'The End of Peacekeeping' with Professor Marsha Henry

The End of Peacekeeping makes use of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition. Drawing on critical concepts from Black feminist thought, and from postcolonial and critical race theories, Marsha shows how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through increasingly militarized strategies. She uses an intersectional analysis of peacekeeping based on more than fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in peacekeeping missions and training centres around the world, including interviews with UN peacekeepers, humanitarian aid personnel, and local populations. Marsha demonstrates how focus on the policy and practice of peacekeeping has obscured the geopolitical knowledge project at peacekeeping’s root, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. Arguing that we must recover critical theoretical contributions that have been side-lined within the field, she brings the insights of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to bear on peacekeeping studies, whose production of empirical data and evidence continues to provide the justification and foundation for policy and global governance actions. Revealing that peacekeeping is not the benign, apolitical project it is often purported to be, the book encourages readers to imagine and enact alternative futures to peacekeeping.

Speakers: Professor Marsha Henry (Queen's Belfast/LSE); Professor Clare Hemmings (LSE); Professor Armine Ishkanian (LSE); Dr Denisa Kotsovicova (LSE)
Chair: Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE)