Nordic exceptionalism and gendered peacekeeping: The case of Iceland

Introduction

Several decades ago, feminist scholars identified as ‘third world’ feminists and ‘black’ feminists showed the crucial significance of recognizing the asymmetry of power between women based on racism and imperialistic ideologies (Mohanty, 1991 [1984]). They drew attention to how European identities are deeply shaped by racial and gendered policies in overseas colonies (McClintock, 1995) as well as how the identities of so-called ‘white’ women and men have historically been shaped by racist policies and ideologies. Gender equality has become entangled in past imperialistic notions of Europeans as the bringers of civilization and progress. These entanglements and their association with power are often concealed in contemporary discourses, reinforcing the continuous need for critical feminist perspectives to take diverse relations of power into account. While extensive research exists on how European identities were shaped by colonialism (Dirks, 1992), the Nordic countries have until recently been exempt from such critical investigation (Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012), despite being firmly embedded in imperialism and colonialism. The idea of exceptionalism, which essentially revolves around a sense of historical innocence, has been strong in the Nordic countries (Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012) even though not necessarily being expressed in a coherent or uniform way.

Our analysis focuses on discourses of gender equality in Iceland in relation to peacekeeping, which was strongly advocated by feminists and non-feminists from different political parties in Iceland during the time of economic expansion. It was primarily viewed in terms of technical problem where women needed to be added, without any consideration of the power relations inherent in the process itself. This can partly be explained by a wider tendency of separating gender equality from a critical analysis of power dynamics. What makes the Icelandic case de facto exceptional in terms of peacekeeping is the fact that Iceland has no military nor any military tradition and entered the arena of international peacekeeping relatively late, with the establishment of the Icelandic Crisis Response Unit (ICRU) in 2001. The other Nordic countries have had a long tradition of engaging in various peacekeeping missions and are seen within the international community as major contributors to these endeavours and have, in the process, gained prestige and power (Stamnes, 2007: 449; Valenius, 2007). The notion of the history of the Nordic countries as disconnected from the history of European colonialism has resulted in the Nordics as being perceived as particularly suited for the peacekeeping role (Jakobsen, 2006: 382). As such, the idea of Nordic exceptionalism as associated with peace, rationality, progress and modernization has been an important component of western peacekeeping endeavours (Browning, 2007). This sense of exceptionalism can also be linked to the Nordic countries’ reputation for being committed to gender equality (Holli et al., 2005). The idea of the equalitarian North is also in coherence with a particular imagining of the world into more ‘civilized’ and less ‘civilized’ spheres; the former characterized by order and equality while the latter are seen as chaotic and oppressive. Spivak’s (1988) identification of western tendencies of ‘rescuing brown women from brown men’ clearly draws out the intersecting racial and gendered aspects.

The emergence of Icelandic peacekeeping should be placed in the context of the economic boom years in Iceland, which started gradually in the mid-1990s. Characterizing the boom years was a strong hegemonic discourse that emphasized Iceland’s self-evident success in global enterprises by emphasizing an unique Icelandic spirit (Loftsdóttir, 2012). This hegemonic discourse was thus strongly entangled in claims of exceptionalism both in the sense of claiming Iceland’s historical innocence as disconnected from Europe’s colonial and imperial project of the past, as well as seeing Icelanders endowed with unique characteristics. Although primarily focused on Icelandic business people, these discourses also revolved around other spheres of Icelandic society such as arts and literature and the foreign policy arena, resulting in increased activity by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in international development and peacekeeping which was also framed as a part of Iceland’s important contribution to the world. As we show here, notions of Iceland’s exceptionalism in terms of historical innocence made it easier to turn a blind eye towards the global power dynamics which peacekeeping involves. The economic boom expanded in its scope and pace in the 2000s before coming to an abrupt end in 2008 with a collapse of the Icelandic financial system.

Our analysis is primarily based on public representations of Icelandic peacekeeping, based on two types of texts: various official government reports and speeches at the Icelandic parliament, and 175 newspaper articles and opinion pieces published during the period 2001–2008. In addition to these texts, we draw upon interviews with 58 individuals engaged in international development, including 28 Icelandic peacekeepers, taken during the period 2006–2011. Our analysis follows Foucault’s (1995: 49) understanding of discourses as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’, producing a certain kind of knowledge that normalizes ideas and behaviours. The analysis is also shaped by our experiences as ‘native’ anthropologists and participants in Icelandic society as well. As researchers we see ourselves as belonging to ‘multiple, overlapping communities’ (Rosaldo, 1989: 194), feminism being one of those with which we identify.

