Agents of peace and objects of protection : An investigation into the effects of militarization on the agency of Swedish female peacekeepers in MINUSMA

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Agents of peace and objects of protection

An investigation into the effects of militarization on the agency of Swedish

fe-male peacekeepers in MINUSMA

Melinda Gwendolynne Marie Nilsson

Thesis, 30 ECTS (hp)

Political Science with a focus on Crisis Management and Security Master’s Programme in Politics and War

Autumn 2020

Supervisor: Arita Holmberg Word count: 18 338

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Abstract

In the years following 9/11, research has shown that United Nations peacekeeping has grown increasingly militarized. Meanwhile, there have long been calls for women’s increased partici-pation in peacekeeping, for a myriad of reasons mainly founded on instrumental and essentialist arguments. According to feminist theories, however, militarization would limit the agency of women as they are often placed in marginalized, protected roles when such a militarization occurs. Against this background, this thesis has utilized a visual and textual discourse analysis to investigate memory books published by the Swedish Armed Forces, which detail the pres-ence of the Swedish contingency in MINUSMA in the period 2014-2019, to understand the connection between female peacekeeper’s agency and the increasing militarization of the UN’s most deadly peacekeeping mission. The findings suggest that militarization does not seem to limit the agency of Swedish female peacekeepers, who have seen their roles become more var-ied and seemingly possess more agency later than earlier on in the mission, despite an increased militarization of the peacekeeping mission. The thesis thus contributes to an underexamined connection between agency and militarization in the context of peacekeepers, while exploring a heretofore unexamined material. In doing so, the thesis opens for further research in both the material itself as well as further comparative studies.

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List of acronyms used

CO – Commanding Officer

DDR – Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration

MINUSMA – United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (Mis-sion multidimen(Mis-sionnelle intégrée des Nations unies pour la stabilisation au Mali)

PIO – Press Information Officer

SAF – Swedish Armed Forces

TCC – Troop contributing country

UN SCR 1325 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and

Se-curity

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1. Introduction

In the year 2000 the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) was formulated. Introducing what was then groundbreaking language, the res-olution was centered around “pillars” of WPS such as women’s participation, protection, relief and recovery, and prevention of violence as well as a normative pillar. One of the pillars that has received the most attention is that of participation, specifically in the context of peacekeep-ing (Kirby and Shepherd, 2016). Among the arguments for women’s participation in peace-keeping there have been claims that their participation increases effectiveness of missions, strengthens community relations, and curbs sexual exploitation and abuse in the mission setting (Rupesinghe et al., 2019). This has resulted in a push for more female engagement in peace-keeping, with the UN establishing target percentages for women’s uniformed participation and the establishment of projects such as the Canadian Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Opera-tions(Government of Canada, 2020).

At the same time, many, including UN expert panels like The High-Level Panel on the Pro-spects for Reform of UN Peace Operations (HIPPO) (Andersen, 2018), suggest that there has been an increased militarization of UN peacekeeping operations since 9/11. While peacekeep-ing began as operations to observe and monitor ceasefires, peacekeeppeacekeep-ing today is broader and widely employed, with 13 peacekeeping operations active with more than 94 000 staff globally (United Nations Peacekeeping, 2020a). Today’s missions are longer than they have been in the past – on average three times longer (Ramos-Horta, 2015), while at the same time being larger in scope and are more ambitious than ever before (Hunt, 2017).

Today’s missions are deployed to far more complex and hostile settings compared to those of the monitoring and observation days of the 1950s and the downsized approach of the late nine-ties (Karlsrud, 2018). In the cases of MINUSMA, MINUSCA and MONUSCO, missions have been charged with stabilization mandates, meaning that they are meant to “keep the peace where no peace is to be kept” (Gilder, 2020; Hunt, 2017). In these dangerous deployment situations, the mandate to protect civilians has been observed to come second to troop contributing coun-tries (TCCs) wanting to protect their forces. Risk management procedures have meant that mis-sions “bunker down” to ensure the safety of their personnel (Andersson and Weigand, 2015), physical barriers like enforced walls and heavily armored vehicles have become the norm, and

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7 it has become more and more common that tools like surveillance drones and armed private security companies are being relied upon within the mission setting (Willmot et al., 2015). Peacekeeping has effectively evolved from unarmed missions monitoring ceasefires to complex missions in more and more volatile environments, allowing the use of proactive force. A con-sequence of this development is that the distance between peacekeepers and the communities they are supposed to protect has widened (Andersson and Weigand, 2015). One example is that female peacekeepers – who are lauded for their supposed ability to connect to local communi-ties and contribution to peacebuilding – have at times been shielded within the mission setting, or not even sent to these more dangerous areas (Karim, 2019:32-33).

While these developments suggest militarization in a more formalistic, material sense, there are several ways to understand militarization, including the more societal understanding penned by feminist researcher Cynthia Enloe. Enloe defines militarization as a “process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (Enloe, 2000:3). In militarized societies, women often come to be marginalized and relegated to protected or non-combative roles, limiting their agency as pro-tection comes at the price of decision-making and self-determination (Young, 2007:142-150). Given that this societal militarization process accompanies the formalistic development, it would involve gendered implications for peacekeepers – such as the shielding of female peace-keepers within missions.

1.1 Research problem

Against this background, while the militarization of peacekeeping missions no doubt affects all mission staff, the effect on female peacekeepers is of great interest. If peacekeepers are hesitant to leave their vehicles and bases due to fear of attacks (Cold-Ravnkilde et al., 2016), how does this affect the role of the female peacekeeper? Are the women in these militarized missions reduced to “objects” of protection, reducing their agency as peacekeepers? Or is it the case that the militarization of peacekeeping does not affect the Swedish female peacekeepers in the way theorized? Should a militarization of peacekeeping be accompanied by a militarized societal shift within the missions, as Rupesinghe et al. (2019) would suggest, a problem arises in where the arguments made for women’s increased participation in peacekeeping lose their meaning.

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8 If women are not found in roles that interact with locals or where they participate in local ne-gotiations – agentic behavior – then it would seem that the point of arguing for women’s special contributions to peacekeeping is redundant. This would mean that an increasing militarization, which would entail more troops on the ground, would be less prone to include women in their ranks, or that their roles would be relegated within the mission walls, protected and less agentic. However, in observing the Swedish contingency of MINUSMA, one can observe the opposite trend, as the relative number of women has steadily increased since the start of the mission in 2014. The UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA, is the most dangerous situation a UN peace operation in the world (“Mali coup,” 2020). Due to a large terrorist threat against the mission, it has seen increasing militarization in the form of counterterrorism mandates (Karls-rud, 2017), large walls and fortifications and claims of limited protection of civilians (Interna-tional Peace Institute, 2020). Despite mandates allowing the proactive use of force, a deterio-rating security situation along with limited resources has constrained the mission’s ability to act on these (ibid). When Swedish and Dutch forces were deployed in the northern parts of the country, operations were technologized using drones, armored vehicles, and helicopters (An-dersson and Weigand, 2015). While the mandate of MINUSMA involves stabilization, and so could be said to have a more military and robust character to begin with (De Coning, 2018), there have been changes within the mission that suggest a turn toward even further militariza-tion. For example, Sweden’s regular contribution to the mission, which previously had been centered on intelligence and reconnaissance, shifted in 2019 to include a rifle company instead (Proposition 2019/20:29).

