Intervention Before Interventionism

The era of liberal interventionism is over, and the prevailing international discourse is once again about defending state borders and putting up walls. This broad re-assertion of sovereignty and non-intervention—-often considered the normative foundation of the BRICS countries, of the Non-Aligned Movement, of Bandung, of the “Westphalian” South—-raises a series of difficult questions, not least about the management of challenges shared by all. How are we to make sense of re-organisations of intervention and non-intervention in global order? Recently the dominant way of approaching these issues has been through the lens of cosmopolitan or liberal-solidarist duties, including the Responsibility to Protect. Yet it seems doubtful that this framework is still capable of posing the right questions or generating the right sorts of answers. This volume offers a new approach that provincializes the conventional debate, de-naturalises what it takes as universal or given, and lays out a series of alternatives at a time when non-intervention, quite suddenly, seems everywhere in the discourse of international society. It does so through a genealogy of the intervention concept since 1945. Intervention before Interventionism is about the ways in which statespeople have re-ordered intervention and non-intervention since the middle of the twentieth century; it is concerned primarily with non-Western contestations of Western-dominated order; it illustrates institutional change in and through decolonization; and it provides a conceptual roadmap for understanding dilemmas of intervention and non-intervention today, particularly in relation to contestation as it has re-emerged in the twenty-first century. While building upon and conversing with existing literature, the book stands out from previous approaches insofar as it is a mapping of international struggles for the re-constitution of intervention in the globalization of the society of states.