Gender equality in Iceland is, however, not only discussed within feminist discourses, but has become to some extent part of mainstream discussions. We do not try here to disentangle the different perspectives focusing on gender equality, but rather show how focus on gender equality in relation to peacekeeping became a technical issue, focusing primarily on the number of women enrolled in peacekeeping. This focus on gender in relation to peacekeeping was divorced from any kind of acknowledgement of historically constituted power relationships based on colonialism and imperialism. In line with Foucault’s critical framework, we point out how a particular discursive space was created where the issue of gender equality was discussed and debated, while the important issue of global power dynamics was not given any discursive space and thus rendered invisible.

In the first part of the article, we explain feminist scholars’ criticism of peacekeeping and they way it drew attention to how peace has been militarized internationally. We then discuss the appearance of Icelandic peacekeeping during the economic boom era in the 2000s, and Icelandic feminist criticism of the ICRU, which ultimately led to an increased emphasis on gender and gender equality. Our discussion provides a critical look at this emphasis when it ignores other power relationships at play.

Feminist criticism of peacekeeping

Women’s bodies have been ‘terrains’ in which wars have been fought on and through (Abu-Lughod, 2002). Many feminist scholars have criticized the image of the docile native woman in need of being rescued (Abu-Lughod, 2002) which has to some extent been incorporated into mainstream feminist theories, often under the heading intersectionality, where the intersections of gender and other forms of identification are emphasized (Crenshaw, 1994). Still, many feminist scholars have continued to criticize western feminist theories for imperialistic tendencies (Christensen, 1997) as the idea of western feminists as saviours of other women is still a persistent theme in certain contexts (Mendoza, 2002: 301).

Feminists have also criticized the association of peacekeeping practices with ‘civilizing’ goals, showing continuity with past colonial projects attempting to ‘civilize’ ‘primitive people’ (Orford, 2003). Sherene Razack (2000: 133) argues that today’s peacekeeping plays an important role in what she calls the ‘transnational project’ – that is to ‘spread “modernity” through the world’ – conducted by the UN and backed up by the ‘first world’ nations ideology. The blurring of the boundaries between peacekeeping and humanitarian actions for the last two or three decades also hides the role that peacekeeping plays in international politics, through which the hegemonic position of western states is reinforced (Higate and Henry, 2009; Pugh, 2004). Within the UN and the ‘international community’s’ current policy on disputes, conflicts and ‘new wars’ (Kaldor, 1999), peacekeeping operations seem to be the much needed solution. By viewing peacekeeping as a kind of a ‘technical thing’ that can be corrected and adjusted in order to get the next mission right, important political questions regarding legitimacy, authority and the effects that peacekeeping has on those involved remains unaddressed (Whitworth, 1995: 428).

The ties between peacekeeping and humanitarianism became even stronger after the terrorist attack on the USA on 11 September 2001, with peacekeeping becoming to a large extent constructed inside discourses of (in)security and ‘war on terror’ and legitimated as an important contribution to development – as a vital part of the aid programmes – which can be seen as a reflection of the increased merging of security policies with humanitarianism (Loftsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2010). Humanitarianism has thus, to a certain extent, been ‘militarized’ (Chhachhi and Herrera, 2007: 129) while the scope of peacekeeping operations has not only increased but become more multifunctional as well (Rubinstein, 2008; Sion, 2008). The shift after the Cold War to use force beyond self-defence, in addition to operations initiated without clear UN mandates, was problematic for most of the Nordic countries (Jakobsen, 2006: 388–389), especially for Finland, Sweden and Norway, but less so for Denmark. This has been interpreted as a shift that signals a change from the ‘Nordic’ idea of peaceful resolution (Jakobsen, 2006). The Nordic countries have all joined the fight against international terrorism.