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Figure 1: Number of Total Troops in MINUSMA.

MINUSMA accounts for Sweden’s currently largest contribution of troops to UN peacekeeping operations. Among the reasons cited for contributing the mission, the implementation of reso-lution 1325 was invoked (Proposition 2013/14:189). Furthermore, the importance of inclusive peace initiatives is explicitly stated in the country’s feminist foreign policy (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019:24). It is therefore interesting to see how the Swedish contribution is living up to this in the face of an increasingly difficult and more militarized peacekeeping operation. In tandem with the mission’s increasingly militarized character and its subsequent expansion, what is interesting given the theory of militarization limiting female peacekeepers’ agency is that the percentage of women in the Swedish contingency has steadily increased during these last few years, at most reaching levels of upward to 38% of 89 staff, with an average of 11% female peacekeepers in the mission (United Nations Peacekeeping, 2020b).

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 01-ju l-13 01-n o v-13 01-mar-14 01-ju l-14 01-n o v-14 01 -mar -15 01-ju l-15 01-n o v-15 01-mar-16 01-ju l-16 01-n o v-16 01-mar-17 01-ju l-17 01-n o v-17 01-mar-18 01-ju l-18 01-n o v-18 01-mar-19 01-ju l-19 01-n o v-19 01-mar-20 01-ju l-20

This data retrieved was from UN Peacekeeping Open Data Portal

NUMBER OF TOTAL TROOPS IN

MINUSMA

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Figure 2: Percent of Women in Swedish Troops in MINUSMA.

1.2 Aim and research questions

Given the conundrum of peacekeeping, militarization, and gender, an interesting research prob-lem has thus been identified, which by addressing would contribute to filling a gap in current research. In the 20 years since UN SCR 1325 was passed, there has been a plethora of research into women’s participation in peace and security, and more specifically, female peacekeepers (see Karim & Henry 2017; Kronsell, 2012; Kronsell & Svedberg, 2012 for examples). How-ever, there is still a need for research centered on the lived experiences – and therein the agency – of women (Wibben, 2011:19-20; Wibben 2016:7), not least on the experiences of female peacekeepers. Specifically, there is a need for more detailed research into their experiences to understand how female soldiers in the mission setting are affected by this increased militariza-tion (Rupesinghe et al., 2019). In order to fulfill this aim and explore the connecmilitariza-tion between female peacekeepers and the effects of increased militarization, the following research question was formulated:

How does the militarization of the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali affect the agency of Swe-dish female military peacekeepers?

This question is accompanied by the following sub-question in order to guide the analysis and attempt to identify agency.

0,0 5,0 10,0 15,0 20,0 25,0 30,0 35,0 40,0 45,0 01-au g-14 01-n o v-14 01 -fe b -15 01-maj-15 01-au g-15 01-n o v-15 01-fe b -16 01-maj-16 01-au g-16 01 -n o v-16 01-fe b -17 01-maj-17 01-au g-17 01-n o v-17 01-fe b -18 01-maj-18 01 -au g-18 01-n o v-18 01-fe b -19 01-maj-19 01-au g-19 01-n o v-19 01-fe b -20 01-maj-20 01-au g-20

This data was retrieved from UN Peacekeeping Open Data Portal

PERCENT OF WOMEN IN SWEDISH

TROOPS IN MINUSMA

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11 What roles have they had in the mission, and how have these changed over time?

This thesis aims to through these questions investigate the gendered effects of the militarization of MINUSMA on Swedish female peacekeepers and their agency. Through a visual and textual discourse analysis of the Swedish Armed Forces’ (SAF) memory books from Mali spanning the period of 2013 to 2019, the subjectification and subject positions of these peacekeepers will be analyzed. Including this type of visual analysis, alongside a textual one, answers a call artic-ulated by Dean Cooper-Cunningham (2019) and Lene Hansen (2011), among others, to include images into the field of security studies. The thesis thus has the aim of bringing images into the foray while investigating a here-to-for unexplored connection between militarization and agency in the context of the SAF. While analyzing memory books cannot tell us everything in detail about the agency of these female peacekeepers, it can give an indication of larger trends within the Swedish contingency.

1.3 Thesis outline

The introduction of the thesis is followed by a short background on the developments of peace-keeping, followed by an overview of relevant previous research before continuing to describe the theoretical concepts at the heart of the research. After this, a presentation of discourse anal-ysis as a method, the employed material, and limitations is presented before proceeding to the analysis, which is followed by a short conclusion.

2. Background

While there is no definitive understanding of what peacekeeping is, there are three principles that the UN is guided by: consent, impartiality, and non-use of force except in the protection of civilians or the mandate (United Nations Peacekeeping, n.d.a). At the inception of peacekeep-ing, this meant that missions were deployed in post-conflict settings, tasked with assignments such as monitoring and enforcing ceasefires. While these guiding principles were part and par-cel of the first peacekeeping missions, they became increasingly disregarded as time progressed (Sloan, 2011: 18, 21–23). James Sloan argues that this disregard was in part due to the decision body establishing the mission – while early missions were established by the General Assembly and thus bound by the principles of peacekeeping, a mission established under the Security

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12 Council could have a mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (Sloan, 2011:27). A Chap-ter VII mandate means that the use of force can be employed proactively, and that the principle of impartiality can be largely circumvented (Sloan, 2011:18). As time passed and missions came to be established by the Security Council rather than the General Assembly, such man-dates became more and more common (De Coning, 2018).

Following the Cold War, the use of proactive force came into play more and more as the situa-tions where peacekeepers were being deployed – namely former Yugoslavia and Somalia – were far more dangerous and hostile than previous missions. This seemed to be relatively short-lived, however. Criticism to the enforcement approach, mainly articulated in the Brahimi panel, seemed to indicate a return to peacekeeping adhering more strictly to the principles (De Coning, 2018; Karlsrud, 2018:3). With an absence of a peace to keep, and widely regarded as failures of peacekeeping, it seemed for a while that peacekeeping might return its focus to mediation and keeping the peace, rather than enforcing it (Karlsrud, 2018:16-17).

