Martialling Peace

The peacekeeper—impartial, disciplined, helpful and restrained in their lethal capacity—is a powerful trope. This book examines the mythology of international peacekeeping and focuses on Canada as a case study of a "peacekeeper par excellence" (Jockel, 1994) and the ways the peacekeeping myth both challenged and condoned combat activities in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014. While Afghanistan was explicitly not a peacekeeping mission, peacekeeping mythology circulated throughout discourse about the War. The book examines the salience of the peacekeeping myth throughout twelve years of Canadian combat activities in Afghanistan as a means to illustrate the adaptability and political utility of this (inter)national myth. It examines how gender, militarism, and nationalism operated in political discourse through the War in Afghanistan to justify military force and violence in the name of peace. The book draws on the Canadian case to address a broader set of questions related to how militarism, gender, and national myths are co-constitutive in condoning military violence of so-called "peaceful" liberal nations.