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

In The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha Henry argues that peacekeeping is an epistemic power project that produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies. She 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. The book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 12 March 2024
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

In her groundbreaking book, "The End of Peacekeeping," Marsha Henry employs a multi-faceted approach, incorporating feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks, to expose the inherent flaws of peacekeeping as an epistemic power project that demands abolition. By drawing upon critical concepts from Black feminist thought, as well as postcolonial and critical race theories, Henry meticulously illustrates how contemporary peacekeeping perpetuates gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork spanning over fifteen years, encompassing interviews with United Nations peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local communities, Henry conducts an intersectional analysis of peacekeeping. Her comprehensive research uncovers the underlying geopolitical knowledge project that underpins peacekeeping, shedding light on its harmful consequences that have remained unquestioned by mainstream scholarship.

Henry argues that the field of peacekeeping has inadvertently marginalized crucial theoretical contributions, which must be reclaimed to enhance our understanding of peacekeeping. By integrating the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship into peacekeeping studies, she provides valuable empirical data and evidence that underpins policy and global governance actions. This book serves as a powerful reminder that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical endeavor it is often portrayed as, and encourages readers to envision and actively pursue alternative futures beyond the confines of peacekeeping.

Dimension: 216 x 140 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512825237