However, another reversal was soon to follow. After the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, peacekeepers were increasingly expected to use force to protect civilians in active conflicts, transitioning again from conflict resolution to conflict management (De Coning, 2018; Karlsrud, 2018:85). Meanwhile, missions were expected to do more, with mandates expanding to include a myriad of peacebuilding activities (Karim, 2019:24–25). In the years since, peacekeeping has been increasingly used as a tool by the international commu-nity to show action in a variety of complex conflicts – many of them being highly volatile. Along with being deployed in these more volatile environments, mission mandates have evolved to be more robust, mandating the proactive use of force. Despite the more robust man-dates, on several occasions it has been observed that peacekeepers do not use said force for fear of their own safety. These missions have proven to be very dangerous – especially MINUSMA, which has repeatedly suffered casualties to armed groups and terrorists. The insecure environ-ments of these missions, combined with the issue of TCCs not wanting their forces to come to harm, has led to a “bunkerization” of UN forces, where hiding behind high walls and fortifica-tions and using technology such as surveillance drones to execute their intelligence work (Karlsrud, 2018:13; Rupesinghe et al., 2019:217).

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3. Previous research

As mentioned in the introduction, there has been a lot of research centered on peacekeeping, and women’s participation in it, especially since the passing of UN SCR 1325. In terms of previous research, this thesis relies on the writings of Johan Karlsrud (2017), James Sloan (2011) and Cedric de Coning (2018) on UN Peacekeeping and its turn toward militarization, contrasted against an alternate understanding by Kronsell (2012). Furthermore, it builds on Rupesinghe et al.’s (2019) understanding of the justifications used for women’s participation in military peacekeeping. Finally, specific research on female peacekeepers conducted by Ka-rim and Beardsley (2013, 2015; KaKa-rim, 2019), Kronsell and Rosamond Bergman (2017), and Valenius (2007) lend insights to the theories used and analysis later on.

3.1 The militarization of peacekeeping

A definition of militarization can be hard to pin down, as any facet of life can be militarized – Cynthia Enloe has described the militarization of everything from Campbell’s Soup to Carmen Miranda (Enloe, 2000:3). Two different understandings of the term are important for this thesis. The first understanding of militarization is described by Enloe as a “process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (Enloe, 2000:3). This is possible through what feminist researchers Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg would consider militarism: “the underlying value system that permeates military organizations and war activities”. Militarization, then, is “the process of preparing and engaging in the actual war-related practices” (Kronsell and Svedberg, 2012:5). In this view, militarization is a societal process.

The second understanding of militarization of peacekeeping is more formalistic and material and can be recognized in the research presented in the previous section. James Sloan describes militarized peacekeeping as:

[…] a peacekeeping operation that possesses enforcement characteristics – that is to say, is authorised, explicitly or implicitly, under Chapter [VII] and authorised to use force beyond self-defence. Depending on the circumstances, the consent of the host state may not be a legal prerequisite to the establishment of a militarised peacekeeping operation or to the assignment

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14 of certain tasks to it; similarly, impartiality may not be a legal requirement for some or all of its tasks (Sloan, 2011:3).

While this is part of it, several researchers mention other facets when describing the militariza-tion of peacekeeping in a “formal” sense. The turn toward robust mandates requiring proactive action is one part of the puzzle as missions are deployed to environments where violent extrem-ism and terrorextrem-ism are part and parcel of daily life (Rupesinghe et al., 2019:217). Bunkering themselves behind large walls, using surveillance drones and heavily armored vehicles is an-other (Willmot et al., 2015:7). These practices, though varying in their level of action or inac-tion, all rely on militaristic ideas of peace and security, where guns, fortifications and combat are prioritized over other forms of peacekeeping, such as dialogical.

These are two very different ways of looking at the phenomena of militarization. While the first definition takes place on a societal, all-encompassing level, the second definition is more con-crete and observable in facts and figures. However, this does not mean that they are irreconcil-able. Given the militarization of peacekeeping in the formalistic sense that has been observed in the past few years, there has been a turn to prioritize so-called “war-like practices” and their preparation, suggesting a shift the direction of current missions to an understanding of peace-keeping that is more militaristic, in the sense described by Enloe and Kronsell and Svedberg, than previously. Should this be the case, both the feminist theoretical process of militarization as well as the formalistic, material process could be understood to take place concurrently, which is the departure point of this thesis. This is however not the only understanding of the developments of peacekeeping.

3.1.1 Alternative understandings of peacekeeping

An alternative perspective on the developments in peacekeeping could be seen in Annica Kron-sell’s Gender, Sex and the Postnational Defense. In the book, Kronsell discusses that postna-tional, “cosmopolitan” militaries – such as the troops in UN peacekeeping – have the potential to demilitarize peacekeeping as their job descriptions include much more than typical military tasks, for example speaking to locals (Kronsell, 2012:69-78). This is based on the theory of cosmopolitanism, which places value in human bonds rather than borders and territories. The idea is that these values should matter more than states, making international interventions im-portant tools to protect “a distant other” that one should be willing to fight for. At the same

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15 time, she notes that “when the stakes become higher, cosmopolitan values seem less relevant” (Kronsell, 2012:79). Faced with more complex, deadlier environments, this thesis would argue that stakes are currently too high for cosmopolitanism to be the guiding star in UN peacekeep-ing. While there is a goal to protect this “distant other”, there is an acute need for TCCs to protect their personnel – an issue which has contributed to the militarization of peacekeeping. Thus, this thesis follows the reasoning of Karlsrud and others, understanding that peacekeeping is becoming increasingly militarized rather than the opposite.

3.2 Women’s participation in peacekeeping

Among the so-called pillars of UN SCR 1325, participation is one that is especially relevant in UN peacekeeping operations. Peacekeeping operations include a military component, a police component as well as a civilian component (United Nations Peacekeeping, n.d.a). While the UN highlights that female participation makes a difference in all three of these areas, there has been a large focus on female participation in the first two components, as women only make up 6% of police and military across missions (United Nations Peacekeeping, 2019). Meanwhile, UN documents from 2017 establish that 22% of civilian staff is female (United Nations Peace-keeping, n.d.a). With this discrepancy in mind, the UN has established clear goals for female uniformed participation – for example an increase from 4.7% women serving in military con-tingents in 2019 to more than 15% in 2028 (United Nations Peacekeeping, 2019). Considering all this effort, it is relevant to ask why women’s participation in peacekeeping operations is an area of focus for states and international institutions.

Rupesinghe et al. (2019) identify four different justifications used for why women should par-ticipate more in peacekeeping. One is that women are needed to perform certain duties that require a gender sensitivity – the demobilization, disarmament, and rehabilitation of female combatants, collecting information from and helping survivors of sexual assault and gender-based violence, and performing searches of homes and bodies. The second is that women are better suited to build community relations – an assumption based on essentialist theories of women in general having “conciliatory attributes […] including communication skills, empa-thy, sensitivity and approachability” (Rupesinghe et al., 2019:214). The third justification in-volves female UN staff functioning as role models for local women. This applies first and fore-most to uniformed personnel, who can show local women that women can be soldiers and that

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16 it is possible to challenge existing norms surrounding gender roles. The fourth and final justifi-cation identified by the researchers is that women’s presence in peacekeeping can ameliorate sexual exploitation and abuse in the mission setting by being a calming element in contrast to the “aggressiveness and hypermasculinity” (Rupesinghe et al., 2019:214) that can be common in peacekeeping missions. This justification, too, builds on essentialist assumptions about women, generalizing female peacekeepers to having a calming presence.