Scholars have shown that militaries are the premium site for constructing and sustaining ideas and images of certain types of masculinities (Whitworth, 2004). Although peacekeeping studies today increasingly focus on female peacekeepers (e.g. Karim and Beardsley, 2013; Pruit, 2013) it seems that ‘the greatest barrier of all’ (Rimalt, 2007: 1118) to changes is the prevailing ideology that encircles all military institutions and peacekeeping. The military culture both creates and maintains a certain ideal masculinity type (Sasson-Levy and Amram-Katz, 2007) that Karen Dunivin (1994: 543) has referred to as ‘the combat masculine-warrior’. The masculine ideology of the military culture is reproduced in peacekeeping missions thus making peacekeeping in fact ‘a new military model’ (Sion, 2008: 581). All kinds of shady activities such as racketeering, shadow economy, human trafficking and prostitution have always thrived where human misery, oppression and uneven power relations exist (Mazurana et al., 2005). But the intensity and quantity of such activities tend to be more pronounced within and around military spaces (Lipson, 2007). The overwhelming majority of peacekeepers are men and accusations against peacekeepers of physical violence, exploitation and sexual abuses (Cockburn and Hubic, 2002; Mendelson, 2005) or ‘peacekeepers’ exchange of food for sex’ (Higate, 2007: 100) are well documented (Enloe, 2000, 2007; Mendelson, 2005; Rehn and Sirleaf, 2002). The UN have been criticized for being slow to respond to allegations of violence, the buying of sexual services and other misconduct by peacekeepers and for the tendency to tone down the seriousness of the allegations (Whitworth, 2004). Johanna Valenius (2007: 517) indicates that among Finnish and Swedish peacekeepers, gender essentialism is prevailing and particular types of masculinities have to be tolerated both by men and women within the peacekeeping camp.

The UN passed resolution 1325 in October 2000 in response to the criticism of the sexual exploitation of displaced and refugee women, indicating a realization of the importance of women having greater access to governmental positions and peace negotiations (Moran, 2010). As Mary H Moran (2010: 266–267) points out, the UN resolution 1325 called for gender mainstreaming which generated various gender projects that have become included in a ‘standard package of post-conflict programming’. Many of these programmes assume that the postwar period carries the opportunity of freeing women from their ‘oppressive, patriarchal menfolk’. Similarly, Dianne Otto’s (2006) analysis of various UN documents has warned against the ‘language of protection’ revolving around gender or women, because even though not all promote negative stereotypes of women, they tend in practice to slide into victimizing women. Within such contexts, stereotypical views of women in the global South as slaves of their traditions and history are evoked, in addition to often ignoring men who have been victimized in similar way to women (Moran, 2010: 268).

Icelandic peacekeeping

Iceland has never had a military nor been directly involved in armed conflicts or military actions of any kind. In 1941, US Marines arrived in Iceland replacing the British garrison that had been established when the UK occupied Iceland in 1940. In 1949, Iceland became one of the founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and in 1951 Iceland signed a defence agreement with the US government making Keflavík airport a NATO base and an important strategic site during the Cold War. Thus the naval air station in Keflavík became Iceland’s main contribution to the Alliance. During the late 1990s the Icelandic authorities were becoming aware of the fact that the end of the Cold War had altered the country’s strategic position within NATO, as the naval base in Keflavík was no longer important from a military point of view and therefore Iceland had to contribute in a different and more substantial way to the Alliance (Baldvinsson, 2008). The result seems to have been a decision to participate in peacekeeping activities. The establishment of the ICRU coincided also with other changes in Icelandic foreign policy caused by a new line of thinking in the foreign services (Sigurðsson, 2007). In confidential interviews with us, some officials in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs linked these changes directly to the atmosphere of the economic ‘boom years’, criticizing the general emphasis then in Iceland that Icelanders were and should be significant players in a global context. One women we spoke to even referred to the extensive emphasis put on peacekeeping at that time as ‘an economic boom-years-nonsense’. ¹ Masculinity was strongly emphasized in these narratives of Icelanders’ international involvements, having intertextual relations to older colonial discourses in the early 20th century as if Icelanders were invading other countries with their superior abilities (Loftsdóttir, 2010). Despite the fact that women’s participation in the labour market in Iceland is among the highest in the OECD countries (Pétursdóttir, 2008), very few women were spokespersons for the ‘raid’ companies and even fewer were on their boards (Einarsdóttir, 2011).

