The end of peacekeeping

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 Henry 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. 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.

Meet our speakers and chair:

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory in the LSE Department of Gender Studies. She works across feminist and queer studies exploring the political and epistemological impact of the stories we tell about these fields. Her books include Bisexual Spaces (2002), Why Stories Matter (2011) and Considering Emma Goldman (2018). Why Stories Matter won the FWSA (Feminist and Women's Studies Association UK and Ireland) Book Award in 2012. Hemmings' current work is on affect and temporality in ‘anti-gender’ discourse and on family stories. She is also the principal investigator of the AHRC and LSE KEI funded research network Transnational 'Anti-Gender' Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions.

Marsha Henry is a Professor at the Mitchell Institute, Queen's University, Belfast and Visiting Professor at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Marsha’s research is concerned with the gendered and racialised politics of violence; militarisation; global south development; international aid and intervention; and conflict, peace and security. In addition, she has published on the challenges of decolonial, intersectional, and feminist qualitative approaches, methodologies and fieldwork. She is the author of several books, the latest of which is: The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race and the Martial Politics of Intervention (Penn Press). She is currently Associate Editor for Security Dialogue and has helped to develop a range of courses on gender, peace and security at the GEST Programme, University of Iceland, Iceland; UNITAR, Switzerland; and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeper Training Centre, Ghana. Marsha has also advised a number of national governments on women’s participation in the armed forces, combatting sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian settings, and developing anti-racist and diversity strategies in foreign policy ministries.

Armine Ishkanian is Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme and Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also co-convenes the Politics of Inequality research programme at the International Inequalities Institute. Her research examines the relationship between civil society, democracy, development, and social transformation. Armine’s work has been published in a wide range of journals including: Critical Social Policy, Democratization, Europe Asia Studies, Journal of Civil Society, Journal of International Development, Journal of Social Policy, Social Politics, Sociological Review, and Voluntas. She is the author of two books: Democracy Building and Civil Society in Armenia (2008) and The Big Society Debate: A New Agenda for Social Welfare? (co-edited with Simon Szreter 2012).

Denisa Kostovicova is Associate Professor of Global Politics and Director of LSEE – Research on South East Europe at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a scholar of conflict and peace processes with a particular interest in post-conflict reconstruction and transitional justice. She is the author of Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk about War Crimes (Cornell, 2023) and Kosovo: The Politics of Identity and Space (Routledge, 2005). Dr Kostovicova co-edited eight volumes, including Rethinking Reconciliation and Transitional Justice After Conflict (Routledge, 2018), and her research has been published in leading scholarly journals, such as International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, Security Dialogue, Third World Quarterly, and others. Dr Kostovicova currently directs a major research programme funded by the European Research Council, titled ‘Justice Interactions and Peace-building (JUSTINT).’ Her academic research and policy contributions have informed policy making at the EU, UN, and in the UK.

Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Her work combines theoretical, conceptual and philosophical investigations with detailed ethnographies of the lived experiences, political subjectivation, and political struggles for rights and justice, specifically, in South Asia. She is most recently the author of Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021), which won both the Susan Strange Book Prize and Sussex International Theory Prize in 2022. Professor Madhok is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).

More about this event

This event is being hosted by the Department of Gender Studies and the LSE Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE). It is a part of the LSE Gender 30th Anniversary calendar of events. The department pioneers intersectional, interdisciplinary and transnational teaching and research, addressing the tenacity of gendered power relations and gendered inequalities in times of global transformations. Established in 1993, LSE Gender is the largest Department of Gender Studies in Europe.

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