(Re-)Building the World: Local Agency and Human Security in the New Millennium

The ‘rebuilding’ of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, as Trudy Fraser in Chapter Ten explains, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of local actors. One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security. In order for the ‘building’ to be reflective of the dynamic requirements of human security, this chapter asserts that it must be responsive to the following questions: (1) who is doing the building?; (2) what is being built?; and (3) for whom is it being built? These three questions speak to separate but interrelated issues in the context of modern state-, peace- and nation-building, and highlights the ambiguity that currently exists between the initial (state-security-centric) and subsequent (human-security-centric) phases of intervention and ‘(re-)building’.

Interventions and the Limits of the Responsibility to Protect: Regional Organisations and the Global South

In Chapter Eight, Sovereignty versus Responsibility to Protect, Joseph Hongoh argues that the struggle in navigating the tension surrounding sovereignty as responsibility to protect actually obscures rather than enables productive engagements with the concept and practice of intervention. Referring to case studies from Africa, Hongoh suggests that integrating regional organizations (ROs) within the international-regional-national axes of R2P potentially restricts the broader conception of intervention. In undertaking this examination, he begins by providing an alternative reading of sovereignty as a responsibility. In this regard, he demonstrates how regional organizations in Africa have perennially engaged with the questions of sovereignty, responsibility, protection and human solidarity within the broader frames of political and economic empowerment and emancipation. In the last two sections of his chapter, Hongo shows how the broader conception of intervention has the potential effect of producing transnational sovereignty, and in ways that are not imagined within R2P. The result, he suggests, may lead to implementation of R2P within the conditions of sovereignty that are determined by ROs.

Introduction

The need to fundamentally rethink interventions is before us. Driven by a combination of pressing humanitarian need as well as conceptual and theoretical dilemmas that limit the value of analysis, it is evident we are seemingly at the crossroads. The crises in Syria and Iraq – the human rights abuses, the destruction of cities and the attenuating flows of refugees into Europe – have only been enough to garner specific military action from external powers in ways closely aligned to national interests. There is the sense that despite being decades on from the end of the Cold War and notwithstanding the varying kinds of interventions in the name of humanitarian ends that have taken place, we have come full circle. For all their challenges and faults, at the end of the twentieth century Kosovo and Timor-Leste suggested that there was enough benefit gained by interventions that they had a future in global politics. The post-9/11 military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have, however, come to dominate discourse as wars fought overwhelmingly for state security rather than humanitarian ends (even though the latter are used instrumentally as a justification at times). Moreover, as events in Syria have unfolded, it has become even harder to discern who would be assisted, and to what end, by a large-scale intervention like those that occurred across the 1990s. The widening of Syria’s civil war into a regional one, and the toll on civilians (approximately 260,000 at time of publication), reflects elements that are described in ‘new wars’ analysis, and yet are overlain with shifting forms of globalised warfare, intersections with terrorism, while reaffirming what appears to be more classical superpower rivalries (though now it is between different versions of empire and capitalism). It is such a riven mess that it is quite possible that the only ‘end game’ will come in the form of general annihilation....

The Evolution of Economic Interventions and the Violence of International Accountability over the longue durée

Chapter Three: Economic Interventions and the Violence of International Accountability, by Bronwen Everill, explores the different uses of economic interventions and their interlocking relationship with the evolution of humanitarian intervention. It specifically focuses on examples from the African continent, stretching from the eighteenth century to the present, though the cases examined will share broader themes with developments outside of the continent. Additionally, it examines state-level economic interventions—sanctions and aid in both war and peacetime—together as one form of pressure for conforming to humanitarian norms. Individual and corporate economic interventions will be considered separately, as a form of intervention inherent to global capitalism. An examination of economic interventions reveals their interconnectivity, as well as their relationship to compulsion and physical force. By giving or withholding, states are able to intervene in the politics of dependent states, while individuals are able to determine the shape of global production. By looking at the long historical record of humanitarian intervention in Africa, Everill is able to make clear connections between different forms of intervention—economic, military, capacity building, humanitarian, individual, state, and NGO.

‘Manifestly Failing’ and ‘Unwilling or Unable’ as Intervention Formulas: A Critical Assessment

Chapter Seven: Intervention and State Obfuscation, begins by arguing that the inclusion of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in the United Nations World Summit Outcome of 2005 marked a decisive shift in the evolution of interventions for humanitarian purposes. While the phrase “manifest failure” corresponds to the “unwilling or unable” standard previously used by the R2P-defining Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), author Ivi Bode admonishes that the “unable or unwilling” standard has also been used to justify military intervention in a counterterrorism context. She explores recent examples where state’s have used this standard as a legal justification for military intervention for self-defense against terrorist/non-state actors on the sovereign territory of ‘host’ states. The chapter argues that the evolving prominence and, arguably, relevance of the “unwilling or unable” standard warrants a more thorough examination of its legal foundations and policy practice. In adding to existing literature which considers either the counter-terrorism or the R2P context only, Bode’s chapter offers a critical examination of its usage across both contexts, and concludes with a summary of what these developments might indicate in terms of evolving intervention standards.

