On Thursday 16 January, Professor Marsha Henry gave the Doing Gender Series Lecture at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

Organised by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies in cooperation with her partners, the Doing Gender Lecture Series stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research.  The concept of Doing Gender supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today.

In her Lecture, ‘From Intersectional to Abolitionist: Decolonial, Feminist and Anti-Militarist Theorising on Peacekeeping’, Marsha argued for the recovery of sidelined critical theoretical contributions such as feminist and postcolonial insights in peacekeeping studies.

Marsha focuses on feminist, postcolonial, and anti-militarist frameworks to expose peacekeeping as an epistemic power project in need of abolition.  Drawing from Black Feminist Thought and postcolonial and critical race theories, she showed how contemporary peacekeeping produces gender and racial inequalities through militarised strategies.

Henry uses an intersectional analysis based on ethnographic fieldwork in peacekeeping missions and training centres around the world. She demonstrates how the focus on peacekeeping’s policies has obscured its underlying geopolitical agenda, allowing its harms to persist unquestioned by mainstream scholarship. She reveals that peacekeeping, often portrayed as a benign and apolitical project, is deeply entangled in justifying policy and global governance.

The Lecture was chaired by Sandra Ponzanesi, Full Professor and Chair of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, University of Utrecht.

 

Professor Marsha Henry

Professor Henry is the Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women, Peace, Security and Justice.  Her research is concerned with the gendered and racialised politics of violence; militarisation; global south development; international aid and intervention; and conflict, peace, and security.  She is the author of several books, the latest of which is: The End of Peacekeeping:  Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

Marsha has also advised a number of national governments on women’s participation in the armed forces, combatting sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian settings, and developing anti-racist and diversity strategies in foreign policy ministries.