It could be, but the other thing that needs to be addressed is that the interactions between peacekeepers and local populations are so formal. There's very little opportunity.
It's always funny to read things that talk about these kinds of utopian visions of peacekeepers and friendships with local populations. The structures of peacekeeping missions don't even allow that to happen, because often you're not even allowed to leave the base.
Diversity is important, and it's very good, beyond just gender, but it's also important to create mechanisms by which peacekeepers can actually interact more meaningfully, and perhaps in less formalized circumstances, with local populations. That's where a lot of grassroots organizations that work in those contexts should be brought in more effectively.
One more point I'd like to make is that, in Afghanistan, one of the things we looked at was how Canadians interacted with local civil society organizations. We found that we're not actually very good at recognizing what civil society organizations look like in global contexts. When we talk about NGOs, we expect a certain type of representation, whereas in Afghanistan the organizations that made the most difference were often associated with religion, for example. There were local women's groups, which were organizing in mosques, and they don't call themselves NGOs. They're just these grassroots groups that have tremendous power in those settings. Learning to broaden our notions of what exactly civil society organizations look like on the ground and not being very tied to our secular ideas of what they look like is very important as well.