Humanitarian Intervention? Responding Ethically to Globalising Violence in the Age of Mediated Violence

In Chapter Six: Responding Ethically to Globalising Violence in the Age of Mediated Violence, Paul James argues that interventions are framed by increasingly material and ideational abstraction in such a way as to inevitably undermine humanitarian intervention efforts, however well intentioned. This does not mean intervention should not occur, but that the terms of intervention have to be fundamentally changed. The problem with this mainstream arguments on humanitarian interventions, including R2P, is that the compounding imperial restructurings, colonisations, resentments, humanitarian interventions, uneven globalising pressures, withdrawals, guided reconstructions, reinterventions, neo-traditional backlashes and interventions-from-a-distance have produced a world of such complexity that is now impossible to ‘do the right thing’. There is no adequate end plan other than withdrawal after having restored semi-chaos. In order to begin the task of establishing an alternative framework, this chapter will begin with an argument for returning to encompassing definitions based on the idea of humanity as historically constituted and made up of persons-in-relation. Second, the chapter will argue that the nature of contemporary conditions makes conventional interventions unviable. Third, the chapter will argue for a more synthetic ethics of intervention, suggesting that the different forms of ethics need to be brought into interrelation.

Peace in the Twenty-First Century: States, Capital and Institutions

Oliver Richmond asks in Chapter Two whether we can move beyond the older ideas of peace and order – and their associated rationalities and dispotifs – which simply implied that IR and politics had to occur within the confines of power, structure and nature. Can we instead develop a more maximalist normative and ethical vision for IR? Can difference, inequality and unequal power be permanently managed by the state and international institutions or will they too become victims of unequal power, as appears often to have been the case since the Second World War? These questions are asked in the context of debates on liberal-democratic peace, human rights, and cosmopolitanism that are each linked with various forms of intervention; from development to peacebuilding and humanitarianism. This ‘interventionary system/order’ model has come under pressure from a range of different fronts, and as such this chapter examines how peace and development may be rethought in a global framework if the previous version of a progressive framework (i.e. the liberal peace) is now being revised and intervention has shifted towards neo-liberal forms.

Rethinking Humanitarian-Military Interventions: Violence and Modernity in an Age of Globalisation

In Chapter One Damian Grenfell argues that interventions are bound up with exogenous assertions of power that aim to reconfigure local populations not just in terms of a ‘liberal peace’, but also the creation of a sustainable form of modern nation-state. This tends to remain the case even in a period of intensifying globalisation. The first section of the chapter develops definitions of humanitarian-military interventions since the end of the Cold War and accounts for the massive expansion of capabilities that allow for the transgression of sovereignty during conflict. These interventions – as it is argued across the second section – reflect the dominance of the West in a post-Cold War world, as the deployment of material and discursive resources in sites of conflict conform largely to the contours of a liberal ideology. Building on and extending these arguments, the third section claims that critiques of liberal peace do not venture deeply enough into understanding power relations between interveners and the intervened. Rather, ideological assumptions of what constitutes ‘peace’ are manifestations of attempts to instill a particular form of modernity within societies, one that is clearly tied to the formation and consolidation of a nation-state.

Transforming the Discourse of Civil-Military Interaction in Humanitarian Environments

In offering insight to the limits and considerations needed when undertaking an intervention, Vandra Harris in Chapter Twelve: Who is the Force Multiplier? Transient Military Insertion and Enduring NGO Engagement, explores the key non-governmental and military approaches to intervention, the interaction between the two, and how it can be reframed to improve outcomes for communities. Drawing on qualitative research with NGO and military personnel as well as an examination of civilian and military guidelines, the chapter illuminates the importance given to NGOs, though points to ways in which military goals appear to have precedence. Reflecting on the claim that NGOs are the military’s “force multipliers”—additional tools that increase the impact of the military force—the chapter argues that what is needed instead is greater clarity around humanitarian and humanitarian-like action and actors. With governments funding both defence and development—the latter increasingly under a foreign affairs banner and with an explicit “national interest” agenda—it can be understood that they view both as valuable in shaping international environments. Harris, therefore concludes that it is imperative to have a clear understanding of how these two entities relate to each other, and how that relationship can function best.

Who Rebuilds? Local Roles in Rebuilding Shattered Societies

The focus in this chapter is on local roles and local-international partnerships in recovery from disaster in shattered societies. The chapter does not discount the roles that external actors can usefully play but rather, as Susan Allen writes in Chapter Eleven, to highlight the opportunities for local actors to intervene in their own societies. In addressing this question, Allen considers the case study of rebuilding Georgian–South Ossetian relationships so as to consider who in practice rebuilds shattered societies, how this rebuilding unfolds as an ongoing process, and how the skills and abilities that come to the foreground in the aftermath of traumatic evolve. In turn, the chapter examines the various actions that are part of rebuilding and the different ways people contribute to such a process. Third, considered are the varied actors, the partnerships, and finally the roles of individuals involved in rebuilding. Finally, even while acknowledging partnerships, the chapter also considers individual agency and the ways that a recognised or emergent leader can exercise what John Paul Lederach (2005) refers to as the ‘moral imagination’.