These justifications rest mainly on instrumentalist arguments, meaning that adding women to missions is the right thing to do because it increases operational effectiveness – an increase that is highlighted on UN material concerning female peacekeepers (United Nations Peacekeeping, 2019). Though this may be the case, Rupesinghe et al. identify several issues with this approach to women’s participation. One is that it negates the rights-based approach to women’s partici-pation, meaning that women should be included because inclusion is a goal in its own and not a tool to increase effectiveness. Another is that, because gender disaggregated data seldom is retrievable from missions, functionalist arguments do not have empirical backing. This means that while other features may be relevant in community relations, such as ethnicity and lan-guage, these arguments look past them and further perpetuate essentialist understandings of gender (Rupesinghe et al., 2019:215). A third critique can be found in Sion’s (2009) research on female peacekeepers in Bosnia, which suggests that female and male peacekeepers may not be so different from one another – many do not join international forces to improve gender equality, but rather because of the benefits that such employment entails.

The heavy reliance of these arguments on essentialist ideas is problematic, according to Karim (2019), among others. Advocating for women’s representation while expecting an added value from their contribution as something different places a double burden on female peacekeepers – should they not succeed in their tasks, their presence loses legitimacy. Making the mission more effective then becomes the female peacekeepers’ burden while their male equivalents do not have to justify their presence. But given that one subscribes to the claim that women make unique contributions to peacekeeping, Karim argues that the instrumental value of these contri-butions may not come to fruition at all due to the culture of peacekeeping missions (Karim, 2019:28). A related point to consider is which women participate in peacekeeping – even if we were to hold that the average woman has the inherent traits which make her peaceful and com-municative, a woman who joins a military peacekeeping mission is not an “average” woman.

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17 Empirical research specifically on female peacekeepers and their participation in missions that is interesting for this thesis has been conducted by Valenius, Beardsley and Karim, and Berg-man Rosamond and Kronsell. In their research, Sabrina Karim and Kyle Beardsley have found that female military peacekeepers actually end up in the safest missions – either where there are the least deaths among mission staff, or where gross domestic product is the highest – decisions influenced by “gendered protection” norms within TCCs (Karim & Beardsley, 2015; Beardsley & Karim, 2013). This suggests that women may not be deploying to missions evenly or where they may be most needed, exemplified by high-ranking officials in the Bangladeshi military saying that they are cautious when it comes to where they deploy their female soldiers. Further-more, the roles female soldiers receive in the mission are commonly as doctors, nurses or ad-ministrative staff – not working with the frontline peacebuilding that they are argued to excel at (Karim, 2019:32-33).

Rosamond Bergman and Kronsell illustrate a different narrative in their research on Danish and Swedish female military peacekeepers in the International Security Assistance Force in Af-ghanistan (ISAF). Through their engagement in dialogic peacekeeping, these peacekeepers were able to offer an alternative to the gender-dependent binary of protector and protected (Bergman & Rosamond, 2017). Lastly, Valenius – like Sion (2009) – discusses how the essen-tialist arguments for women’s participation in military peacekeeping often ring false in practice, exemplifying this by discussing Finnish female peacekeepers in NATOs Kosovo Force (KFOR). Furthermore, these arguments tend to disregard barriers to participation such as mili-tary culture and the gendered hierarchies that women are added to (Valenius, 2007).

In summation, previous research has shown that there are many ways used to justify women’s participation in peacekeeping operations, while presence of men is seen as a given. At the same time, research has shown that despite these supposed unique contributions to mission effective-ness, female peacekeepers have ended up in protected positions within missions. In the context of an increasingly militarized peacekeeping operation, it is relevant to ask if these justifications matter in practice if the work and roles of female peacekeepers are limited in order to ensure their protection. If they are limited in their ability and agency to contribute as soldiers, the supposed talents and qualities of female peacekeepers will not come to fruition anyway.

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4. Theoretical framework

This discussion of theory will present the feminist theory within which this thesis is situated, discussing key concepts such as gender essentialism and agency. Lastly, theorizing on the con-nections between gender and militarization will be presented.

4.1 Feminist theory

This thesis builds its understanding of gender on feminist literature. What this means is that gender is understood as a social construct – “any social construction having to do with the male/female distinction” (Nicholson, 1994:79). Its social construction does not make the reali-ties of gender any less real, however. This construction is woven into the fabric of our world – it is present in our social interactions, institutions – in our everyday lives. It is in these everyday lives that feminist research takes its starting point by questioning that which is assumed to be normal (Wibben, 2011:12), e.g., gendered hierarchies, gender roles, and gendered violence. Feminist critical perspectives have been applied to many fields, not least to international rela-tions and the study of war, where they have challenged the fundamental assumprela-tions of the fields for decades. Research has, in no small part, focused on illuminating women’s roles in peace and security and understanding the effects of militarization (Wibben, 2011:5-7). Unlike much of “mainstream” security studies in the early 1990s, scholars within the field of feminist security studies embraced a broader concept of security which includes both environmental and economic issues as well as more “traditional” questions of hard security (ibid). Feminist theo-retical perspectives on international relations and security studies are unique in the sense that they recognize their own inherent political, emancipatory aims (ibid, 21). This stands in stark contrast to other theoretical perspectives of international relations, for example realism, which tries to situate itself as “neutral” despite its assumptions leading researchers who subscribe to this theory to strive toward certain aims.

4.2 Gender essentialism

Gender essentialism ascribes women and men certain inherent qualities, differentiating between the two. Within feminism, the topic of gender essentialism has been a subject of debate (Wibben 2016:4-5); there are divergent approaches to the concept in the literature. Mary K. Burguieres

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19 identifies these to be “’woman as mother’, ‘woman equal to man’, and ‘feminism versus mili-tarism’” (1990:2). These approaches can be summarized as follows: 1) the acceptance of stere-otypes of men and women with an aim to employ them in a feminist way; 2) the rejection of female stereotypes and an argument for pursuing equality by becoming similar to men; and 3) the rejection of both male and female stereotypes with the conclusion that they are inaccurate and perpetuate militarism and patriarchy through imagining women as peaceful and mothering and men as violent and power-seeking (Wibben, 2016:5).

The feminists that subscribe to the first reasoning – that is, that women as a group do have certain inherent qualities – try to employ these stereotypes as an argument for women’s inclu-sion in, for example, peace processes (Wibben, 2016:5). These are the same kind of arguments that we can see being employed by the UN and UN SCR 1325. While many feminists would consider the increased participation of women an admirable goal, many more would object to the employment of essentialist arguments in pursuit of this, for several reasons. For one, while beneficial for arguments for inclusion, seeing women as only peacemakers is wrong. While there are many female peacemakers, women also engage in violence (Alison, 2004). For an-other, this perspective perpetuates the status quo and limits the scope of women’s participation (Wibben, 2016:6). Further consequences involve precluding women from DDR programs as well as denying them legitimacy as combatants or any role they take on outside that as peace-maker (Shepherd, 2008:88-89).

