Aiko Holvikivi’s Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers is a pioneering study of gender training within peacekeeper training institutions. Drawing on close engagement with peacekeeper training environments, the book traces how gender knowledge is translated into pedagogical practice and negotiated by trainers and trainees. Rather than asking whether gender training succeeds in transforming peacekeeping practice, the book examines how gender is made intelligible, teachable, and politically workable within military institutions. It shows how gender training simultaneously reproduces militarized and colonial logics while also opening limited spaces for feminist disruption. While many feminist scholars have critiqued gender training for being at worst futile or at best co-opted, the originality of this contribution lies in its empirical contribution: an in-depth semi-ethnographic analysis of how such training is designed, taught, and received in practice.
At the heart of the book lies a paradox: Gender training for peacekeepers is embedded within the military, an institution steeped in hegemonic masculinity, a dominant gender order that privileges militarized ideals of strength, discipline, and authority. Feminist scholars, particularly those termed “anti-militarist,” have long debated whether efforts to reform such institutions are ethically and politically desirable or if they simply reinforce patriarchal logics. Holvikivi reframes this debate through her central question: “What political and epistemic work does gender training do in martial institutions involved in peacekeeping?” (p. 12). Rather than assessing the overall effectiveness of gender training, in terms of its capacity to reform military organizations and the agents within it, she adopts a meaning-making approach to explore how gender trainers interpret their roles.
Holvikivi conducts her research across Europe and Africa, interviewing gender trainers and their trainees, as well as analyzing policy documents and training materials. Her multi-sited research is based on eight weeks of participant observation across seven peacekeeper training courses held in East and West Africa, the Nordic region, the Western Balkans, and Western Europe. These included five specialized gender courses, one national pre-deployment training, and one professional military education lecture. While the training was delivered at regional centers, her unit of analysis is the transnational community of trainers who circulate between these sites, revealing how they create a set of practices that they apply across regions. Rather than treating each location as a discrete case, Holvikivi frames them as nodes in a transnational community of practice that spans institutions such as the UN in New York, NATO in Brussels, and the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations in Sweden. Most participants in her research were middle-ranking officers, older and more highly educated than typical pre-deployment trainees. Women made up nearly half of those present which is an unusually high proportion for military settings.
The book is accessible and clearly written, with an introduction that effectively synthesizes debates on gender and peacekeeping that will be familiar to feminists in critical security studies and peace and conflict studies. Subsequent chapters unpack how gender knowledge is produced in classrooms and how trainees resist or embrace the pedagogy.
Holvikivi highlights how militaries tend to simplify the concept of gender into two key narratives: a protection narrative that does not question the link between hegemonic masculinity and gender-based violence, and a participation narrative that highlights the usefulness of women in enhancing military effectiveness, invoking earlier work by Laura Shepherd and Stéfanie von Hlatky. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she does find that gender training often reinforces martial logics; for example, when conflict-related sexual violence is framed as a military problem solvable by military action (p. 80). She also shows how the curricula present gender as a universal, knowable object, often in binary and heteronormative terms, while silencing power, race, sexuality, and peacekeepers’ own complicity in sexual exploitation and abuse. She contends that gender is framed as an operational tool for protecting “womenandchildren” (and she pushes these words together, emphasizing their conflation) (p. 47), producing what she calls the “happy gender trainer” (p.54) who avoids difficult conversations to keep military audiences receptive.
In chapter 4, Holvikivi goes into more detail on the presence of resistance to gender training in peacekeeping institutions. She illustrates that resistance is a pervasive feature of gender training, manifesting in behaviors that range from dismissal to denial. She notes that resistance often follows recognizable scripts such as trivializing humor, separating gender from feminism, and projecting gender problems onto racialized others. She finds resistance is also performative: it allows trainees to position themselves socially and politically in front of peers with the aim of creating distance between themselves and the uncomfortable gender issues being raised. While often frustrating, she argues resistance is not necessarily negative because conflict and discomfort can represent moments when deeply held assumptions are being unsettled. Ultimately, she exposes how far feminist politics can be pushed within peacekeeping institutions, revealing the points where structural inequalities, militarized logics, or colonial assumptions are defended.
In chapter 5, Holvikivi discusses how gender trainers attempt to disrupt masculinized thinking. She contends even small disruptions at the microlevel matter, creating moments where hegemonic norms are unsettled. For example, she notes how one trainer sought to disrupt the tendency to locate gender as “out there” by encouraging trainees to connect lessons to their own personal experiences, thereby unsettling the racialized assumption that gender problems only belong to others (p. 133). Another invited trainees to share their struggles in the classroom, emphasizing that listening to each other’s personal challenges could itself be a form of learning and self-reflection (pp. 133–34). Yet another engaged trainees in conversations on militarized masculinities, asking Western male officers to confront how their own investment in masculinity shaped their behavior, an approach she described as highly provocative (p. 135). A further strategy tried by an instructor was to carve out unstructured time for students to reflect on and become familiar with uncomfortable topics that might be new to them, pushing back against the neoliberal efficiency logics of her institution (pp. 139–40).
Collectively, such micro pedagogical practices may not amount to macrolevel transformation of the military logics that underpin peacekeeping praxis, but the author contends they help to illuminate spaces of possibility where trainees are asked to witness, question, and sometimes unlearn dominant logics, which are small fissures that matter in a moment of global gender rights rollback.
In the concluding chapter, Holvikivi frames gender training for peacekeepers as a paradoxical practice: simultaneously colluding with martial, colonial, and heteropatriarchal logics, while also creating moments of disruption that unsettle them. She illuminates how gender training is shown to reaffirm Global North expertise, binary understandings of gender, and militarized subjectivities. But she also shows that it can help generate crises of meaning, expose contradictions, and allow trainers to smuggle in feminist pedagogies as Trojan horses. Holvikivi argues that rather than expecting transformation, the political worth of gender training lies in these small acts of resistance and embracing paradox as a space of feminist possibility.
While the book engages with longstanding debates about feminist engagement with the military without seeking to resolve them, its contribution lies in its careful articulation of feminist pedagogies and the nuanced ways these emerge within military training environments. Fixing Gender is thus a timely and valuable work. It enriches our understanding of how gender mainstreaming is enacted in practice, offering an empirically grounded and granular account of how feminist ideas circulate and are contested within martial spaces.
