Where are civilian peacekeepers in the process of militarization?

UN peace missions are international interventions composed of three different categories of personnel – civilian, police, and military – each with specific tasks under the mission’s mandate. To date, feminist scholarly attention to militarism and militarization in a peacekeeping context has focused on military personnel. However, the increasing importance of civilians in peace missions has been evident over the past decades, in tandem with the broadening of UN mandates. As such, civilian peacekeepers’ relationship to militarization merits examination. Drawing on critical approaches, particularly feminist theorization, this article will examine the experiences of civilian peacekeepers in MINUSMA in order to shed light on their involvement in a specific kind of militarization proper to UN peace practices. Using the conceptual lenses of militarization and martial peace to analyse data gathered during fieldwork in Mali, this article demonstrates that civilian peacekeepers can be active agents of militarization and martial peace. Nonetheless, this dynamic is not automatic; depending on their positionality in the hierarchies that traverse a peace mission, civilians can also play an ambiguous part in it and may experience ambivalence about its reproduction.