The End of Peacekeeping with Marsha Henry

12/20/24 • 68 min

In this episode, Alice interviews Professor Marsha Henry, the Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women, Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute, at Queen’s University Belfast. Over the course of an impressive career, Marsha’s research has focused particularly on the complex relationships between gender, militarisation and peacekeeping. As well as writing a wealth of articles and chapters on these topics, she has spent time over the past 20 years documenting the social experiences of people living and working in peacekeeping missions. Her book on this ethnographic-inspired research, The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention, was published in March 2024 by University of Pennsylvania Press.
The episode starts with Marsha discussing militarism (the ideology that armed conflict is acceptable, normal, even impressive, noble, desirable - and of greater value in society than many civilian activities) and militarisation (the process by which individuals and groups, civilians as well as soldiers, are socialised into war-oriented worldviews). As she underlines, militarisation often intersects with discourses of gender (that reflect and generate inequalities between men and women) and also with discourses of race and colonisation (again leading to inequalities and oppression). While it is less studied, the same trend can be observed in contexts of peacekeeping, where ideas of gender and race can similarly result in unequal and harmful experiences. This has led Marsha to adopting 'intersectional feminist methodologies' in her study of both militarisation and peacekeeping - an approach she explains in detail.
The bulk of the episode focuses on Marsha's study of current systems of peacekeeping, in particular the harms perpetrated in official peacekeeping missions via e.g. gender-based violence, colonising impulses, and global north thinking. In her book The End of Peacekeeping, Marsha argues that peacekeeping is not simply a practical but also ‘an epistemic project that actively produces knowledge about peacekeeping, peoples, and practices and as such maintains global systems of power and inequality including heterosexism, colonialism, racism, and militarism’. For that reason, she advocates for its abolition - a proposal we discuss in depth.
In exploring alternatives to current peacekeeping practices, Marsha underlines the need for 'knowing differently' by examining peacekeeping more systematically from the perspectives of 'the peacekept'. We discuss the power of different peace imaginaries to shift habits of thinking and doing, and the need to visualise peacekeeping broadly, as encompassing e.g. environmental work. Despite advocating for an end to peacekeeping, Marsha concludes the episode by looking ahead to positive futures - achievable if we are able to dismantle gendered, racist and colonising approaches that for too long have resulted in peacekeeping itself becoming a mechanism of direct, cultural and structural.
We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Previous Episode

Curating Peace: the role of museums

In this episode, Alice interviews two guests about the 'peace knowledge' produced by different museums. Charlotte Houlahan joins us from Yorkshire, where she is principal curator at The Peace Museum in Saltaire, near Bradford. Alongside her, Lydia Cole, a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, shares insights from her new research project, 'Curating Peace', which examines ways that exhibitions and museum collections shape public knowledge of peacemaking in the United Kingdom.
The Peace Museum in Saltaire is the UK’s only peace museum. Founded in 1994, it recently moved to new premises, which prompted its curators to think afresh about the kinds of peace stories it shares with the public. Charlotte gives listeners a flavour of some of the items in its collection, talks us through the design of its new exhibition space, and reflects on its mission to empower and inspire visitors through the human stories of individual peace activists past and present.
Lydia helps us to identify the different kinds of peace knowledge present in war-oriented museum spaces, such as London's Imperial War Museum. Discussing their WWI and WWII galleries, their Peace and Security section, and their 2017 temporary exhibition 'People Power', she discusses different approaches - some of which focus on top-down, institutional forms of peacebuilding, while others centre ordinary people and even take the curation of peace knowledge (and conflict histories) beyond the museum space.
The conversation ends with some important reflections on the challenges of talking about peace amid conflict, the benefits that might arise from the development of more peace-oriented museums, and the ripple effects beyond the museum space of sharing peace knowledge in the everyday.
We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. You can access our own virtual Museum of Peace here.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Next Episode

Ancient war stories and their real-world ramifications

In this episode, Zofia Guertin interviews Alice König about her recent research on ancient habits of visualising war and peace.

Alice has recently co-edited a new book with Nicolas Wiater, on ancient conflict narratives, called Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay between Conflict Narratives in Different Genres and Media (Routledge 2025). In this podcast episode, Alice introduces the book and discusses some of the themes at the heart of it.

In particular, she explores the conception of visualisation: the ways in which narratives of war not only reflect or depict conflict but also envision it, in ways that shape how conflict gets pursued or prevented in the real world. She also discusses the role that interplay between narratives and discourses can play in cementing and amplifying influential war imaginaries. And she considers the impacts which all of this war-storytelling has on ordinary lives in the everyday.

In the process, Alice reflects on connections between ancient habits of visualising and narrating war and modern discourses and behaviours. Among other topics, she wonders why narratives of peril and danger seem more attractive than narratives of peace; what consequences might flow from ancient tendencies to euphemise or romanticise violence towards women; and what force military metaphors have in civilian contexts, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The episode ranges back and forth between antiquity and modernity, as Alice discusses militarism(s), the narrative role of children in war storytelling, the complex relationship between discourses of war, knowledge and power, and many other such topics.

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin