Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers, by Aiko Holvikivi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 216 pp., cloth 89.99.

Abstract

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.