Introduction: Decentring the study of international interventions

Introduction

International interventions are an omnipresent and increasingly diverse instrument in world politics. Often highly contested with regard to their legitimacy and effectiveness, the manner and the targets of interventions vary widely and can range from interventions to overthrow or stabilize political regimes to attempts to build peace and create functioning political institutions after war. In the field of International Relations (IR), however, debates about interventions have long concentrated on cases of multilateral military engagement in situations of humanitarian crisis. The bulk of this research has framed the debate about interventions in the language of state sovereignty – that is, it sees interventions, to a greater or lesser extent, as legitimate exceptions to the norm of non-intervention, which forms the basis of the international order. The primary question in this context has been a normative one: under what conditions do states and the international community have a duty to supersede the principle of non-intervention in world politics and a responsibility to protect populations within states at risk of major human rights violations? (for overviews, see Weiss, 2016; Wheeler, 2000). After the end of the Cold War, this question became particularly pertinent in the wake of the mass atrocities witnessed in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia. Understood as ‘coercive interference in the internal affairs of a state, involving the use of force, with the purpose of addressing massive human rights violations or preventing widespread human suffering’ (Welsh, 2003: 3), humanitarian interventions became a core concern for both international policymakers and academics alike. The emergence of a consensus on the ‘responsibility to protect’ (International Development Research Centre (ICISS), 2001) was the culmination of long-standing discussions about the duty and the right to intervene in sovereign states (see Kurtz and Rotmann, 2016; Orford, 2011; Pattison, 2010). Subsequent research explains the selectiveness of decisions to intervene in humanitarian crises (Binder, 2017) and explores the negotiations on when and how states intervene for humanitarian reasons (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014).

The parallel evolution of the ‘liberal peace-building’ paradigm in the wake of the Agenda for Peace report by UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali (United Nations, 1992) substantively expanded the scope of international interventions. Current international peace-building interventions routinely go beyond humanitarian interventions’ emphasis on the protection of populations at acute risk. United Nations peace-building, for instance, includes all those activities ‘undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble the foundations of peace and provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war’ (Brahimi, 2000: 3). In line with this very broad definition, a host of activities has become part and parcel of multidimensional peace-building in the past two decades. For instance, adherents of the ‘liberal peace’ proposition advocate interventions that seek to foster and support peaceful mechanisms of conflict transformation, resilient democratic institutions, human rights, and the rule of law in post-war societies. Often aimed at the wholesale transformation of domestic political orders in line with liberal values and institutions, this normative agenda has been a core guiding principle of multilateral interventions in past decades. However, after a series of high-profile failures, both the normative base and the implementation of the liberal peace paradigm have been roundly criticized. Scholars in the field of critical peace research outline multiple issues with this agenda, such as the coercive imposition of Western models of development, the neoliberal nature of the liberal peace project, and the failure to understand or fulfil local needs (see, amongst many others, Campbell et al., 2011; Duffield, 2001; Richmond and Mac Ginty, 2015). These critiques have become so dominant, in fact, that some observers argue that the criticism of the liberal peace has become the ‘new mainstream’ (Hameiri, 2011: 205) in studies of intervention.

This special issue of Cooperation and Conflict proceeds from the observation that the current research agenda on international interventions is at something of an impasse. On the one hand, established research agendas in the field have remained relatively stagnant for the past few years. Academic and policy debates about humanitarian interventions have slowed down, in part because actual cases of humanitarian intervention have become few and far between in the current political climate. At the same time, critical peace research has, to a certain extent, become a victim of its own success: the now well-established critique of international intervention practices has in recent years lost some of its novelty and the research field is in need of new direction. On the other hand, research on humanitarian interventions has followed a relatively narrow agenda, focusing on legal debates about international law, state sovereignty, and human rights as well as on the normative debate about legitimate grounds for intervention. The research agenda is centred on the notion that the state is the most crucial actor in the Westphalian system and on the evolution of Western or Northern legal and normative frameworks in the ‘just war’ tradition. This focus has been criticized for being state centric (e.g. Lawson and Tardelli, 2013: 1042), being too narrowly centred on the European/Northern experience (e.g. Sabaratnam, 2013), and having ‘echoes of the “standard of civilisation” argument’, as Ayoob (2002: 84) puts it. In this vein, but focusing on the EU’s international relations, Onar and Nicolaïdis (2013) have called for a ‘decentred’ research agenda outside the ‘Eurocentric box’, which would allow ‘researchers to engage with the way the world is envisaged by others’ (Onar and Nicolaïdis, 2013: 285).

