International Intervention and Local Politics


Book Description

This book advances an innovative approach to explain international interventions' uneven outcomes in given contexts, and harnesses this approach to examine three prominent case studies: Aceh, Cambodia and Solomon Islands. It is the first book comprehensively to discuss the rapidly growing literature on how interventions interface with target states and societies.




Peaceland


Book Description

This book suggests a new explanation for why international peace interventions often fail to reach their full potential. Based on several years of ethnographic research in conflict zones around the world, it demonstrates that everyday elements - such as the expatriates' social habits and usual approaches to understanding their areas of operation - strongly influence peacebuilding effectiveness. Individuals from all over the world and all walks of life share numerous practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These common attitudes and actions enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they also result in unintended consequences that thwart international efforts. Certain expatriates follow alternative modes of thinking and acting, often with notable results, but they remain in the minority. Through an in-depth analysis of the interveners' everyday life and work, this book proposes innovative ways to better help host populations build a sustainable peace.




The Politics of International Intervention


Book Description

This book critically explores the practices of peacebuilding, and the politics of the communities experiencing intervention. The contributions to this volume have a dual focus. First, they analyse the practices of western intervention and peacebuilding, and the prejudices and politics that drive them. Second, they explore how communities experience and deal with this intervention, as well as an understanding of how their political and economic priorities can often diverge markedly from those of the intervener. This is achieved through theoretical and thematic chapters, and an extensive number of in-depth empirical case studies. Utilising a variety of conceptual frameworks and disciplines, the book seeks to understand why something so normatively desirable – the pursuit of, and building of, peace – has turned out so badly. From Cambodia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Mali, interventions in the pursuit of peace have not achieved the results desired by the interveners. But, rather, they have created further instability and violence. The contributors to this book explore why. This book will be of much interest to students, academics and practitioners of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international intervention, statebuilding, security studies and IR in general.




International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy


Book Description

In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy Andrew C. Gilbert argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert's probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition. Above all, International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.




International Intervention


Book Description

National sovereignty, defined as a nation's right to exercise its own law and practise over its territory, is a cherished norm in the modern era, and yet it raises great legal, political and ethical dilemmas. This study looks at the problems created by international intervention.




Is Local Beautiful?


Book Description

Based on the swisspeace annual conference 2012, the publication examines the delicate balance between external interventions and locally-led initiatives. It addresses the question of what “local” means in the peacebuilding and development context; which actors on the ground actually represent the local level and how external actors choose their partners from amongst them. Moreover, it examines how local ownership - emerging as key criteria for any external intervention - is constituted: does this concept only imply local participation or is local control from the outset a must? Finally, it assesses the potential of locally-led initiatives and local conflict resolution mechanisms and their interaction with external interventions. Several authors provide insights on these questions and nuance our thinking about both local ownership and external interventions. As such, the publication aims to encourage critical reflections on this topical debate in peacebuilding and development.




Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa


Book Description

A contributory volume considering how global forces establish networks of power across Africa, first published in 2001.




Knowledge and Expertise in International Interventions


Book Description

Knowledge about violent conflict and international intervention is political. It involves power struggles over the objects of knowing (problematization/silencing), how they are known (epistemic practices), and what interpretations are taken into account in policymaking and implementation. This book unearths the politics, power and performances involved in the social construction of seemingly neutral concepts such as facts, truth and authenticity in knowing about violent conflict and international intervention. Contributors foreground problems of physical and social access to information, explore practices generating knowledge actors’ authority and legitimacy, and analyse struggles over competing policy narratives. A first set of chapters focuses on the social construction of facts, truth and authenticity through studies of militia research in the DR Congo, politicians’ on-site visits in intervention theatres in the Balkans and Afghanistan, and the epistemic practices of Human Rights Watch and comics journalism. A second set of contributions analyses the strategic side of knowledge through case studies of diplomatic counterinsurgency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, African governments’ active role in the ‘bunkerization’ of international aid workers, and authoritarian peacebuilding as a challenge to the liberal power/knowledge regime in world politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.




Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding


Book Description

The book provides critical perspectives that reach beyond the technical approaches of international financial institutions and proponents of the liberal peace formula. It investigates political economies characterized by the legacies of disruption to production and exchange, by population displacement, poverty, and by 'criminality'.




Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Intervention


Book Description

Using insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict across the world, this book provides essential practical guidance, discussion of mistakes, key reflections and raises important questions for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent and closed contexts.