This is a not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies, and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. This book considers the mythologised images, stories, and tropes about peacekeeping that have been used to justify military deployments. It examines the politics of military force deployed in the name of peace.

Peacekeeping as an international practice is imbued with a great deal of moral legitimacy. This perceived legitimacy stems from the belief that peacekeeping is how we might use militaries in a helpful, benign, and productive way. For ‘middle power’ countries with smaller military capacity, peacekeeping has been positioned as a practical, useful and niche mechanism to create change in international politics. Internationally, there is a dominant sense that peacekeeping is a public ‘good’ used to create peace and stability in the face of global violence. The peacekeeper – impartial, disciplined and restrained in their lethal capacity – is a powerful trope. The dominant association of peacekeeping with neutrality, consent, and non-violence broadly encompasses what I refer to as the peacekeeping myth. The myth is intentionally one-dimensional and operates to depoliticise peacekeeping as practice. It prevents us from asking critical questions about military violence as the peacekeeping myth presumes lethal military force is required to create peace. In short, then, this book details how the peacekeeping myth, as a discursive process, (re)creates a narrow vision of peace, one that is heavily martialised.

Peacekeeping mythology contains the assumption the military is required to secure the semblances of peace that exist across space and time. This myth obscures our ability to think critically about using military force. The fantasy of the neutral, benign and helpful peacekeeper is deeply implicit in the reproduction of ideological militarism, and in turn, the legitimisation of warfare and the deployment of lethal force by international militaries. Following Enloe (2000), I see peacekeeping mythology as reproductive of cultural and social processes where society imagines military needs and militaristic presumptions to be valuable and normal. The peacekeeping myth reproduces militarism.

Militarism, described as ‘the social and inter-national relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organised political violence’ (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012: 3), is an ideological framework that demonstrates the relationship between coercive and violent state practices and social relations that uphold and legitimise these practices.