Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq

"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