While this thesis adheres to the third approach to essentialism with its critique against essen-tialist instrumentalist arguments when arguing for the participating of women in peacekeeping, it is nevertheless important to note that these different approaches exist and what effects they can have. The first approach to essentialism, employing stereotypes in a feminist way, has been used effectively to boost the participation of women in peacekeeping – as can be seen in UN SCR 1325. What is interesting then, is whether “meaningful participation”, to use a term em-ployed by UN bodies such as UN Women and the World Health Organization (UN Women Headquarters, 2018; World Health Organization, n.d.) is achieved within the Swedish Contin-gency of MINUSMA. UN Women find that women’s “meaningful participation” flows from several different factors being present at once, such as “agenda-setting”, “coalition building”, “exerting influence”, decision-making, and the “confidence to effectively represent women’s interests” (UN Women Headquarters, 2018:11-12). Many of these factors are commonly seen

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20 as indicators of women’s agency, which this thesis aims to investigate when it comes to Swe-dish female peacekeepers in MINUSMA. In other words, what agency looks like for female peacekeepers within the mission has a significant impact on whether or not participation can be considered to be the “meaningful participation” which UN bodies advocate for.

4.3 Agency

Agency is a key concept in feminist literature, often conceptualized as “the ability to define one’s own goals and act upon them” (Kabeer, 1999:438). While this is observable in decision-making, negotiation, manipulation, deception, and bargaining, Kabeer also notes that the intan-gible processes of analysis, sense of meaning and purpose, and reflection are important parts of agency. The inherent qualities assumed in gender essentialism leave us with two binary cate-gories: the male protector/agent of violence versus the female victim, associated with peace and in need of protection. In this relationship of protector and protected, the protected faces a loss of autonomy and is reliant on the protector to define as well as respond to the threat (Wibben, 2011:21-22). The protected woman is thus left without the agency to make change.

Consider Karim and Beardsley’s research on where female peacekeepers are deployed; often-times decided by “gendered protection” norms, with women ending up in the missions pre-sumed to be the safest and being relegated to positions far from the frontlines (2013). Such deployments indicate that female peacekeepers may not actually be agents of security within the mission setting, but rather, that they have been relegated to objects of protection or “referent objects of security”1_{. Iris Marion Young discusses how the gendered dynamics of protection} affect agency, in the sense that the protected – commonly women and children – are subjugated in relation to their male “protectors” and that in exchange for protection the protected must distance themselves from decision-making processes and action. The Hobbesian idea that po-litical power is based on the need for and ability to provide protection informs Young’s theory of the gendered logic of protection (Young, 2009:145-146).

1_{A term commonly used in securitization theory. Securitization is an extreme version of politization which}

allows for the utilization of methods outside those used normally to secure a referent object: something seen as existentially threatened and must be protected. (Buzan et al., 1998:23-24, 36).

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21 If protection limits agency, then this status as referent object of security, as that which must be protected, would leave female peacekeepers without the agency to impact upon the mission. With this in mind, one can question if “meaningful participation” is achieved when women participate in peacekeeping is if the environment they are in leads them to become protected, referent objects of security within the mission setting, missing the key component of agency. If this is the case, we face a paradoxical situation in which women’s participation is justified in terms of the instrumental value that their supposed essential qualities give them but that they are unable to use in practice because of their protected situation and accompanying lack of agency.

4.3.1 The agency dichotomy

Although it is simple to think in terms of women having or not having agency, researchers such as Carol Cohn reject this dichotomy. Cohn holds that it is imperative that women not be cate-gorized as either agents or victims, but rather that women face multiple different roles in pro-cesses of war and militarization. An example she uses is women who use their status as victims of sexual violence as a starting point for their activism – thus holding dual identities as both victim and agent (Cohn, 2013:31-32). A similar argument can be found in Judith Butler’s Vul-nerability and Resistance theory, which stipulates that vulVul-nerability and resistance are interde-pendent processes – vulnerability can mobilize resistance while resistance brings about vulner-ability (Zakarriya, 2019). We can thus conceptualize that the positions of victim and agent are similarly interdependent. It is therefore important to acknowledge that agency is not necessarily a dichotomy or a binary concept, but rather exists on a gradient scale where agency and the lack of it depend on each other. In the context of the material of this thesis, we could imagine that women for example have dual roles, both within the camp walls and outside of them, or that despite having a role in which one could assume that a female peacekeeper is a decisionmaker, negotiator or leader, she does not have the space to reflect upon her work in a way that would project agency.

4.4 Gender and militarization

Given the assumption stated in previous research – that a societal militarization accompanies a formalistic one – the next step in our process is to understand how gender and militarization

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22 interact with one another. Again, it is worth distinguishing between the concepts of militarism and militarization, as they are often used interchangeably. Dowler’s simple distinction between militarization as a form of mobilization for conflict and militarism as societal attitudes about military effectiveness does well to correspond with the definition by Kronsell and Svedberg discussed in the preceding chapter (Dowler, 2012:491).

Most of both military spending and killing is directed and done by men. Although men may suffer in war and through militarism, just as women and children do, men retain their collective structural power. Militaries are largely made up of men, and militarism and militaries are among the most overtly gendered of government activities (Hearn, 2012:37, 39). Processes of milita-rization are thus reliant on the strengthening of a patriarchal system, categorized by “a supreme masculine principle and a secondary feminine one, where masculinity is associated with rising above the mundane and femininity with immersion in the daily round, where the masculine is a source of authority”, according to Cockburn (2012:24-25). Cockburn establishes that this gen-dered hierarchy, with its basis in coercion and violence, affects militarization in important ways, arguing that gender as a deciding factor in the social order is a prerequisite for militarization to occur. At the same time, she holds that masculinity itself is dependent on militarization for its fulfilment (Cockburn, 2012:32).

Feminist scholars, Dowler among them, argue that militarization is a norm that as a process perpetuates a societal belief that war and violence are suitable solutions to conflict, and that it is a “hyper-masculine evolution” that depicts violence as masculine and non-violent solutions as feminine, and thus not “viable” (Dowler, 2012:492). The masculine is thus the hegemonic ideal, bringing with it an inherently uneven social dynamic where marginalized groups are ren-dered more vulnerable to exclusion – for example, women (Dowler, 2012:493). Applied to the mission setting, one could assume that this would mean that female peacekeepers are relegated from important decision-making processes and operations, facing limits in what they can do within the militarized mission in comparison to their male colleagues.

To summarize the connection between essentialism, militarization and agency, gender essen-tialism combined with the masculinity-favoring process of militarization could contribute to a situation in which the female peacekeeper is conceptualized as an object of protection within the mission, rather than a soldier with the same agency as her male colleagues. However, as

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23 noted by Cohn (2013), it is important to note that a lack of agency does not necessarily mean a total loss of it.

