Virtual icon Dialectics of International Interventions through Scale, Space, and Time

Abstract

The roundtable explores the relevance of a dialectical approach to the study of international intervention, and its contribution to critical peace and security studies. This roundtable aims to address the problem of interventions’ persistence and multidimensionality by questioning what makes interventions still relevant, often unavoidable, and for whom. We see international interventions as long-lasting and complex agents of transformation, composed of contradicting rationales and operational modalities, frequently used with the pretence of restoring social and political order. Our objective is to critically look at coexisting intervention modalities, their implications for the people under intervention, and the different enactments, adaptations, forms of resistance, and re-engineering practices that interventions have produced.. We bring together scholars working from different disciplinary angles to discuss the co- constitutive relationship between international interventions across societies, cultures, and political systems. Our collective work (Fagioli, M. Malito, D. 2024 Dialectics of International Interventions through Scale, Space, and Time, International Studies Quarterly 68:2 https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae050), inspired by Doyle’s theory of inter- imperiality (Doyle, L. A. 2020 Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labors, and the Literary Arts of Alliance, Duke University Press) emphasizes the competing, contradictory, and frictional dynamics of current interventions. We also bring empire and imperialism back into the study of intervention to grasp their multiplicity and interconnections. We aim to push the confines of disciplinary positionality toward a more comprehensive approach that allows us to address interventions’ long-term multidimensionality, including their continual violent reconfigurations.