Description
Peacekeeping is intimately attached to war (Henry, 2024; Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018). The United Nations (UN) continuously makes clear that peacekeeping is not an army to be used in conflict and that it should be distinguished from military interventions and warfighting. At the same time, peacekeeping has over time exhibited an increased trust in military solutions, especially the use of force, to solve ongoing conflicts and to promote peace. How can we understand the relationship between peacekeeping and war? How does ‘war’ permeate the politics of peacekeeping, and what kind of politics and global order does this produce? Regarding war as a generative force of political and social order (Barkawi and Brighton, 2011), this paper explores how ‘war’ is understood in UN peacekeeping and what this can tell us about the production of racialised and gendered ways in which UN peacekeeping’s role and purpose are framed. Through a genealogical approach, I trace how the concept of ‘war’ is understood throughout UN peacekeeping history, drawing from postcolonial and feminist scholarship calling for a more nuanced understanding of an ever-present war that carries certain power dynamics into the present-day policies and practices of liberal international politics.