5. Methodology and methods of analysis

This thesis uses a Foucauldian-inspired visual and textual analysis applied to memory books produced by the SAF depicting the Swedish contingency in MINUSMA in combination with insights from an expert interview with a former gender advisor in the mission. This section begins with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological implications of using discourse analysis as a method, touching upon the socially constitutive nature of discourse, the connection between power and knowledge and the principle of intertextuality. It then goes on to discuss the limitations of this thesis in material, methods, and reflexivity. It concludes by providing an overview of the questions and tools that guide the subsequent analysis.

5.1 Discourse as theory and method

As this thesis has its departure point in the understanding of gender as socially constructed, an approach to methods which understands society to ripe with social construction comes natu-rally. One such approach is using a discourse analysis, inspired by Michel Foucault’s work with discourse. Discourse analysis is a method of looking closely at texts with the goal to understand their meaning. As a method, it does not have a representative ambition, but is rather to be con-sidered as it is a “deep-dive” into a specific case. It can instead serve an illustrative purpose when analyzing theoretical and methodological conundrums (Ackerly and True, 2020:196). Us-ing a method of discourse analysis, this thesis further assumes that discourse plays an important part in constituting the world as we know it – constructing meaning and human subjectivity (Willig, 2013:139). Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) considers discourse as “groups of statements which structure the way a thing is thought, and the way we act on the basis of that thinking” (Rose, 2016:187).

Central to any discourse analysis inspired by Foucault is the concept of power, and its omni-presence. Discourse dictates a certain way of acting and thinking, and through this, human sub-jects are then produced. Sense of self, obsub-jects, relations, places, and scenes are all produced

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24 through discourse. Because discourse is everywhere, so is power, and with contesting dis-courses come contesting terms of power. The dominance of certain disdis-courses, according to Foucault, was based both in them being located in socially powerful institutions as well as their claims to absolute truth (Rose, 2016:189-190; Foucault, 1977; 1979). It is the focus on power in discursive structures that makes a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis the chosen method in this thesis – recognizing the different discursive subject positions and their relative power (or lack of it) is important to understand the material analyzed. Furthermore, the inherent chal-lenge to claims to absolute truth that a Foucault-inspired discourse analysis dovetails well with the emancipatory goal of feminist security studies, which involves challenging given structures and norms to uncover deeper meaning and understanding (Wibben, 2011:21).

While discourses are the object of analysis in a discourse analysis, these discourses produce subjects and subject positions, which have implications for experience and subjectivity (Willig, 2013:130). This production of subject, subjectification, involves the discursive construction of subject, that are then enabled and constrained through these discourses (Heller, 1996:91). In the context of this thesis, the subjectification of female peacekeepers concerns the ways they are constrained – or enabled – within the mission setting. The analysis in this thesis will focus on this subjectification and the limits or freedoms it entails, with a specific interest in how milita-rization interacts with the agency of the subject in question. Binaries, categories and differenti-ation between this subject and others are thus of particular interest.

Discourse can be found in many kinds of material, which makes intertextuality an important facet of discourse analysis. Intertextuality means that meanings in one text or image cannot be understood without understanding their relation to other texts or images. We can understand visualities as discourse as well, as a certain visuality makes certain things visible in a particular way while concealing others (Rose, 2016:188), and visual discourse analysis can concern how discourse produces subjects and “things”, how they are given meaning and the relations be-tween different meanings (Rose 2016:205-206).

5.2 Choice of material

The primary material for this analysis consists of the memory books depicting the Swedish contingency in MINUSMA that are published by the SAF, in total seven books spanning the

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25 time from 2014 to 2019. While there are not yet books published for every unit sent to Mali, the seven books still span the period fairly evenly as each unit was in Mali for a three-to-six-month period that fell within the time span. This material is rich in its depictions of the day-to-day life of the soldiers in the contingency, thus presenting a window into a world otherwise very difficult for a researcher to examine. In this material, the subjectification of female peace-keepers in the mission is that which is focused on. Moreover, the memory books include pic-tures as well, which through the employment of visual discourse analysis alongside a textual one can lend greater depth to the analysis. The intertextuality between the text and images is an important facet of understanding meanings in both types of material, as they depend on each other. It is also this intertextuality that gives discourse analysis its interpretive power (Rose, 2016:204).

However, considering that the SAF reviews and publishes these memory books, it is important to take note of what is not articulated as there exists motivation for them to portray the contin-gency and its activities in a primarily positive light. Absences can be just as productive in dis-course as explicit naming, meaning that it is important to account for in one’s analysis – this applies just as much to text as it does to images (Rose, 2016:213). Moreover, the memory books constitute a vast body of material, including in total 1,371 pages. While beneficial for a depth of analysis, the size of the material is also challenging to analyze within the scope of a master’s thesis. This is especially demanding as the books are abundant in military jargon and intertex-tuality is highly important for understanding much of it which required reading and re-reading the material several times. Excluding books from the material would not have been able to give the same understanding of how an increased militarization over time affects agency, as exclud-ing material would narrow the period analyzed and result in less depth of analysis. By focusexclud-ing on a certain aspect of the material however – namely the subjectification and subject positions of female peacekeepers – the difficulties of having such a large body of material were reduced. Although not without its difficulties, in being among the first to examine these memory books, an analysis of this size bodes well for discovering future areas of inquiry within the material. This could be beneficial for understanding internal jargon within the SAF, portrayals of rela-tions between peacekeepers and locals, or other potentially unique aspects of the material.

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26 5.3 Procedure of analysis

Images can have multiple meanings in competition to one another, depending on audiences’ understanding of their intertextuality (Cooper-Cunningham, 2019:389). In understanding im-ages related to security and tackling the polysemous nature of imim-ages, Cooper-Cunningham adapts an analytical framework from Lene Hansen (2011) to his work on suffrage posters, of which this thesis adopts two tools. These involve first looking at images and their strategic depictions, evaluating their positions in relation to dominant ideas of gender. Second, text on or immediately surrounding the image is analyzed (Cooper-Cunningham, 2019:389).

Furthermore, as this thesis aims to understand agency in both visual media and text, specific strategies had to be developed in order to understand agency (or lack of it). An important aspect that can constrain agency which was discussed in the previous section is whether or not one is protected. Visible indicators of agency discussed were the ability to participate in decision-making, setting and achieving one’s own goals and negotiation, for example. While these fac-tors can be understood in text, it is harder to see them in images. For this reason, this thesis utilizes theory on center-periphery relations to try to understand agency visually. By putting something in the center, you are at the same time marginalizing something to the periphery and othering it in the process (Giritli Nygren et al., 2020:229-231). By moving something to the periphery, one also robs it of the inherent agency that being in the center grants. Translating this into a visual analysis, this thesis will reflect upon how women are portrayed visually, and if they are portrayed at all. If they are seen at the center of action, this could indicate that they are afforded more agency than if they are on the margins of photos or not pictured at all. Additionally, guidance was drawn from discourse analytical tools suggested by James Paul Gee regarding the construction of identity and context: how is what the speaker is saying shaping the context and its reproduction (2011:198-199)? These tools, the theories on agency presented by Kabeer, and the tools adopted from Cooper-Cunningham could thus be synthesized to sev-eral questions serving to guide the analysis. Who is speaking in the text? In what way are they speaking? Were there descriptions of soldiers, and if so, were any of these about women? How were they described? Were women’s contributions mentioned explicitly or were they implicit? When it came to the images, it was relevant to ask what was pictured. If people were pictured, were any of them women? What were they doing? Were they portrayed in active or passive

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27 roles? Were they portrayed as “separate” or together with male colleagues? These questions aim to identify the discursive constructions and subjectification of female peacekeepers in the mission and how their agency is constructed and (un)constrained in the discourse.

