Forces for Good?

Claire Duncanson is a Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research and teaching is focused at the intersection of international security, international development and gender politics.

• Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Can Soldiers Ever Be Used to Achieve Peace? Feminists Debate Military Intervention 3. What Can We Learn From Soldiers' Personal Narratives? Methodologies and Methods 4. British Soldier Identity and the Warfighting Ethos 5. British Soldiers Doing and Undoing Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan 6. Regendered Soldiers and the Transformation of Hegemonic Masculinity 7. Conclusion

"As a whole, the book has four major strengths. First, its focus on agency adds balance to a debate that has been biased towards deterministic understandings of how gender affects war and international military interventions. Second, its attention to complexity, highlighting the tensions and contradictions of gendered identities, adds to our knowledge of the variety of strategies through which masculinity is constructed, reasserted and transformed. Third, its reference to context and intersectionality is a reminder of the historicity of gender, thus strengthening our ability to avoid reified and essentialist visions of gendered social practice. Finally, the book explores, froma new angle, the British contribution to the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, as such, it is innovative from an empirical perspective [...] A valuable and thoughtful contribution for understanding the way gender affects the social, cultural and organizational contexts of security." - International Peacekeeping