Join us for the launch of Aiko Holvikivi’s Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers. This new book examines how gender is conceptualised, taught, and learned in peacekeeping situations, and with what political effects.  

The practice of "gender training" has gained widespread popularity among numerous professions in the last few decades. Gender training has even become a requirement for soldiers and police officers deploying overseas as peacekeepers. Based on extensive ethnographic work in peacekeeping contexts, Holvikivi finds that this training constitutes a deeply ambivalent practice from the point of view of intersectional feminist political commitments. On the one hand, it reinscribes the logic that martial force is an appropriate solution to gendered insecurities, and it affirms attachments to normative heterosexuality. On the other hand, this training simultaneously exposes contradictions that inhere to the logics of martiality, coloniality, and heteronormativity that structure the peacekeeping enterprise. Drawing on queer and postcolonial feminist thought, Fixing Gender examines the contradictory politics of gender training, arguing that we need to develop the analytical tools to grapple with paradoxical practices that are simultaneously good and bad feminist politics.  

Dr Holvikivi will provide introductory comments on the book, and panellists will offer their reflections on the topic, with the opportunity to participate in a Q&A afterwards. The event will be followed by a reception provided by the Department of International Relations. 

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This event is co-hosted bt the Department of International Relations.

Meet our speakers and chair

Jasmine K. Gani is Assistant Professor of International Relations Theory at the LSE. She writes and teaches on (anti)colonialism, race, knowledge production, theory and history of IR, and ideologies and social movements in the Middle East. She is currently working on a monograph on racial militarism.

Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies and an Associate Academic at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, LSE. My research is interested in transnational movements of knowledges and of people, and how these are produced by and productive of gendered and racialised (in)security. My first monograph, Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers (Oxford University Press 2024), interrogates these themes through an examination of the practice of ‘gender training’. This research traces the ways in which training produces knowledge about gender; the processes of circulation, translation, resistance and negotiation that are involved; and the epistemic and political effects of such training. The book draws on fieldwork with military and police peacekeepers in East Africa, the Nordic region, West Africa, the Western Balkans, and Western Europe.

Katharine Millar is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Her broad research interests lie in examining the gendered cultural narratives underlying political violence and the modern collective use of force. Her on-going research examines gender, race, sexuality and the transnational politics of death; gender and cybersecurity; and liberal notions of political belonging. Dr Millar is also researching the relationship between grief, mass death, and social order in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr Millar has also published on female combatants, gendered representations of violent death, military and civilian masculinity, far-right populism and conspiracy theory, the politics of hypocrisy, and critical conceptions of militarism.

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is a Belgian Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist. She holds a PhD in Political Science/International Relations from Ghent University (2013, Belgium), following the doctoral training programme at the European University Institute (2001-6, Italy) and internships at the European Commission in Brussels and the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris (2003-4). Before joining LSE, she was Senior Lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies at the University of Portsmouth. (2013-21, UK). She is an affiliated Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS), South Africa and a member of the Critical Approaches to Political Science Lab at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea.

Hakan Sandal-Wilson is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies. He is a political sociologist whose teaching and research critically interrogate gender and sexuality in relation to war, peace and conflict, as well as ethnicity, religion, and migration. His ongoing research focuses on social movements in conflict-affected states and societies in the Middle East, the intersections of ethnic, religious, gender and sexual identities in these contexts, and how such movements reimagine and extend social and political horizons. He is currently preparing his first monograph, on Kurdish queer/LGBTIQ+ politics in Turkey. Hakan also researches the political engagements of feminist and queer diasporic subjects and movements, particularly in the UK. He has recently edited a special issue on ‘Kurdish Queer Studies’ for Kurdish Studies Journal, and has published in journals such as Social Research: An International Quarterly and South Atlantic Quarterly.