In Fixing Gender, Aiko Holvikivi adopts a feminist lens to examine how gender training in peacekeeping settings both reinforces and challenges institutional power dynamics. Though it under-examines Global South contexts, this book is an original and essential interdisciplinary study of the potential and constraints of gender training within military institutions, writes Jocelyn Xu.
Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers. Aiko Holvikivi. Oxford University Press. 2024.
Can gender-based violence training in peacekeeping settings effectively address the complex political, institutional, cultural, and historical factors that influence its implementation and outcomes? Drawing from nearly two decades of research into military and police institutions for peacekeeping, Aiko Holvikivi’s first monograph Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers critically interrogates gender training as a practice that sustains and subverts deep-seated arrangements of power. As an assistant professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies affiliated with the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at LSE, Dr. Aiko Holvikivi’s research addresses how the transnational movement of people and knowledge produce, and are produced by, gendered and racialised (in)security. In Fixing Gender, she applies a critical feminist lens to gender training within martial institutions to question the degree to which gender functions as a transformative concept.
The book […] furthers the discussion on gender training as both a power tool and a space of resistance by speaking out about co-optation and resistance within feminist discourse.
Interdisciplinary in its scope, Fixing Gender focuses on how gender training, emerging from feminist theories in historically male-dominated organisations, disrupts and perpetuates martial politics. The book is unique in its policy and curricula analysis, draws on a multitude of observations from European and African training camps. The book resists binary views and furthers the discussion on gender training as both a power tool and a space of resistance by speaking out about co-optation and resistance within feminist discourse. Its most significant contribution is a methodological framework that combines participant observation with postcolonial feminist theory insights from scholars such as Adrienne Rich, Paul Kirby, and Robyn Wigman, further developing the feminist debate on gender in peacekeeping.
In Chapter Two, Holvikivi conducts a detailed analysis of peacekeeping training sessions, focusing on the gender training modules observed during fieldwork. Rather than anonymising the training model, the author provides specific details and examples to show how gender is constructed and implemented in the sessions. One example is taken from a pre-deployment gender training module in a Western European country, where the instructor briefly glossed over a section on sexual exploitation and abuse, commenting that the information was “nothing new for them” and could be “dumbed down to being a decent human being” (51). This observation highlights the instructor’s assumption that the participants were already familiar with the material, potentially diminishing the topic’s significance.
Holvikivi criticises the ‘singular focus on conflict-related sexual violence in peacekeeping gender training’.
Holvikivi also cites an interview with a Nordic soldier named Lasse, who expressed scepticism about the training on sexual exploitation and abuse, suggesting a disconnect between the content and participants’ understanding. Lasse also contrasted his commitment to gender equality with that of soldiers from other countries, noting that some had to be explicitly told about the inappropriateness of certain behaviours. These examples demonstrate how the author grounds her analysis in specific observations and direct quotes from peacekeepers.
In this manner, Holvikivi critically evaluates the cultural and contextual dimensions of gender training in peacekeeping curricula to set the stage for further investigation in Chapter Three. Holvikivi explores the “ ” of gender training for military peacekeepers. She considers the impact of emotion on the learning process and the political consequences of managing emotional displays in the classroom. Her analysis highlights the characteristic hallmarks of qualitative research, include subjective, contextual, and nuanced aspects of the training experience.
Holvikivi criticises the “singular focus on conflict-related sexual violence in peacekeeping gender training” in Chapter Three, arguing that this focus is largely because the curriculum uses a Eurocentric understanding of gender as a measure of progress which perpetuates colonialist and racialised understandings of gender and conflict (67). “White” peacekeepers are seen as inherently superior, while the “black and brown” local population is seen as a source of violence and low self-esteem. In addition, the training encourages peacekeepers to view “gender” as an external issue that does not mean they themselves need to make any profound changes, positioning them as providers of the solution rather than part of the problem. This analysis frames gender training as “a deeply ambivalent enterprise,” emphasising the challenges of implementing feminist concepts in martial spaces – a process that is often complex and fraught with difficulties (129). The engagement with feminist scholarship and the historical contextualisation of present-day dynamics deepens the analysis when combined with the qualitative data gathered from participant observations and a consistently theoretical lens.
Likewise, Holvikivi provides a critical perspective about resistance to gender training by institutions, a phenomenon that is rarely discussed in the literature. The introduction also says, “other states have gender topics and modules in both basic training and professional military education, but in some states this training is confined to certain modules before deployment.” This observation demonstrates various ways gender training can be implemented and also underlines how little effectiveness change from the top down has.
While peacekeepers from the Global South make up most deployed troops and police contingents, gender expertise and training is largely led by actors from the Global North.
The book has some limitations, including its heavy use of theoretical jargon, which might be challenging for those unfamiliar with feminist epistemology or peacekeeping studies. While the author convincingly reframes gender training as paradoxical, the scarcity of examples of how martial politics can be disrupted by such training may leave some readers sceptical about its praxis. Some chapters could have been enhanced through inclusion of case studies illuminating the capacity of gender training to tackle racism, coloniality or misogyny in peacekeeping missions. Another shortcoming is the book’s relatively limited exposure to views of the Global South. The author acknowledges that while peacekeepers from the Global South make up most deployed troops and police contingents, gender expertise and training is largely led by actors from the Global North. This creates a disconnect between the conceptual image of “women in conflict” and the lived experiences of women in conflict areas (138). Despite the transnational nature of peacekeeping itself, the book does not fully address transnational nuances between Eurowestern contexts and those of the Global South.
Overall, Fixing Gender is an ambitious, compelling book with a clear feminist sensibility which opens up important new pathways for scholarship on both feminist research and peacekeeping. The text drills deep into the paradoxical politics of gender training to expose the difficulty of integrating feminist theory and praxis into martial institutions. It will interest scholars in feminist studies, international relations, peace studies, and political science and will be a valuable resource for postgraduate students and researchers interested in gender, conflict, and organisational change. While the book’s theoretical dimension might be forbidding for a general reader, it provides insights useful to peacekeeping and gender policy practitioners. If the relative inaccessibility and few practical illustrations render the title unappealing for some audience segments, this text would pair nicely with Elisabeth Prügl’s “Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping”, which provides such a strong contribution in method and analysis that it should be a required read for any scholar or stakeholder interested in understanding gendered institutional spaces. Ultimately, Holvikivi’s reframing of gender training as both ambivalent and paradoxical invites feminist scholars to reconceptualise the politics of institutions of state violence and think more critically about the potentiality, as well as constrictions, of transformative politics.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Christina Desitriviantie on Shutterstock.
Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to our newsletter for a round-up of the latest reviews sent straight to your inbox every other Tuesday.
