Robert Cox famously distinguished between policy advising analyses and critical theory in international relations. Sabrina Karim and Kyle Beardsley’s Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping clearly belongs to the former genre. The goal of their book is, in their own words, “to explore the extent to which reforms that relate to gender equality in peacekeeping missions have been successful both in and through peacekeeping missions” (p. 3). The focus is on the ways gender equality within peacekeeping can contribute to greater gender equality of peacekeeping. The authors particularly aim to propose measures that can reduce the number of cases of sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, and violence by peacekeepers (abbreviated as SEAHV by the authors). Their key argument is straightforward: “We contend that military and police institutions, of which peacekeeping missions are composed, are gendered institutions in that they project and replicate structures of power that privilege men and certain forms of masculinity” (p. 3).

In line with their key argument, they discuss meticulously their vast empirical research on gender roles in peacekeeping operations, on gendered perceptions of what peacekeepers do and how well they do it, and on the conditions of possibility for sexual abuse and violence. Their empirical material is rich and varied, from surveys and interviews to game model observations and statistical analysis.

In a very dense discussion, packed with highly interesting empirical materials, they first develop their understanding of military institutions as highly gendered organizations in which the simple increase of female membership changes little concerning gendered role expectations. Far fewer women than men are recruited into military and police in general, and where they are, they are less often perceived as competent. Once in the force, they participate less in crucial decision-making and commonly do not work at the “frontline” but in “safe spaces” which, by definition, are seldom core peacekeeping zones. Women also are often attributed caring and supporting roles rather than protective and combative ones. As a consequence of all these dynamics, women are often discriminated against in their career development as, for one, their qualifications and achievements are undervalued, and, secondly, they do not get to go through all of the stations that are relevant for promotion. Karim and Beardsley ultimately impute these structures of exclusion and discrimination to the “warrior identity,” typical for security organizations. They view such gender discrimination as problematic sui generis and because it buttresses practices of SEAHV through peacekeepers in peacekeeping contexts.

They systematically seek to carve out the structural character of gender inequalities in peacekeeping operations by showing that “SEAHV may be a major symptom of a heightened sense of militarized masculinity, an aggressive form of masculinity needed for warrior culture to flourish” (p. 93). On the grounds of a regression analysis that takes into account all reported cases of SEAHV and correlates these to an index of gender equality in contributing countries (as measured for instance by the proportion of women in the workforce), they argue that there is a “strong relationship between . . . measures of gender equality in contributing countries and lower SEAHV allegations in military units” (p. 102).

For the critical reader, Karim and Beardsley’s statistical analysis appears somewhat cavalier at this point, as only a very limited number of countries actually contribute troops to peacekeeping, and the large majority of these happen to be countries that rank low on their scale of gender equality. They add variance to their independent variable (high/low gender equality countries) by including all countries’ contributions to missions and weighting these in various ways, yet the overall initial problem remains that there are too few cases of countries that display high gender equality and that are involved actively in peacekeeping. The reader can therefore agree to the conclusion that high gender inequality seems to be correlated to SEAHV incidents; but it is more difficult to assert that high gender equality in a country will significantly reduce SEAHV incidents. In the end, despite their large and varied empirical research, it remains unclear if a “sense of militarized masculinity” is specific to peacekeeping organizations because they are security organizations or because they are from particularly gender unequal countries.

Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping has laid valuable grounds for showing that peacekeeping organizations are profoundly gender biased and that there are reasonable grounds to assume that incidents of SEAHV result from dysfunctions in these organizations themselves. Karim and Beardsley’s book is a highly interesting contribution to our understanding of the global power structures that are embodied (in the multiple understanding of the term) in peacekeeping. This research is worth following up on in order to get an even better understanding of how structures and cultures of gender discrimination and violence might be reproduced in peacekeeping. The first approach would be to differentiate more the very basic assumption of a “warrior masculinity.” The somewhat sweeping assertion of a “warrior identity” obliterates all ambiguity of gendered power relations in the social world. Sexual violence is henceforth always the exploitation of female sexuality by (heterosexual) men as by definition masculinity is assumed to be the powerful agency over (female) victimhood; it is always uni-dimensionally hierarchical (heterosexual men exploiting heterosexual women). The authors are well aware of this simplification and how it potentially impacts on their findings but do not (yet) offer any solution. They do point out in places that women can be perpetrators of sexual violence and men can be victims; they do say that gender roles can appear in different forms and shapes; however, they do not systematically theorize the existence of multiple and variable, hence, often contradictory masculinities and femininities. Hence they miss out entirely on the many forms of queerness that exist in securitizing gender constructions (for instance the importance of men being sexually brutalized in war).

Therefore, the authors’ comment that sexual violence is always about social control and power requires further exploration regarding who is controlling whose sexuality for which social identity, role, and position. Without focusing on the large range of ambiguities in gender constructions (their queerness), it seems very difficult to distinguish the various social and political configurations that will lead some organizational processes to violently subjugate “other” sexualities.

Similarly, they completely omit any discussion of intersectionality, thereby neglecting both the vast body of feminist literature on the complexities of class, race, and gender divides and the growing interest of IR in the racial and social ordering practices of international peace missions. One of the crucial criticisms articulated against peace missions is the reproduction of Eurocentric gendered, racial, and social orders in and through peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Fully taking this research into account could help to better articulate the relationship between the general social and political culture out of which peacekeeping organisations operate, and their behaviour and actions on the ground. If we take, for instance, the case of SEAHV by French troops, these cannot be explained well by the authors’ model of correlating a country’s general gender equality with SEAHV incidents. France displays a very high proportion of women in the workforce, hence would count as highly gender equal, and yet its troops have still engaged in horrible cases of SEAHV. Yet French security institutions regularly display high levels of racism in France itself and that often is directed against populations from the same countries where French troops are deployed as peacekeepers; only last year public debate took place over the death of a Malian-origin French citizen in police custody.

The case of French security forces also exemplifies how important it is to address questions of the interaction between local populations and peacekeeping troops. Although this is the subject of some of the empirical research in the book, Karim and Beardsley do not engage with the question of how the principled power imbalances between internationals and locals plays out in the occurrence of SEAHV. The very nature of peacekeeping is to include aggressive forms of population control and crowd management in extreme situations such as refugee camps or food distribution camps. Violent behaviors might well be structurally “programmed” by the very form of how peacekeeping is provided and fed back into the organization rather than, inversely, resulting from it. From the research into police behavior in national contexts it is known that confrontations with high levels of vulnerability in target communities put security forces under great stress and commonly have negative effects on their responses to these same vulnerable populations, for instance by reinforcing racist stereotypes.

A deeper exploration of the way those organizational cultures are constructed and how they play out in the interaction with the local populations could clarify in more detail how ideas of race, class, and “civilization” predicate peacekeeping. Carrying Karim and Beardsley’s analysis further in this way would provide and connect a number of dots that are still missing in Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping to help draw a more complete picture of gendered power structures in peacekeeping.