The practice of peacekeeping has been legitimised by its association with a normatively desirable outcome: peace. Daniel Levine has written that peacekeeping is ‘distinguished from other forms of warfare by its object rather than its nature’ (Levine 2014: 193, emphasis added). It is therefore important that we consider the object of peacekeeping – peace – that is promoted in the mythologisation of the construct.

I first offer a brief exploration of scholarly approaches to peace and the ways in which these ideas have been embedded within, and are influential of, contemporary understandings of ‘peacekeeping’. I then explore how, far from an objective observable condition, ‘peace’ is a normatively loaded political concept, particularly in the ways it is employed in aspirations for global peacekeeping. I proceed to illustrate why these imaginations about peace and peacekeeping are important for understanding militarism, and, as the book promises, the legitimisation of warfare. While extensive interdisciplinary scholarship examines the links between militarism and war (Cockburn 2009; Sjoberg and Via 2010; Stavrianakis and Selby 2012; Bacevich 2013; Basham 2013; Mabee 2016), my work instead focuses on the intersections between militarism and peace. Drawing upon Allison Howell's framework of martial politics, I explain how peacekeeping discourses evoke a particular vision of peace – martial peace – that legitimises military deployments for the desired goal of peace. I conclude the chapter by signalling why martial peace is problematic and what we need to know about this vision of peace to understand about the politics of the peacekeeper myth.

Visions of Peace

The UN Charter makes forty-five references to peace, yet the term is not actually defined; former Secretary General Boutros-Boutros-Ghali described the concept as ‘easy to grasp’ (Otto 2020: 26). I disagree, and an overview of peace scholarship confirms my opinion. IR and peace studies have evolved disciplinarily as systematised areas for the study of war and how to end it, with the latter discipline embracing the normative goal of finding peace. The Journal of Peace Research's founding editor, Johan Galtung, argued that peace ‘is among the most consensual’ values (Regan 2014: 347). Yet peace itself does not have a clear definition or conceptualisation, despite the vast literatures devoted to exploring it. As the editorial of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (1957) notes, ‘we are all interested in peace but we too often abuse the term “peace”’ (Regan 2014: 346).