WORKSHOP PROCEEDING
Weiyi Zhang
On 18-19 June 2021, the Department of International Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University (XJTLU) organized an online workshop, “Re-thinking the Study of International Interventions Through Transversal Lines of Inquiry”. It was organized by Debora Malito and Monica Fagioli, funded by the Research Development Fund at XJTLU (Project ‘The perils of International Intervention’ No. 18-02-25). This two-day workshop was divided into two sessions: Panel 1 - Transformative interventions in their longue durée and Panel 2 - Interventions: spatial and scalar differentiations.
The workshop aimed to create a space for problematizing the international dimension of contemporary interventions through transversal lines of inquiry. By questioning the scales, space, and temporalities of interventions, contributors to this workshop pushed instituted disciplinary boundaries towards the study of the multiplicities, complexities, and incongruences of interventions. The contributions focused on three fundamental questions: how are interventionist projects enacted and adapted to at different scales and temporalities? How can transversal lines of inquiry expand our understanding and critiques of interventions? How have different forms of interventions (from state building to human security practices and drone warfare) been resisted, reconfigured, or instrumentalized in different contexts?
Panelists questioned also the fragmented geographies of power involved in humanitarian security practices; how different actors embrace, oppose, or instrumentalize intervention projects according to their different subjectivities, positionalities, and agendas. Participants also discussed how those under intervention have responded, re-engineered, opposed, repurposed, and adapted to interventions; and what are the material and historical conditions that have enabled specific forms of intervention to emerge.
The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars (with backgrounds in international relations, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, history, law, geography), based in China, Germany, Italy, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The presentations showed a wide range of focus on different field sites (Sahel, Middle East, the Balkans, North and Sub-Saharan Africa), objects of investigation (border management, urban reconstruction, dollar financialization, foreign military intervention, legal implications of humanitarian intervention, extractivism, etc), and conceptual concerns (sovereignty, colonialism, post-colonialism, hegemony, decolonization, practices, etc).
DISCUSSION
One of the key aspects of the workshop was the differences in methodological approaches and how they contributed to the understanding of intervention.
Intervention is instrumental to different social practices. Research papers in the first panel were more centered on the instrumentality of contemporary interventions to a series of other social/political/security practices, spanning from border management to urban reconstruction, financialization, and international law. Each paper presented a different story of intervention in a distinct meaning, context, and geographical location, but while some retained a more classical notion of intervention as an instrument of political and military coercion, other contributions have expanded the conceptualization of intervention itself. For example, border management in the Sahel region can be seen as inter-scalar intervention by various actors endowed with different levels of power and resources. Moreover, as a concept long dominated by Western elite interests, also the institutions and instruments codified by international law can become a tool for intervening in third world countries. One panelist advanced a TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) critique to international law as basically a colonial project which was designed for satisfying the interests of colonial powers.
Other contributors advanced a more innovative understanding of intervention beyond the disciplinary boundaries of security and politics, to include aspects that relate to the materiality of conflicts, such as urban post-conflict reconstruction and the financialization of the US dollar. A wide range of international actors uses urban reconstruction as a tool for intervening in post-conflict reconstruction, as evident in the case study of urban remaking in cities such as Beirut, Sarajevo, and Belgrade.
As an evolving concept in context, intervention warrants re-elaboration. The second panel provided both an analytical approach for re-thinking foreign intervention and contextualizing the specific historical conditions and contradictions that have enabled specific forms of intervention to emerge in certain contexts.
One paper introduced the necessity of re-thinking the study of contemporary interventions by discussing to what extent, and how, an interdisciplinary focus on scales, spaces, and temporalities of intervention can expand our understanding and critiques of international interventions in the present. One contributor aimed to re-evaluate the 2013's French intervention in Mali in between the rhetoric of the War on terror and French colonial interventions, highlighting how the different narratives coexist within the same intervention. Another participant engaged with the paradox of foreign intervention during the Cameroon anglophone crisis, where the intensification of capital extractivism interrelates with authoritarian geopolitics and calls for interventions are mobilized (and opposed) by a broad range of actors.
Several critical observations emerged from the collective discussion.
Transversal lines. First, many participants agree on the methodological innovation of the transversal approach proposed, but also recognize some challenges ahead. Participants raised the question of how to address the methodological challenges in practice, while at the same time differentiating this contribution from existing ones that have attempted to reform interventions per se. The discussion raised the importance of maintaining methodological, ontological, and epistemological pluralism as essential directions in unpacking how dynamics such as class, power politics, gendering, and racialization are alive in intervention beyond classical categories of thinking. Instead of forcing the displacement of certain theoretical or conceptual traditions with more 'innovative' ones, this research agenda is committed to an epistemological reconsideration of these categories as terrain of common critical inquiry.
To contribute towards a common transversal research agenda implies then a commitment to critical scholarship in unpacking the blindspots left by our disciplinary debates in what we think is the primary way of looking at the study of intervention (this critique is especially important to the discipline of international relations, which is patrolling the study of intervention).
For instance, one participant pointed out that scale is a useful analytical tool to understand the situation in the Sahel and also as an instrument to highlight the interconnection between different actors involved. More than that, the discussion of the relationship between the War on terror and the underlying continuity of French neo-colonial intervention can also be considered through scale, space, and time, as one discussant put.
Metamorphosis of Intervention. Another issue touched upon during the workshop is the dynamism and transformative capacity of intervention to become something else. Interventions are dynamic processes. Some contributors highlighted how interventions are appropriated and transformed into the new, setting of political strategy, social activism, or economic possibilities.
Critique of Intervention. Despite the commitment to analyzing intervention through various methodologies, panelists also shared a critique of the intervention complex. Participants agreed on the point that the contemporary intervention complex situates within a western dominated legal, political, and normative system, and this makes also the knowledge mobilized around intervention not neutral, but bounded to the same power configurations. Contemporary interventions do not sit outside the global system of capitalism and imperialism: they are necessarily recreating inequalities that characterize modern capitalist societies.
On the one hand, scholars are calling for decolonizing the study of intervention: some panelists pointed out the self-colonization nature of the concept of intervention, and the necessity to dismantle it. This often starts in the classroom, as the way we teach various aspects of the 'the international' (visible in the textbook used), is often a pedagogical reconfiguration of those power relationships that have made interventions appear as necessary instruments. Scholarship has to commit in the long term to challenge the coloniality of the international community. But on the other hand, we need to recognize the scalar politics surrounding interventions: the 'intervened upon' do not necessarily oppose interventions as such, as demonstrated not only by the call for intervention mobilized by Cameroonian activists but also the call for interventions issued by Libyans and Syrians in their respective countries, and conflicts. This raises wider questions about how we write or speak about that as scholars who are interested in de-colonizing the study of intervention, where to fit in the conversation as scholars, and how do we contribute?
This workshop offered a space where participants questioned assumptions in different ways, and from various disciplinary assumptions, learning from their object of study, field perspectives, and methodologies. This two-day fruitful discussion managed to put this project forward, fostering a coherent dialog on the necessity of re-thinking the study of intervention from a variety of epistemic and interdisciplinary angles.