This special issue follows these broader calls to ‘decentre’ the study of IR, European Studies, and Security Studies (see, further, Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Bilgin, 2010; Hurrell, 2015; Nayak and Selbin, 2010) to contribute to a research agenda that goes beyond the prevailing Western-/Eurocentric focus of interventions research. The articles in this issue do that by bringing into view the strategies and perspectives of actors outside the Northern centres, and by advancing a set of methodological propositions from the fields of ethnographic and sociological research. To foster a pluralized and multi-perspectival understanding of relations in interventions, this special issue also seeks to facilitate more-structured communication and exchange between the disparate research communities working on the complex and rapidly changing phenomenon of intervention in the international system. It does so by combining approaches and methodologies from different fields of research. With contributing authors from the fields of peace and conflict studies, regional and area studies, and IR, this special issue seeks to build bridges across disciplinary boundaries by bringing together a set of experts who normally speak to separate audiences within their respective research fields.

Intervention research and the changing nature of interventions

External interventions into the domestic sphere of sovereign states are nothing new for the international system of states, as students of the history of humanitarian intervention remind us (see Barnett, 2011; Simms and Trim, 2011). Interventions are omnipresent in history, in fact, while the counter-concept of state sovereignty has never been as clear-cut as many expected (Krasner, 1999). At the same time, what we understand to constitute ‘an intervention’ has changed substantially over time. Although states have been intervening in other states for humanitarian reasons for at least two centuries (Finnemore, 2003: 3), we are primarily concerned with changes in the more recent incarnations of multilateral interventions. An exemplary case is the post-Cold War expansion of traditional UN peacekeeping towards a wider set of mandates and tasks. While peacekeeping was once limited to the interposition of impartial UN forces between formerly warring parties, large-scale UN operations have adopted increasingly broad peace-building functions since the 1990s (see Bellamy et al., 2010). In addition to the range of measures now included in those extended mandates – such as support of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR); security sector reform (SSR); and electoral processes – humanitarian and development assistance as well as longer-term governance- and institution-building tasks have also become components of many multifaceted international interventions. Critical observers describe this new set of activities as the ‘emergence of a veritable intervention complex’ that gives rise to ‘new forms of interventionary power’ (Bachmann et al., 2015: 1).

To elaborate this new ‘intervention complex’ further, we will unpack the changing nature of international interventions by highlighting three interrelated shifts in the way international interventions are conceived of and implemented in target states. First, the new set of interventions is characterized by a proliferation of involved actors and agencies, which occurs in tandem with the rise of a transformative intervention paradigm. Second, the modus operandi of interventions is often now to focus indirectly on transforming target states and societies from the inside out rather than to directly and externally coerce and control. Third, interventions are no longer exceptions to the rule of non-intervention.

First, unlike earlier humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions, current international engagement has seen a decline in the overt, coercive use of military power – even though military forces might still remain in the background. As a countervailing trend, some interventions have recently scaled up the use of force, as can be seen in the mandates of UN peacekeeping operations in Mali, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Karlsrud, 2015). But what has become evident is that military interventions have become less attractive to international actors in recent years. In the wake of the NATO-led humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011, which has been widely condemned as a failure, there have been fewer calls for multilateral military engagements. Furthermore, even though both in public debates and in the research literature, ‘intervention is … commonly assumed to be about the use of military force’ (Kaldor and Selchow, 2015: 2), we have seen a retreat from this use. International intervention practices have instead diversified, and include a proliferating number of agencies. With the focus of international engagement shifting from upholding ceasefires or peace agreements through military interposition to facilitating comprehensive peace- and state-building goals, international agendas have also become more transformative in their scope. While traditional peacekeeping interventions essentially left domestic politics untouched, more recent interventions exhibit higher levels of intrusiveness into the domestic affairs of states. With their mandates now covering, inter alia, the fundamental reform of the development of human resources in state administrations or the reform of the organizational structures of civilian police services, the new interventions have shifted from military engagements to changing the procedures and management of domestic political institutions deemed in need of reform. Nevertheless, this often less directly coercive approach does not imply that interventions have become more equitable. Given the frequently enormous power differentials in the international system, ‘drawing a line between “consent” and “coercion” is difficult’ (Williams, 2013: 1215).