For coherency, the analysis is structured around four themes in each memory book– roles and participation, voices, field work, otherness, and voices. Roles and participation, to see where in the mission women are stationed – are they in more protected roles, as Karim (2019) found in the case of Bangladeshi peacekeepers, or are they in the roles the essentialist justifications would have them in, for example connecting with local women. Do their positions allow for agentic behavior? Voices, as who is speaking and how they speak is important to understand the subjectification of female peacekeepers, as well as in evaluating whether they have agency in the sense that they have the space to reflect upon their experiences and goals. Field work, to see if and how women work in field situations, in which they are proposed to make a differ-ence according to the justifications for female participation in peacekeeping. Do they show agentic behavior by taking part in negotiations or decision-making? Otherness, as Giritli Ny-gren et al. (2020) identify this as limiting agency. Where are female peacekeepers positioned in images, and are they made to be something different or marginalized? By going through these themes, the analysis aims to understand women’s agency in the mission over time in the period between 2014 and 2019.

5.4 Other limitations

5.4.1 Choice of method

In an ideal world, an ethnographic study would have been the preferred approach to this ques-tion as much of the analysis now relies on official accounts of the SAF as well as dated testi-monies from soldiers, while an ethnographic study would have allowed for a closer documen-tation of the lived experience of these soldiers (Bevir & Rhodes, 2015:172-173). On the other hand, such an approach would not be feasible considering both time, cost, ethical considera-tions, and risk for the researcher. In the end, discourse analysis is a strong approach as it allows for an in-depth examination of the material, the discursive constructions presented by the SAF both visually and textually. This will hopefully allow for insight into both the structure of the

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28 SAF and their Mali contingency as an institution, as well as into the lived experiences of Swe-dish Female Peacekeepers – as far as the material allows for it.

5.4.2 Reflexivity and positionality

Reflexivity is an important part of research practice, both concerning discourse analysis as well as in feminist research in general (Rose 2016:215-216). FDA holds that all knowledge is con-structed through discourse, and so, the scientific knowledge of the researcher and what they produce is as well. The researcher is seen as an author of knowledge, rather than she who dis-covers it (Willig, 2013:139). An important part of this reflexivity is positionality. Feminist re-search urges the rere-searcher to take their various positions into account – one’s position as woman, civilian, queer, and white, for example, and reflect on how these factors influence their research (Al Ali and Pratt, 2016). As a woman with these characteristics, especially as a civilian, I am limited in my understanding of the inner workings of military organizations and have a harder time evaluating their discursive constructions than someone with experience within the military would have. Furthermore, it is important that I, as a researcher, recognize how my own preexisting knowledge may influence my discourse analytical research (Willig, 2013:139), and note that others may not analyze the same material in an identical fashion.

6. Analysis

The following analysis begins with a brief overview of statistics for and the character of the units that have been in Mali, as well as some corresponding numbers for the memory books in order to provide a short synopsis of the material. After this, changes to the character of the memory books over time is discussed, along with the ways in which a militarization is visible within them. The main body of the analysis consists of an examination of the material according to the themes roles and participation, voices, field work and otherness, and the developments within these which can be seen over time in the memory books. Note that for the sake of textual flow the words female peacekeepers and women are used interchangeably throughout the anal-ysis, and that the word women in this case does not include civilian women or other non-peace-keepers.

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29 6.1 Overview

To begin with, a brief overview of the material analyzed is in order. In Table 1, each memory book is presented first in terms of the years in which they were in Mali, where each unit was there for a period that lasted between three and six months. Next is the type of unit stationed there, which, apart from the first unit tasked with establishing the Swedish camp, have all been intelligence and reconnaissance units. Despite the difference in unit type, many roles are similar as both types of unit still include trauma care group, staff expeditions, and guard platoons, et cetera, differing mainly in the number of soldiers focusing specializing in engineering versus intelligence and reconnaissance. Lastly, the relative number of female peacekeepers participat-ing in the mission durparticipat-ing the period of the memory book is included, as well as the relative number of the pictures in the memory books where Swedish troops figure and in which female peacekeepers can be seen as well. In more than 1300 total pages of memory books, 2464 images featured Swedish peacekeepers in an identifiable way, in which female peacekeepers figured in 589, or 23.9%. The average number of women in the mission during these periods has been 11.2%, which displays an overall trend of overrepresentation of women within the memory books compared to their actual numbers of participation. Note that the relative frequencies of women in pictures are not the point of a discourse analysis, but rather that these statistics have been included to more easily visualize the discrepancies between the memory books and the actual participation of female peacekeepers in the Swedish contingency, for the reader’s benefit.

Memory book Year Unit type Women in

mission

Women in pic-tures featuring Swedish troops Mali 00 2014-2015 Engineering 1.9 – 6.1% 19.5%

Mali 02 2015 Intelligence and

reconnaissance

7.0 – 12.4% 22.4%

Mali 03 2015-2016 Intelligence and reconnaissance

7.3 – 9.5% 16.8%

reconnaissance

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30 Mali 05 2016-2017 Intelligence and

reconnaissance

7.2 – 10.7%. 21.7%

reconnaissance

7.7 – 10.9%. 31.6%

Mali 09 2018-2019 Intelligence and reconnaissance

9.1 – 15.5%. 28.8%

Table 1: Summary of memory book material.

