■ The landscape of international development has changed with increased emphasis on security as a key development issue. Peacekeepinginvolving a mixture of both civilian and military agencies -is constructed inside discourses of insecurity and 'war on terror' and legitimized as an important contribution to development. We discuss the increased emphasis on 'security' and its meaning in relation to critical questions that anthropologists involved in development have been formulating in relation to issues such as participation, equality and gender. We take the recent reformulation of the Icelandic development assistance policy as an example of this current trend, examining changes in policies and the recent establishment of an Icelandic peacekeeping unit.
The Nordic countries have been major contributors to peacekeeping, often seen as particularly well suited due to their lack of ties to colonialism and supposedly peaceful nature. The article critically addresses this idea in relation to how gender equality has been conceptualized in peacekeeping taking as an example Icelandic peacekeeping. Iceland's recent engagement in peacekeeping has strongly emphasized gender issues but has lacked an engagement with issues of power and domination and thus reflects a particular idea of 'Nordic exceptionalism'. The authors emphasize in their discussion the need to maintain critical feminist perspectives that take diverse relations of power into account.
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