Armed conflict, torture, murder, sexual assault, sexual enslavement, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS—United Nations peacekeepers are sent into conflict-torn countries to help prevent the further spread of these horrors. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan often highlights these brutalities when he publicly calls upon member states to send troops and resources to protect and assist vulnerable populations in conflict zones. In her most recent book, Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping, Sandra Whitworth provides a critical feminist analysis of a UN peacekeeping system that not only is failing to protect civilian populations but is also implicated in the spread of HIV/AIDS and in the torture, murder, sexual assault and enslavement, and human trafficking of the very populations the mission was purportedly sent to assist. Throughout, Whitworth uses sharp critical feminist analyses to help us understand why UN peacekeeping missions have too often become sites of violence and abuse.

Peacekeeping is often portrayed as an important alternative to the use of traditional military force, and its backers include not only a wide array of governments but also women's, peace, and human rights groups. Yet as Whitworth's at times disturbing and always challenging account makes clear, in a number of instances, the presence of peacekeeping forces has actually increased some populations' insecurity on the ground. In trying to understand why this is occurring, she contends that perhaps the two most important aspects to which we must pay attention are militarization and masculinity.

Militarized masculinity saturates most of the peacekeeping operations, sometimes surfacing in displays of hyper-masculinity and violence. As a case in point, Whitworth examines Canada's official government and military response to its premier fighting units' involvement in the torture and murder of a young Somali male during peacekeeping operations. She also details sexual assaults against Cambodian children by UN peacekeeping personnel; the creation of pornographic materials by Eritrean peacekeepers, using the bodies of local women living in the war zones; and the hazing of Canadian Airborne members that included acts of sodomy and racial degradation. The author explores how most of the messages a soldier receives about appropriately masculine soldierly behavior are fundamentally at odds with the kind of behavior that is expected (at least by local communities) and, indeed, required in a peace operation that does not brutalize the populations it is sent to serve. She reveals that the allegations of abuse facing peacekeeping missions are indices of deep-rooted problems and cannot be explained (or wished) away by citing “a few bad apples.”

One of the strengths of Whitworth's account is her ability to move seamlessly among the people who make up the peacekeeping missions to an interrogation of the structure of the missions themselves, including the pivotal role of mandates, the UN agencies working to fulfill those mandates, and the role of troop-contributing member states. Her questioning takes the reader to the very heart of peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, peace, and security. Moving back and forth between theory and evidence, she investigates why and how so-called middle and small powers—countries like Austria, Canada, Bangladesh, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries—are participating in peacekeeping. In doing so, she reveals an important link between the “imagined communities” of the legitimate nation-state and its military (i.e., combat) readiness, a link that is infused with and shaped by notions of masculinity and manhood.

Using the first post–Cold War multidimensional peacekeeping mission as a case study, Whitworth takes a closer look at the UN mission to Cambodia. The United Nations Transnational Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) mission was widely hailed as a success story; then–UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali wrote that it “set a new standard for peace-keeping operations” (cited in Whitworth, p. 54). Beginning with the planning and staff composition of the mission, which had very few women in decision-making positions (literally zero in statistical terms), Whitworth follows the mission away from the offices of Manhattan and onto the streets of Cambodia. While she does not deny significant achievements by the mission, she uncovers a more complex and less glowing reality on the ground. Her research documents the sexual abuse of local domestic workers; the massacres and exodus of the ethnic Vietnamese (who, during the attacks, were afforded no protection by the UN mission); the skyrocketing cost of food and housing, which was directly linked to the presence of the mission; the booming sex industry that involved children and women; and the drawing away of the most trained or experienced Cambodians from vital jobs (such as physicians) to make better money serving as drivers for UN staff. She argues that “in deploying a highly militarized, and highly masculinized, peacekeeping mission to Cambodia, increasing, rather than alleviating, the insecurities of many local people was almost ensured” (p. 73). The questions she asks about why and how this abuse was happening are as relevant today as they were the day the first peacekeepers arrived in Phnom Penh.

Whitworth's analysis of the current success of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping in hijacking and neutralizing critical feminist critiques of peace and security should serve as a wake-up call for those who think (or hope) that real progress is being made within this department. For the most part, she argues, critical feminist and gender analyses of peacekeeping have been co-opted and effectively silenced, thus leaving this UN body and its way of doing business largely untransformed. The results can be seen in recent media headlines as reporters continue to expose sexual violations and abuse by UN peacekeepers and humanitarian aid staff, mostly against women and children in the war-torn countries in which they are stationed.

Perhaps most importantly, Whitworth shows that a critical feminist engagement with peacekeeping, militarization, and masculinity means paying serious attention to why peacekeeping missions and peacekeeping personnel are at times implicated in the very horrors they are sent to mitigate. She presses us to ask questions about whose security is being enhanced and whose threatened. She highlights the necessity of examining the links among nationhood, militaries, and masculinities. She stresses the need to understand the successes or failures of peacekeeping missions through extended critical dialogue with the people in the communities the peacekeepers are sent to protect. What her new book provides is a more nuanced, smarter, and inevitably more complicated understanding of what keeping the peace means in conflict and postconflict situations.