‘The friendly, fun-looking teddy bear in the picture below is relatively innocuous on its own; but the fact that we can pick a Peace Pal off the shelf in the Pentagon gift shop raises broader questions about how we entwine military power and peace.’
Jenny Oberholtzer, Pentagon Peace Pals
As team member Jenny Oberholzter observes in the museum entry on Pentagon Peace Pals, ‘militarism and peace are often linked in discourse… There is a recurring insistence on peace as the goal of many military endeavours, even if the preparations are for anything but peaceful. We see this in the rhetoric of oppressive governments, intent on justifying military action against their own civilians or other countries. The notion of the citizen-soldier who carries a weapon solely because they must also speaks to us in more peaceful contexts…’
Throughout our project, we have tried to resist the temptation to see peace as simply the absence of war (‘negative peace’, as defined by Johan Galtung) and to explore its many different manifestations beyond the realms of conflict. However, it is important to recognise that war and peace are often visualised in opposition to each other; and also to understand the tight connection often forged between military intervention and peacekeeping or peacebuilding. UN peacekeeping missions invariably involve armed forces (Blue Helmets); some wars are started in the name of peace; and civilian peacekeeping and peacebuilding initiatives are often visualised via military metaphors (‘wage peace’) or articulated as ‘a battle’. Peace and peacebuilding can be belligerent.
Visualising Peace student Teddy Henderson has been researching these tensions and paradoxes. In this presentation, she discusses some of the research she has been doing into the logistical, ideological and moral challenges connected to military involvement in peacebuilding. Among other topics, she reflects on the factors (such as troop diversity and levels of training) that can make military involvement go better or worse; and she considers military effectiveness in both conflict prevention and reconciliation. In this podcast, Teddy interviews two professional soldiers to hear their perspectives on how military intervention can help in different peacebuilding processes, by bringing stability and protection to a conflict-stricken area. Operational success and failures are discussed and military training and awareness in response to the changing landscape of future conflict is explored. Ethical questions about external interventions and using violence against violence in efforts to build peace are also reflected upon. In response to an increasingly critical public view of military intervention, this podcast sheds some light on what military interventions look like, and what roles they can play in wider peace operations and conflict transformation.