The second shift relates to a change in the modus operandi of interventions, which now is to seek to govern indirectly rather than attempt to directly control territories and populations. Interventions are thus rapidly increasing attempts to strengthen and reform the justice, security and administrative sectors in target states in order to enable them to develop ‘local solutions to local problems’ (see, further, Gates, 2010; Peterson, 2010; Schroeder and Chappuis, 2015). Chandler (2015: 77) has called this delegation of responsibility the turn towards the ‘governance of effects’, in which supply-driven policymaking is superseded by an engagement with the internal capacities and capabilities of the intervention societies themselves. While this observation does not hold in all empirical fields under study, it does point to a crucial sea change in how interventions play out today: they now represent an increasingly close engagement with the core of target societies themselves, instead of superficially imposing standard liberal international values and institutions.

The third shift is that the expansive set of activities subsumed under the concept of ‘intervention’ has started to lose its temporal limitations. Whereas earlier military interventions had clearly marked beginnings and ended with military drawdowns, it has become difficult to classify current activities in these terms. Interventions are constantly perpetuated with a shifting array of renewable international mandates and projects, and have become a self-reinforcing cycle of engagement in the affairs of other states. The sociological concept of an ‘intervention society’ (Daxner et al., 2010) highlights the perpetual character of interventions, which know neither substantive bounds nor temporal limitations. In this understanding, international interventions lead to the formation of societies where interveners, the intervened-upon, and cultures are integrated for a certain period, and where the social positions and perceptions of actors are altered (Distler, 2016: 342). As a result of their omnipresent and extensive activities, interventions have become a rule in the international system of states and cannot be considered an exception anymore. Today’s interventions are no longer closely tied to infractions against the principles of sovereignty and non-interference. As Chandler (2015: 73) insightfully points out, the view of ‘intervention and sovereignty as conceptually opposite’ no longer holds in situations where the transformation of interventions has increasingly ‘severed the ties between sovereignty and intervention’.

What do these shifts in the nature of international interventions mean for the study of interventions? This special issue proceeds from the observation that contemporary research in this field remains shaped to a disproportionate degree by its foundation in more traditional concepts of intervention, on the one hand, and its focus on Northern actors, their interests, and their expectations vis-a-vis interventions, on the other.

First, current research retains too strong a focus on military force and military actors. While the military undoubtedly remains a crucial actor in studies of intervention, direct and coercive international military interventions are on the wane. The corresponding fragmentation of the mandates of comprehensive interventions into multiple activities and goals is a challenge for a research field that has become both broader and less coherent. Modern interventions include actors from fields as diverse as development policy, democracy assistance, force-to-force security assistance, and rule of law promotion – as this special issue will outline in more detail. Not all of these activities are compatible with traditional understandings of intervention, as Williams shows in the case of development interventions, which are characterized by activities that are ‘not discrete acts, but part of a substantial and ongoing relationship with developing country governments’ (Williams, 2013: 1214).

Second, interventions research still tends to highlight the exceptional nature of external engagement in the domestic affairs of other states. Because interventions have increasingly taken on the character of perennial, or at least recurring, engagements, the understanding of intervention as a process (see, e.g., Long, 2001) needs to take hold. Even a brief glance at the global spread of international development, security assistance, or democracy promotion projects points to the fact that international interventions have become the norm, not the exception, in many states around the world.

Finally, our understanding of the effects of interventions needs to move away from its current focus on the effectiveness of interventions in the eyes of international actors and on their strategies. The failure to consider equally at least the perspectives and perceptions of those who face the potentially adverse effects of interventions in their everyday lives leaves a crucial part of intervention dynamics unexplored. To reassess the changing nature and expanding roles of contemporary international interventions requires that we find a new way to bring together empirical insights and theoretical perspectives from various fields of research. In doing just that, this special issue seeks to advance both the conceptual foundations and the empirical depth of research on international interventions in IR.

