Digital peacekeeping, cyborg soldiers and militarised masculinities: a posthuman critique

Abstract

This article contends that digital technologies are profoundly altering peacekeeping practices as well as peacekeeper consciousness and modes of being. It is proposed that combining postcolonial humanist and posthumanist ontological perspectives when undertaking ethnographic research enrichens investigations into global race and gender power relations in peacekeeping. Drawing on posthumanism and Bourdieusian practice theory, the article examines how 16 British infantry soldiers articulate reconnaissance and civilian protection experiences and construct their militarised masculinities prior to and after deployment to United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in 2020–2021. Findings show that deployment to a high-risk, stressful mission and functioning as ‘information processing devices’ in an increasingly centralised UN peacekeeping system disempowers and emasculates the men. The peacekeepers respond by engendering and racialising the British Army’s ‘gender-neutral’ cyborg soldier figuration and draw on virtual gaming syntax and framings to create relational distance between themselves, female colleagues and local populations.