Lesley J. Pruitt’s The Women in Blue Helmets: Gender, Polic-
ing, and the UN’s First All-Female Peacekeeping Unit seminal
book is worth reading. It is the story of the female Indian Police
Battalion that arrived in Liberia in January 2007. These 105
women peacekeepers and their handful of male support staff,
were from India’s Central Reserve Police, a paramilitary police
organization. 1
The author collected supporting data from UN documents,
public discourse, global media outlet, a series of semi-structured
interviews with current and former officials that were involved
in implementing the Female Formed Police Unit (FFPU) and
interviews of Liberians by her research assistant in Monrovia.
If you are looking for performance measurements and best
practices for Formed Police Units, you will be disappointed.
The author is clear that she did not attempt to measure the
FFPU’s performance against their male colleagues. 2 Rather,
she was more interested in how FFPUs and “similar practices
further gender equality, peace, and security and what difficulties
they raise in society and for the direct participants.” 3 And she
did that. Nonetheless, as the security community is interested
in operational effectiveness, there is an opportunity for future
researchers to more deeply explore what effectiveness means and
to develop assessment tools that go beyond measuring simple
outputs.
In Chapter 1, the author provides the global context for the
development of the FFPU. The Formed Police Unit (FPU) is a
paramilitary police force that has some military capabilities. As
such, they are recruited and deployed as units from a member
state – similarly to military units. They were first used in the
Balkans and East Timor in the late 1990s and as they are “quick-
er to deploy, are better armed, and can operate independently,
they are used for managing public order, protecting UN person-
nel, and assisting UN Police (UNPOL) and local police units in
high risk situations.” 4 The author identifies the tension between
women’s rights advocates (include women in security because it
is their right to be there) and operational effectiveness (women
should be there because they make us more effective).
Chapter 2 does a superb job of describing the genesis of the
FFPU concept. Police Advisor Mark Kroeker, from the United
States, floated the idea with Kiran Bedi. As India’s first officer
in India’s Police Service (IPS) and a former UN police advisor,
she called India’s home minister to encourage support. 5 As
others in the UN were trying to find ways to increase women’s
participation in peacekeeping, Kroeker and Bedi’s awareness of
All-Women Police Stations (AWPS) in India 6 made an FFPU
worth exploring.
Chapter 3 provides an overview of how the FFPU provided
security. As noted by the author and other works, security is
often “understood and enacted in a militarized and masculinist
way” that generally focuses on crime control and apparent vio-
lence. 7 But, this view fails to account for a feminist approach,
best summed up by Tickner, in which she defined security as
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