish and which ones to keep? Finally, Henry does not provide clear answers to what should replace peacekeeping in the event that it is abolished. Although one might argue that to do so would shift the perspective from critical toward problem-solving, it is unavoidable as a reader not to be left with such questions in mind.
That being said, the very key contribution of this book and of Henry’s work is that she dares to ask the difficult questions, and to take a strong position. For both scholars and practitioners, her work is valuable in how it reminds us that how we come to know about peacekeeping affects what alternatives can be envisioned about its future.