Concepts of intervention

Although multiple studies have focused on different empirical and normative aspects of the humanitarian intervention puzzle, the theoretical underpinnings of this research remain underdeveloped, with little attention paid to the concept of intervention itself (Reus-Smit, 2013: 1057; see also MacMillan, 2013). Because research on interventions has largely remained confined to separate debates in different subfields of study, we have been left with a partial and disjointed understanding of a highly salient and increasingly complex phenomenon. The fragmentation of knowledge about interventions is further exacerbated by a prevalent focus of intervention research in IR on the interests and perspectives of actors in the Global North. This special issue seeks to contribute to remedying these research gaps by proposing a process-focused and decentred research agenda for the study of interventions.

In a departure from traditional, more narrow conceptualizations of international interventions as exceptional events in a world order characterized by non-intervention, this special issue understands intervention as a social process that functions as a ‘mechanism fundamental to how core strands of international order have spread around the world’ (see Lawson and Tardelli, 2013: 1234). In line with Reus-Smit’s (2013) historically contextualized discussion of the concept, interventionist practices are, moreover, decoupled from the traditional understanding that they are always linked to issues of sovereignty and territorial statehood. Rather, interventions can take place across boundaries that are, as Reus-Smit points out, not territorial but functional; they therefore need not be automatically linked to the coercive transgression of a state boundary (see Reus-Smit, 2013: 1058).

This broader conceptualization of interventions enables us to include a wider range of international ordering mechanisms and actors beyond humanitarian interventions. Our conceptualization supports a decentred agenda for the study of interventions because it is neither state-centric nor necessarily limited to Northern interventions. International democracy assistance, governance- and state-building measures, peace-building, developmental projects, and security assistance are all paradigmatic examples of this large and expanding set of international ordering mechanisms. A conceptualization of interventions as social processes, as research on development interventions shows, also departs from more conventional notions, which see interventions as ‘a discrete set of activities that takes place within a defined time–space setting involving the interaction between “intervening” parties and “target” or “recipient” groups’ (Long, 2001: 32). Intervention, instead, ‘implies the confrontation or interpenetration of different lifeworlds and socio-political experiences’ (Long, 2001: 33) and thus goes beyond the increasingly obsolete traditional intervention/non-intervention dichotomy.

Decentring the study of interventions: research agenda

While research on interventions has traditionally focused on the interests, narratives, and practices of actors in the Global North, this special issue seeks to decentre the study of interventions by taking into account alternative perspectives on the functioning and effects of such interpositions. In doing so, it engages with earlier debates on the uneven geopolitics of knowledge production (Agnew, 2007; Mignolo, 2002) in the discipline of IR as well as with the recent move towards the construction of a more ‘global’ (Acharya, 2014) and ‘worldist’ (Ling, 2013) discipline of IR (see, further, Tickner and Blaney, 2012; 2013; see Hobson, 2012 on the Eurocentric history of international theory). Within the parameters of this debate it has become commonly accepted that IR, as a body of knowledge, a discipline of study, and a field of practical political decisions and structures, remains ‘centred’ (Nayak and Selbin, 2010: 2) on world politics as understood from Northern/Western perspectives. Decentring the study of IR requires that we confront and rewrite its standard accounts. These have focused predominantly on the concerns of and relations between the great powers in world politics, and have drawn standard historical reference points of the discipline’s understanding of world politics almost exclusively from Europe’s ‘internal’ history (see Gruffyd Jones, 2006: 1–2).

This special issue advances two interrelated research strategies to decentre the study of international intervention. First, it promotes research that gives voice to the diversity of experiences and perspectives outside the Northern centre. Second, it embraces an emerging set of methodological advances that draw on sociological and ethnographic research traditions in order to advance the in-depth study of interventions.

