Description
United Nations reports and independent inquiries into its peace operations often suggest that better trained peacekeepers would better protect civilians and implement other mandated tasks. While closing the training gap is commonly framed as a performance issue subsumed by the goal of increasing peacekeeping efficiency, this understanding obscures the global politics of peacekeeping training. Most peace operations today take place in the postcolonial space, with the persisting ‘colour line’ (Henry 2024) dividing the ‘northern’ peacekeepers who ‘lead’ and ‘southern’ peacekeepers who ‘bleed’ in peace operations (Coleman and Job 2021). In turn, peacekeeping training is typically built atop military institutions and security assistance networks inscribed with particular forms of masculinity and colonial lineage. I focus on where race and gender sit in the global infrastructure of peacekeeping training and how they can be made visible. Specifically, by asking explicitly political questions such as who is considered a peacekeeping expert, who is designing the training materials, who is financing the training, and who is to be trained, this paper sets out to unpack the epistemic, material, and normative acts of order-making inhabiting the training space. To make this argument, I rely on (non)participant observations of peacekeeping training as well as interviews with trainers, peacekeepers, and UN officials.
