Engendering (In)security in Peace Support Operations

Abstract

This article contributes towards ongoing debates on gender, security and post-conflict studies. Its focus is on the activities of male peacekeepers and their gendered relations with women and girls. Against the backdrop of the peacekeeping economies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, we focus on the consequences of male peacekeepers' construction and enactment of masculinity (and masculinities) on the security of local women. We conclude by suggesting that a deeper understanding of gender relations and security in peacekeeping contexts is necessary for any policy intervention in post-conflict settings.

Gendered Culture in Peacekeeping Operations

“…51 In a similar vein, Paul Higate and Marsha Henry underline the tensions that arise when a pre-existing male soldiers' socialization into a supposedly hyper-masculine gender role clashes with typical peacekeeping requirements in the field: 'peacekeeping operations are argued to require impartiality, sensitivity and empathy, attributes that may have been discouraged by traditional military training; and it could even be argued that such attributes involve the very opposite of the conventional activities of warriors such as aggression, instrumentality and goal-oriented "brutality"'. 52 However, the assumption of a male soldier's necessary socialization into the warrior-like ideal and the stereotypical hyper-masculine traits that all these analyses seem to take for granted is, at best, an oversimplification. As Higate and Henry themselves note, if military cultures evolve from specific social and historical contexts and masculinity is understood as diverse and complex, there is no homogeneous group of male peacekeepers: 'military masculine subcultures create and shape a complex and nuanced range of soldier/peacekeeper identities and practices'.…”

Drinking Vodka from the ‘Butt-Crack’

“…Though the emerging feminist scholarship has only just begun to delve into the gendered context of this predominantly military veteran workforce as one way in which to explain the genesis of contractor transgression, there remains little in the way of micro-level, thick-description of the gendered world of the contractor. In contrast, feminist, critical men's studies and postcolonial contributions pertaining to national militaries and peacekeeping have examined military and militarized masculinity across a range of contexts from the everyday to the international (Arkin and Dobrovsky 1990;Morgan 1992Morgan , 1994Barrett 1996;Goldstein 2001;Higate 2003;Higate and Henry 2004;Razack 2004;Whitworth 2004;Higate and Henry 2009). This scholarship has taught us a great deal about the sometimes unintended, negative consequences of training men (and rather fewer women) in violence, and while of undoubted relevance to explaining the militarized and masculinized cultures underlying misuse of power, this work tends to have focused on contexts of relative accountability -those of national, regular militaries and UN/NATO peacekeeping operations subject to military and civilian law in the former, and institutional codes of conduct in the latter, for example.…”

The Pacification of Soldiering, and the Militarization of Development: Contradictions Inherent in Provincial Reconstruction in Afghanistan

“…Focusing on militarized masculinities sheds light on the nature of racialized and gendered relations and their interpenetration with practices of power. The representations are all the more acute as they are combined with the legitimate (or illegitimate) use of violence, a point that has been argued by Arkin and Dobrofsky (1978); Morgan (1994); Barrett (1996); Higate and Henry (2004); and Higate (2003;. As a result, a detailed analysis of the interplay of masculinities in and around the teams is essential for understanding the emergence of the new rescue industry and its practices and how it impacts local communities in the South.…”