Chasing Giants: Simulation and the United Nations’ Trompe l’oeil Games

This essay examines how François Debrix’s Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology “revisions global politics” and complicates scholarship in international relations and human geography by situating his analysis at the level of simulation, conceptualizing United Nations peacekeeping efforts as trompe l’oeil games that “fool the eye.” Specifically, it analyzes how Debrix’s analysis pushes the borderlines of scholarship in human geography by going beyond the critique of Cartesian perspectivalism with its attendant masculine mind/body dualism that is often levied at mainstream geographical discourses by critical and feminist geographers. After doing this, this essay outlines how Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping casts a critical light on the foreign policy analyses disseminated by scholars such as Samantha Power and Thomas Weiss, who ascribe specific “moralizing intentions” to international institutions like the UN. This essay ultimately argues that Debrix’s analysis of the “New Word Order” and disciplinary neoliberalism is increasingly relevant in the contemporary setting, where YouTube and TikTok videos and images contribute to the proliferation of individualizing empty frames.