Contributions to this special issue

With articles drawing on ethnographic, phenomenological, relational, sociological and affect-oriented approaches and methodologies, this special issue seeks to conceptually deepen and empirically broaden the research agenda for the study of international interventions. A second feature of this special issue is that each article pays close attention to the creation of in-depth and data-rich empirical narratives covering hitherto underexplored cases which fall outside the standard canon of current interventions research in IR. This line of inquiry and the participation of area studies researchers in this special issue allow us to construct a more widespread and detailed picture of intervention dynamics and effects. The articles look beyond the ‘classic’ cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the Balkans and instead provide thorough analyses of intervention practices in the Solomon Islands, Colombia, Somalia, Puntland, Côte d’Ivoire, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Given the contested nature of interventions and their consequences, this special issue does not seek to promote a consensual view on interventions research. Indeed, some articles propose similar trajectories of inquiry (e.g. the relational sociological contributions by Brigg, and by Birkholz, Scherf and Schroeder), whereas others diverge in their approaches – for instance, in their treatment of ethnographic research and ‘local’ knowledge. For instance, Millar sees ethnographic research as a tool with which to effectively communicate with policymakers to improve policy, while Moe and Mueller provide critical insights into the ways in which ‘local’ knowledge and practices are incorporated into wider Northern security agendas. Although the notion of ‘decentring’ provides a core starting point for all the articles, Keukeleire and Lecocq outline in greater detail the multifaceted nature of the concept and that it can be operationalized in different ways (as it is in this issue). Making the case for the study of EU external relations, they identify several dimensions of the decentring agenda: spatial, temporal, normative, linguistic, disciplinary, and polity relevant.

Each of the empirical articles in this special issue deals with different aspects of the decentring agenda. The contributions by Brigg, and Birkholz et al., adopt relational perspectives to explore the interconnectedness and co-constitution of relations between interveners and the intervened upon. Morgan Brigg’s article examines peace governance in the Solomon Islands from both a relational and an affective perspective in order to identify micropolitical effects of interventions that have so far remained neglected. His auto-ethnographic study of intervention in the South Pacific decentres dominant perceptions of the crucial role of the state in post-conflict governance by highlighting how affect, feeling, and emotion are more strongly attached to customary and church institutions than they are to the state or to international interveners.

Continuing with the theme of relationality, the article by Birkholz et al. reconstructs how intermediary actors in intervention societies perceive of and navigate their social relations with actors in international governance-building interventions in Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon. In contrast to studies that posit clear-cut hierarchical interactions between Northern interveners and Southern targets of interventions, the article finds power relations in interventions to be more multidimensional and to fluctuate more than expected in standard accounts.

The conventional North–South divide comes under further scrutiny in Moe and Mueller’s investigation into the rise of new forms of South–South interventions. Focusing on relations between Colombia and Somalia, their article examines the active co-production of (in)security by elites in the Global North and South. The authors highlight the crucial role South–South cooperation plays in ‘global counterinsurgency’ as well as the convergence of interests and power relations between Western and non-Western elites in interventions of this type.

Two further contributions explore empirically the ways in which international interventions are intertwined with and depend on the complex domestic political constellations in intervention societies. Benjamin Schuetze’s article investigates the fallacies of international interventions that target the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. Building on ethnographic research in the field of democracy promotion in Jordan, he demonstrates that standard accounts of such interventions provide us with an inadequate understanding of their effects. By highlighting that external interveners ignored alternative logics of power at play within Jordanian domestic politics, Schuetze is able to outline how and why continuously increasing democracy promotion portfolios have had, in the case of Jordan, the unintended and contradictory effect of strengthening authoritarianism. Similarly, Peter Albrecht’s article on security interventions in Somalia builds on comprehensive ethnographic research on the complex social and political orders in the understudied Puntland region. Further deconstructing the dominant binary understanding of external interventions and domestic politics, he engages with and criticizes the conceptualization of ‘hybridization’ as a ‘liminal occurrence’ or ‘contact point’ between pre-established domestic and external political orders that has recently gained prominence in research on peace interventions. Drawing on the empirical case of the UN’s security sector reform intervention in Puntland, Albrecht shows instead that interventions are part of ongoing processes of hybridization that have no set beginning or end. By taking into account the plurality of social and political orders in Puntland and its surroundings, he is able to reveal that the UN mission in question indeed influenced but did not crucially shape how security as a whole is organized and enforced in the region.

The final article in this collection concentrates on the ways in which ethnographic methodologies and methods can feed into research on interventions and on the policy implications of the type of sociological and ethnographic research conducted in this special issue. Gearoid Millar calls for a policy-oriented research agenda based on the view that policymakers have so far largely ignored the complexity within and the diversity between different intervention contexts. He therefore proposes to decentre the traditional focus of ‘intervention experts’ with research that provides more access and influence to the targets of international interventions themselves. The resulting findings, Millar argues, will provide us with a better and deeper understanding of local drivers and everyday experiences of peace interventions and, in turn, could help us to develop alternative, bottom-up approaches to policymaking in post-conflict states.