6.2 Changes in the character of the memory books

One thing is very notable when analyzing the first memory book from Mali, and that is the relative degree of openness that the book shows. The depictions of activities are often detailed, jargon is unfiltered – use of the term “retard [author’s translation]” as an affectionate nickname (Minnesbok: Mali 00, 2016:54) and pictures from hazing ceremonies (ibid, 36-37) are examples of this – and full names and positions are published for all to see, which stands in contrast to the majority of subsequent memory books. This suggests that the intended audience for the book are those who participated themselves and their friends and family, rather than it being produced to be informative to the public regarding the SAF’s participation in MINUSMA. However, for Mali 02, the production of the book has changed somewhat. A full list of partici-pants and their specific roles is no longer included, but a clearer depiction of each platoon and subgroup is. At the same time, there is an aim included. While not claiming to be a comprehen-sive review of the unit’s experiences in Mali, the Press Information Offices (PIO) expresses a wish for the memory book to give a picture of the mission as not just “bullets and gunpowder” (Kjaergaard, 2016: 9), but rather that they present a picture of all facets of day-to-day life, from dance parties to patrols. He also discusses that while there is much material on the Swedish contingency online, that material might not be there forever. Thus, the book would seem to fill a preservatory purpose when it comes to the unit’s experiences in Mali. In Mali 03, the ex-pressed aim of the book has been taken a step further, with the PIO saying “I hope that the person who has leafed through this book and who has not been a part of the unit have gained an increased understanding for our mission in Mali, and our sandy, warm, educating, and ex-citing presence in the country” (Dahlgren, 2017: 206). This expressed aim suggests that the

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31 books are meant to be promotional and educational regarding the SAF’s presence in Mali, not only being a keepsake for the soldiers that have served within the mission. The subsequent memory books that do express aims in terms of material include a wish to show what has been done, seen, and experienced within the mission, as well as being relatable for those who have served, seeming to combine the purposes of being informative as well as sentimental (Mali 04:

minnesbok, 2017; Minnesbok: Mali 08, 2020: 293).

A further development bringing the subsequent memory books even further from the first arises when the PIO describes the “spiked balls” that get stuck to clothes while out in the field, saying that “because of SAF’s value system all [the spiked ball’s] nicknames will not be written out [author’s translation]” (Minnesbok: Mali 09: svenska soldater i fredens tjänst, 2020: 42). Though jovial in tone, this alludes to a censoring, or at the very least a careful consideration of what can be published or not, which would present a striking contrast to the use of the nickname “retard” in Mali 00, for example. It also serves to illustrate the shift in tone from the memory books being something private intended mainly for those who participated in the mission to a product intended for a larger audience.

6.3 Militarization in the memory books

While not a main feature of the memory books, or one that is present in all of them, they do describe what has been a deteriorating security situation and subsequent militarization of MI-NUSMA. In the Mali 02 memory book, the civilian aspect of the Mali mission was highlighted several times, making it clear that the mission was made up of more than “just” the blue helmets (Kjaergaard, 2017:38). This emphasis on a civilian approach does not reoccur in following books. From increased attacks on UN soldiers (Minnesbok: MALI 05, 2018: 15), attacks upon the camp in which a Swedish soldier was injured (ibid, 152), as well as on neighboring encamp-ments (Dahlgren, 2017: 60; Kjaergaard, 2016: 185), reconnaissance patrols where armored ve-hicles are escorted by attack helicopters (Mali 04: minnesbok, 2017: 152), and attacks against the airport in Timbuktu (Minnesbok: Mali 08, 2020: 221). Accompanying this, of course, is the aforementioned steady increase of troops to MINUSMA.

But while theory would suggest that this militarization of MINUSMA would entail limitations upon women’s agency within the mission, the analysis of the memory books tells a different

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32 story. Not only has the relative number of female peacekeepers in the Swedish contingency increased, but their roles have become increasingly varied.

6.4 Roles and participation

When looking at the number of female reconnaissance soldiers, from being non-existent in the first few memory books, women have gone on to be included in several such groups. Moreover, their presence in roles such as interpreters, reconnaissance soldiers, and participation in local patrols suggests that more female peacekeepers are engaging in field work and thus are able to connect with the local population. While there has been a high number of women within trauma care, tasked with the nursing which Karim (2019) argued was a more protected occupation, observations from material indicate that the peacekeepers working within these groups still par-ticipate in forward operations and patrols, providing both medical care and military expertise as needed.

While Mali 00 had only a total of seven female military personnel, all working in jobs which are mainly based within the (then not entirely existent) camp – as nurses, in logistics and with Human Resources (HR) (Minnesbok: Mali 00, 2016: 40-45). The development throughout the memory books shows women taking on increasingly varied roles, including many where the most important parts of the job take place outside of the camp walls. The roles female peace-keepers take on within the Mali 02 are thus diverse, and above all more numbered than what could be observed in Mali 00. While many of these roles are mainly based within the walls of Camp Nobel and the logistics hub in Bamako, others figure in patrols and reconnaissance out-side the camp – especially interpreters and groups responsible for guard and escort tasks (Kjaergaard, 2016: 38, 40-41, 63, 90, 117-118, 134, 159, 163, 186, 190). This is a trend which one can observe throughout the memory books – women seem to fill increasingly varied roles, with eventually at least one or two being included in nearly every reconnaissance group as the norm (Minnesbok: Mali 08, 2020; Minnesbok :Mali 09: svenska soldater i fredens tjänst, 2020) Even in the roles which Karim (2019) considered “protected”, women are able to show agency through participation in the field. In Mali 03, what separates the trauma group from previous Mali units is the fact that they are described as “a happy gang that happily hangs out in the sandbox [author’s translation]” (Dahlgren, 2017:52) – articulating that they follow along on

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33 different operations in order to provide medical care when needed, a role where one is put in harm’s way in order to fulfill an important task. Women are included in some of these forward group constellations, and are absent from others. The nursing role is described as: “[they] were tasked with delivering competent care as needed as well as egging on the driver from the back seat [author’s translation] (Dahlgren, 2017:53).

Outside of their primary roles, female peacekeepers can be seen participating in other tasks around the mission. In Mali 00, for example, while in important roles for the function of the camp, such as healthcare, women were in high relative high concentration when it came to traditionally feminine-coded tasks. The trauma group, which had the highest concentration of women within the mission, had the capacity for daily care, surgical and intensive care as well as X-ray capabilities. At the same time, their responsibilities included organizing a mess hall, showers and outhouses, preparing breakfast and cleaning (Minnesbok: Mali 00, 2016: 71-73), typically domestic tasks that have historically been assigned to women. In Mali 03, apart from learning of the roles which they have, one can see women included in a myriad of the daily tasks and activities within the camp. The first such instance is already in basic training, showing that female peacekeepers have been included from the very start of mission preparations, fig-uring in several photos from this preparatory time (Dahlgren, 2017: 6-8). However, as in Mali 00, they also feature in several instances of taking on traditionally domestic tasks, such as mak-ing garlands for Christmas decorations or preparmak-ing the Christmas meal (ibid, 12).

While in earlier books, such as Mali 00, women are mainly depicted in supporting roles when in action, but when not, they are often seen in group photos, smiling toward the camera and often together with other female colleagues. This contrasts with their male colleagues, where most pictures of them are often not staged but rather taken while “on the job” – performing daily tasks like guard duty, giving orders, building and training. Pictures of men that are staged often have a joking character, for example with all of them covering their faces and brandishing weapons, or posing topless while wearing different costumes. This is not to say that women are not seen participating in fun in the camp at all – some pictures depict them participating in hazing ceremonies and games together with their colleagues (e.g., Minnesbok: Mali 00, 2016: 36-37).

Agents of peace and objects of protection : An investigation into the effects of militarization on the agency of Swedish female peacekeepers in MINUSMA