Between 1994 and 2001, about 60 individuals had been deployed as peacekeepers on behalf of the Icelandic government (Baldvinsson, 2008), the majority to NATO’s peacekeeping operations in the Balkan countries. ² However, this changed when the ICRU was formally established and emphasis were placed on participation in big and prestige projects, like the NATO-led operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where special skills were requested and seemed only to be attainable from all-male professions like the fire brigade and the police. The choice of assignments situated the country within a new geopolitical context, as Icelandic nationals were now located within military spaces and directly involved in conflict situations. Following a suicide bomb attack on the ICRU unit in Kabul in 2004, a steady recession in the ICRU’s operations within military projects began and today smaller assignments in cooperation with some of the UN’s institutions such as UNIFEM and UNICEF are emphasized.

The rise of the number of people deployed by the Icelandic authorities coincided with the revitalization of the UN peacekeeping function in the 1990s; the establishment of the ICRU was often justified as being a part of Iceland’s will to contribute more to the international community and an important part of Iceland’s development assistance (Björnsdóttir, 2011; Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2005; Loftsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2008, 2010). Hence, peacekeeping was stressed as important in the fight against ‘international terrorism’ as explained by Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Halldór Ásgrímsson, in an interview in 2004 (Morgunblaðið, 2004). Official discourses produced by the ICRU, manifested mainly through governmental texts and articles in the newspaper Morgunblaðið appearing from 2001 to 2008, associate the ICRU dutifully with development and peacefulness. In most of these texts the militaristic nature of the unit’s assignments was not mentioned, while seemingly ‘softer’ notions such as aid and reconstruction that aimed to maintain peace were highlighted. The ICRU, as evident in official documentation, was cited as the contribution to the international community from a country ‘that has something to spare’ and sees it as ‘its obligation‘ to participate in restoring and keeping the world peace, as phrased in the ICRU’s 2006 Annual Report (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2007: 4). During this period news on the ICRU appearing in Morgunblaðið displayed very little critical analysis of the organization and its activities. The focus of the majority of the articles we surveyed was similar to the official material produced and published by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Thus discussions in Morgunblaðið described peacekeeping as a ‘humanitarian act’ aimed at preserving the peace and to ‘restore community mechanism’ in war-torn societies (Baldvinsson, 2008). The newspaper’s rhetoric stressed the civilian nature of the ICRU, which was referred to as ‘civilian experts’ on a ‘humanitarian mission’ working on projects such as transferring the airports in Pristina and Kabul into ‘civilian airports’ (Morgunblaðið, 2003). These projects were described as being ‘strictly civilian’ (Jóhannsdóttir, 2008) or as ‘development and reconstruction projects’ as the ICRU’s activities in Afghanistan were described in 2008 by the acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir (Morgunblaðið, 2008). The reality is that most of the ICRU’s assignments during the period from 2001 to 2009 were part of larger military projects led by military institutions like NATO and ISAF (International Security Assistance Force). Also, these projects were located within military spaces whose rules and regulations the Icelandic peacekeepers adhered to, including the wearing of military uniforms and the bearing of arms. The authorities’ rhetoric concerning the country’s development aid, the ICRU’s assignments and its existence became mixed and interwoven, using the nation’s aid and development objectives to create a legitimate space for the ICRU to exist and within which to operate. But by presenting and emphasizing the ICRU as a civilian project that was ‘a part of Iceland’s contribution to development aid’ (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2007), the ‘militaristic’ side of the Icelandic peacekeeping was obscured and critical discussions silenced by the authorities, especially by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, who tried to some extent, to ‘control’ discussions on the ICRU (Sigurðsson, 2006). By ‘handing down’ information and ‘news’ on the ICRU to the media who just published it without questioning or analysing it, the ICRU, its existence and operations, was, in fact, never properly debated in public discourses in Iceland, not during its heyday and certainly not after the economic crash in 2008, despite political changes in government (from right to left). It is tempting to argue that the ‘hegemony’ of governmental discourses is solely to blame for the sparse discussions on the ICRU’s political meaning and its portrayal in the media. The lack of discussion can, however, also be explained by general lack of interest by the Icelandic public, due to the fact that the assignments were located in faraway places making the ICRU both geopolitically and ideologically new in the Icelandic context. And this new space did connote a culture that was, and still is, relatively unknown to most Icelanders, i.e. the culture of the military that peacekeeping is inevitably a part of.

