Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis

Extract

Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 225p. $49.95.

The rapid expansion in United Nations peacekeeping operations in the 1990s has inevitably led to official and scholarly scrutiny of their efficacy and shortcomings. Sandra Whitworth offers a critical eye and questions of gendered analysis by studying the subjects of the UN's peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, whose presence often meant greater insecurity as well as the (mis)conduct of soldiers from Canada—a country historically linked to major peacekeeping contributions—in Somalia. Using these two case studies, Whitworth highlights a basic contradiction inherent in peacekeeping that stems from its heavy reliance on soldiers whose training emphasizes masculine traits of violence, homophobia, racism, and aggression, yet whose tasks as peacekeepers require limiting violence to self-defense and providing a benign, altruistic presence. She uses gender analysis to examine these contradictions, to challenge peacekeeping's association with alternatives to military violence, to show how peacekeeping forces can increase local people's insecurity, rather than alleviating it, and to critique the use of soldiers for missions requiring unsoldierly skills.