While Chapter 1 considered the narrow vision of negative peace – martial peace – associated with peacekeeping, this chapter takes a closer look at peacekeeping itself and the ways that discourses about peacekeeping have resulted in the peacekeeper myth: the belief that peacekeeping is a moral, softer, more legitimate means of using militarised force in the world. The peacekeeper myth is a powerful one; it has enabled international interventions in the name of peace to become legitimatised and widely practised, a puzzling phenomenon of increased militarised interventions in a political world where sovereignty is presumed to be central (Barnett 2005).

The mythologisation of peacekeeping has contributed to processes of militarisation, such as the demand and purchase of military technologies and the perpetuation of foreign policy strategies that utilise military force to create peace. It has also led to problematic activities adjacent to keeping of ‘peace’ by military personnel, such as sexual exploitation of women and girls by peacekeepers (Notar 2006; Ndulo 2009) that have resulted in ‘UN Babies’ or Peacekeeper-fathered children (Lee and Bartels 2020), the torture of children (Razack 2004), fraud (Lederer 2020), and the failure of peacekeepers to protect civilians from mass atrocities (such as in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995). The peacekeeper myth distracts us from asking what kind of ‘peace’ military occupations uphold, and therefore also obscures the martial politics that peacekeeping missions may reinforce. The peacekeeper myth is distracting, therefore, allowing us to imagine militarised coercion in romanticised ways while avoiding looking closely at the attendant violent practices associated with the deployment of militarised forces.

The peacekeeper myth, however, is also productive. It reproduces ideological militarism as a commonsensical element of international politics. It positions militaries as forces for good (Duncanson 2009, 2013), rather than a ‘destructive form of riot control’ (Greener 2013: 636), potentially lethal tools for political control. The peacekeeper myth reproduces the idea that military force can be used in ethical and justifiable ways. The peacekeeper myth and ideological militarism coconstitute each other. Both militarism and the peacekeeper myth are circulated discursively to reproduce one another, making the myth appear straightforward, commonsensical and apolitical; these meanings transform into ‘just the way things are or the ways things ought to be’ (Weber 2014: 6). This has the effect of obscuring the politics of peacekeeping and of legitimising military activities conducted in the name of peace.