Gender and peacekeeping in Iceland

The ICRU was from the beginning an institution created by men and structured by masculine standards, and men were usually in all key positions when it came to decisions regarding its operational space. When the Ministry for Foreign Affairs first advertised for personnel to work for the ICRU, women were especially encouraged to apply (Þórarinsdóttir, 2005: 18). Of those 238 responding to the advertisement, 76 were women. But the percentage of women hired and deployed as peacekeepers during the first four years steadily decreased from 30% in 2001 to 14% in 2004. In 2007 the ICRU deployed 74 people to the field – 53 men and 21 women – which means that 72% of the total number of personnel were male while 28% were women (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2008: 18). In the ICRU’s 2007 Annual Report it was underlined that these numbers did not tell the whole story because the women tended to have longer contracts that made them stay longer in the field and thus their contribution counted more in the overall figures (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2008). The report also stated that during the latter half of 2007, the percentage of women deployed abroad increased by ‘11% to a total of 38%; and the percentage of men declined correspondingly to 62%’ (2008: 18). Even though this was surely encouraging for women who wanted to join the ICRU, there were some questions to be asked such as why women tended to have longer contracts than men. One possible explanation was that women were more likely to be employed by institutions like UNIFEM and UNICEF as development or gender advisors. Those jobs did not necessarily require direct contact with conflicts and wars but were, nevertheless, located within military spaces and carried out in close proximity to conflicts and warlike situations.

This gender bias was criticized in a public report on the ICRU’s policy on gender and equality (Þórarinsdóttir, 2005: 21) and by some Icelandic feminists, who argued that the ‘masculine’ nature of the assignments prevented women from applying for work with the ICRU. However, the well-established link between masculinities and the militarization of societies (Enloe, 2007) was not made. The matter was also debated in the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi, mostly by some female MPs (Morgunblaðið, 2005) and in articles in the media where it was pointed out that the small numbers of women employed in these units were in stark contradiction to the government’s policy on gender equality. For instance, a female MP for the Left–Green Movement asked whether this ‘gender imbalance’ could be explained by the fact that men were responsible for the ICRU’s policy-making (Morgunblaðið, 2005). Another female MP for the Social Democratic Alliance argued that the ICRU was a legitimate offspring of male-oriented ideology and its only purpose had been to provide jobs for men. The then-acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, Davíð Oddsson (Morgunblaðið, 2005), responded by pointing out that it was not in the power of Icelandic authorities to decide which assignment to choose; they were simply responding to demands. Moreover, the choice of assignments, in fact, corresponded to the usual emphasis in Icelandic foreign policy. He furthermore noted that it was due to the ‘nature’ of the assignments that the majority of the workforce of the ICRU was male. The assignments in Kosovo and later in Afghanistan required personnel from professions that have in Iceland traditionally been occupied by males, such as the police and the fire department.

The participation in NATO’s and ISAF’s Military Observation Team/Mobile Observation Team (MOT) in north and west Afghanistan is an example of the masculine nature of the assignments. The MOT team were first sent to Afghanistan in 2005 and as such they were, in a way, an analogue or perhaps precursor to the US army Human Terrain System (HTS) teams that were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 and whose main purpose was and still is to gather information on the local culture. The main goal of the MOT team was the same: to ‘check conditions in villages and the countryside and to propose proper ameliorations to the NGOs and international organizations’ (Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2005) – or in other words to gather information. After a few weeks’ training in Norway, a group of eight people, of which only one was a woman, were deployed to Afghanistan and with them they brought four specially equipped jeeps. While the team’s role was to go on fieldtrips for three to five days, driving around the countryside and camping out, the woman’s role was to be stationed at the main camp as a development advisor.

