Training the Troops on Gender: The Circulation of Knowledge and the Politics of Training

The “women, peace and security” agenda – codified in UN Security Council resolutions and regional and national action plans – has over the past 16 years mandated gender training for peacekeepers. This training has dual aims: on the one hand, it seeks to provide peacekeepers with the technical skills and knowledge to better respond to women’s security concerns in a mission area, and on the other, to induce attitude change to dissuade peacekeepers from committing abuses against the local population. This evolving knowledge practice aimed at governing peacekeeper conduct has so far received little academic attention. I argue that analysis of such knowledge practices is paramount because “knowledge and its effects (material and ideological) construct how we feel, think, know and understand. What we ‘know’ and how knowledge is practiced in the everyday creates further knowledges” (Zalewski, 2000, p. 117). In this paper, I draw on data from my doctoral research on gender training for uniformed peacekeepers in order to trace how gender knowledge travels between and across different national and institutional sites. Grounded in multi-sited ethnography, I examine what kinds of knowledge traditions trainers and training developers base their training on, with a view to showing how knowledge circulates, how claims are interpreted, and how knowledge is translated (both literally and figuratively) for different audiences. This analysis enables me to make claims about how different bodies of knowledge about ‘gender’ enable different politics of training. Zalewski, M. (2000). Feminism after postmodernism: Theorising through practice. London: Routledge.