Tell us about your recent research project.
My research project Fixing Gender examines training provided to military and police peacekeepers on gender-related topics. This project is interested in what happens to a critical concept like ‘gender’ when it is deployed in institutions of state power. For this project, I observed gender training courses in East Africa, the Nordic countries, West Africa, the Western Balkans and Western Europe. I also interviewed gender trainers working in different contexts.
Why did you choose this area of study?
I first encountered the practice of training peacekeepers on gender when I was working for an international NGO. In this role, we were often invited into security institutions to design and conduct this kind of training. As the years went on, I became more and more curious about what this training was really achieving and whether it was, after all, good or bad feminist politics. I felt that I needed to investigate these questions in the framework of an academic inquiry, and that’s how I came to leave the NGO and got back into academia.
What do you hope will be the impact of your research?
Instead of concluding that gender training is either good or bad feminist politics, my research eventually revealed that it is both good and bad feminist politics! That means that my research shows that training is not the solution to all manner of gender problems – in fact it can reinforce some harmful ways of thought – but neither does it conclude that training is useless. I hope that my research will provide feminist advocates and gender trainers frameworks for thinking about how best to do training and ways to assess where their energy and effort is best spent. In terms of research, I hope this research will contribute to how we think about messy and contradictory implications of feminist relations to powerful institutions.
What's next for you and your research?
I am excited to be launching my book, Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers (Oxford University Press 2024) this autumn at LSE and to be discussing the work in further book talks. This gives me the opportunity to engage researchers and practitioners whose work I admire on a topic that is close to my heart. At the same time, I’m starting to develop my next research project, which examines how institutions that send people abroad seek to regulate their intimate lives and with what effects.
Why is Gender Studies an important discipline to study and research?
Gender, as an analytical frame and a socio-political force is literally everywhere! It has to do with people as gendered subjects, but also the fact that institutions and objects work in social reality through gendered logics. Everywhere, it is shaped by and through other structures of power including race and class. Pursuing this research in an interdisciplinary gender studies department is a wonderful opportunity, because it allows us to learn from across different backgrounds. I trained as a political scientist initially, but I have enjoyed so much learning from colleagues whose background is in the humanities, in economics, etc. I am convinced this environment has shaped my work for the better.
Find out more about Aiko's research.