In August 2006, Valgerður Sverrisdóttir, the first female Foreign Minister, announced the government’s intention to ‘soften up’ the masculine and militaristic image of the ICRU by halting participation in the MOT teams (Morgunblaðið, 2006b). These new emphases were, according to the Minister, implemented to ‘increase women’s interest in working in peacekeeping’ because as the Minister phrased it: ‘until now women have been too few’ (Jónsson, 2006). As a token of how serious the government’s intentions were, the Minister furthermore announced that the government intended to send two health workers to Afghanistan to teach local women some basics in midwifery and healthcare. The nature of this gesture is very much in line with development policies of many western agencies and governments; that is to assume that ‘third world’ women need to be taught and saved from their own local and cultural knowledge. The media and parliamentary members of the government and the opposition expressed their contentment with the planned changes. Steingrímur J Sigfússon, an MP for the Left–Green Movement, for example said that he was ‘well-content, for once, with the Foreign Minister’s decision’ (Morgunblaðið, 2006a) which he thought to be a positive act if ‘we are to increase our participation in, for instance UNIFEM, UNICEF and WFP’ (Morgunblaðið, 2006a). Similar responses came from the other opposition parties in the Alþingi who welcomed these ‘fundamental changes’, as the MP for the Social Democratic Alliance said (Morgunblaðið, 2006a). Thus serious discussions on the ICRU’s existence and policy were never had.

The peacekeepers themselves were not allowed to comment publicly about these changes, but in conversations with one of us, some expressed doubts about the effectiveness of these changes: ‘I have doubts about what they are doing – to send some midwives and nurses down to Afghanistan, you know. It is a totally different world there, and women are not respected at all. Women from Iceland … it is not easy for them to be there, you know. And anyway they probably need a group of men to defend them, you know.’ ³ This move to increase the number of women in the ICRU in order to tone down or demasculinize the image of the institution did not change the fact that the assignments continued to be located within military spaces and carried out in close proximity to conflicts and warlike situations, although it did succeed to some extent to divert the public gaze away from the image of the ICRU as a militarized institution or, as one woman who worked in international development phrased it in an interview, ‘from boys playing with guns’. ⁴

These changes in the ICRU’s image from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ were also entwined with general changes in the foreign policy on development issues (Loftsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2008) influenced by the UN Millennium Development Goals where emphases on sustainable development and gender equality were stressed (Gísladóttir, 2008). As the former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, stated, the government of Iceland was ‘committed to being among the donors with the highest per capita contributions’ (Gísladóttir, 2008) to UN institutions such as UNIFEM and UNICEF. This was also manifested in various other measures taken by the Icelandic authorities as exemplified for instance in the establishment of the Gender Equality Studies Training Programme (GEST, n.d.) in 2009. The programme is a joint project of the University of Iceland and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and a part of ‘the government’s development cooperation efforts’ with the aim to ‘promote gender equality and women’s empowerment through education and training’ (GEST, n.d.). During the first decade of this century the Icelandic UNIFEM was significantly financially strengthened by the authorities (Ómarsdóttir, 2010) – and the contribution went from 2.8 million ISK in 2003 to 87.5 million ISK in 2008 (UNIFEM, 2008). These changes reflect the overall shifts that occurred in Icelandic foreign policy during that time and clearly show that the focus and emphasis were now on ‘women’s and girls’ condition’, indicating that these were areas where the Icelandic authorities felt they could ‘brand’ Iceland within the global geopolitical context, which was very much in coherence with the emphasis on Iceland’s participation in a global marketplace.

Iceland’s failed attempts for a seat in the UN’s Security Council for the period 2009–2010 ran parallel to these changes of emphasis in foreign policy. The campaign in 2008 placed a great emphasis on ‘gender issues and the special needs of women and children’ and women’s ‘active participation in all levels of decision making’ (Gísladóttir, 2008). The earlier masculine and ‘militaristic’ characterization embodied in the public image of Icelandic men in military outfits, driving around in big, specially equipped jeeps, gathering information from the local people, did not quite fit this image of the nation that strived to present itself as a peaceful nation without an army and one that promoted equality and women’s right in all spheres of society. However, past and present power relations were ignored in discussions of gender equality, thus giving increased validity to military projects.

Relationships of power

We have here only attempted to give a broad mapping of the discursive landscape in Iceland during the period of economic expansion, which means that further analysis of different discursive spaces is certainly important. During the time of the economic boom there was no, or at least little visible, criticism of the broader relationship of power embedded in peacekeeping and its colonialist connotations. Gender equality was pushed as an important issue for peacekeeping but simultaneously there was no critical reflection on the peacekeeping process in itself in relation to gender. This uncritical emphasis on adding women to peacekeeping forces fits well with the wider international emphasis on women as ‘naturally’ associated with peace. In their critical analysis of UNESCO’s Culture of Peace programme, Suzan Ilcan and Lynne Phillips (2006: 66) draw attention to how the programme essentializes women as natural ‘peace promoters’ and life givers by depicting them as synonymous with peace. Some feminists have similarly warned that women’s increased participation in military activities is not to be interpreted as a sign of gender equality – but rather as ‘a symptom of the militarization of society’ (D’Amico, 1998: 122). Women are made into essentially soft, peace loving givers of life which makes men automatically the opposite: the aggressive, hard and combat loving takers of life (Ilcan and Phillips, 2006). Culturally defined stereotypes are reinforced through the categorization of women and men as homogeneous groups. It is in line with views that stress the importance of women’s role and participation in overall peace processes (Cockburn and Zarkov, 2002), for example, in the UN resolution 1325 (UN, 2000), which has been prevailing in the thinking about current western development policies since the 1990s when the UN promoted its gender ‘mainstreaming’ approach aimed at empowering women, especially women in the ‘third world’ countries. In such thinking little attempt is made to deconstruct the ‘essentialist’ discourses trender women as more peaceful than men. Instead, the dominant view is that if women are allowed into traditional male spaces such as the military and peacekeeping, these spaces will automatically shift towards more feminine values and gender equality. Even though not directly stated, the emphasis on gender equality without any critical feminist stance on power relations implies that peace will be achieved and maintained if only we ‘add women’ to the mix. One could also claim that the term gender equality has ‘shrunk’ to refer only to women instead of as referring to the relationship between men and women (Lombardo et al., 2010: 108).

In addition, such an emphasis completely ignores how gender equality has been used in the post-9/11 environments to justify various militaristic interventions such as the invasion of Afghanistan (Abu-Lughod, 2002). Icelandic feminists have criticized Iceland’s execution of specific militaristic assignments while simultaneously emphasizing peacekeeping’s important role in improving the conditions of women in these countries. It is as if improvement of women’s conditions by peacekeeping forces can be separated from its militarized context.

Within international development, Mendoza (2002: 301) shows that ‘the substance of global feminist solidarity’ rests on the emphasis of first world feminists as ‘saviors of their poor Third World sisters’. In order to claim this position, first world feminists have to rely on a reifying essentialization of women while other dimensions of identity such as race and class are silenced in the process of ‘teaching’ so-called third world women to develop their capabilities in order to break out of their oppressive lives. The similarity is striking between Icelandic feminist ideas in relation to peacekeeping and Mendoza’s identification of ‘global sisterhood’ (Mendoza, 2002).

The Icelandic case reflects thus a wider tendency wherein gender is seen as some ‘technological’ problem that needs to be solved, based on the idea that women are naturally more peaceful, as well as a strand of global feminism that does not question the wider political context in which ‘assistance’ takes place. Both perspectives can fall within the exceptionalism found in the different Nordic countries, emphasizing their moral high ground in terms of equality and development, as well as dissociation with colonialism and racism. In Iceland, historically there is a strong sentiment that racism does not exist due to the absence of ‘black’ people. Iceland is positioned as a colonized but not a colonizing country (Loftsdóttir, 2012). For example, the notion of Icelandic exceptionalism appeared in Iceland’s campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council when it was stated that Iceland could better understand other formally colonized nations due to its own status as a colony, thus ignoring its own history of racism and neocolonialism. Iceland was one of the few Western European countries to support the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 by joining the ‘coalition of the willing’ (Þórhallsson, 2005: 121). And even though the support was strongly protested by many in Iceland, it was seldom extended to questioning Iceland’s engagement in peacekeeping missions, or in other types of postwar reconstruction.

As feminist scholars, we believe that we have to be critical of the global political environment in which particular actions and policies take place. It is not sufficient to be critical of gender imbalances that certainly exist, but we also have to be critical of how these particular actions resonate in historical relationships as well as in the present political context. Even though particular actions can empower individual women, we still have to be aware of how they reproduce and maintain not only specific colonial relationships but can also give legitimacy to militaristic actions that are not aimed at improving women’s position or rights.