Intervention before interventionism

What if core concepts in International Relations (IR) yielded multiple interpretations that were connected to various political projects, pursued with differing consequences for global governance? What would be the harm of teaching one interpretation as the only interpretation, connected to the only project, with a singular consequence? How might our analysis of the present and our expectations of the future shift if we pluralized our understandings of the political life of core concepts? Patrick Quinton-Brown's book challenges us to do so with one of the core concepts of IR: intervention. Intervention before interventionism joins recent critiques of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and humanitarianism with a postcolonial sensibility that seeks to renew normative debates arising out of the English School tradition of weighing solidarism and pluralism in international society. Using a genealogical approach, Quinton-Brown maps out multiple intersecting pathways through which government officials and diplomats from the decolonized and decolonizing worlds took issue with the asymmetries of imperial norms concerning who could intervene where, on whose behalf and for what purpose. Here, the author makes a key claim that in some of these pathways, the principle of self-determination did not stand opposed to the practice of intervention—for instance, in the case of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Quinton-Brown's book exposes our presumption that we face a binary, of heartless pluralism versus hierarchical solidarism, as the artefact of one interpretation of intervention. There were, and perhaps remain, others. The contributors to this forum have produced scholarship that contributes to either the recovery of alternative interpretations of global governance (arising from the global South) and/or to a critical retrospection on the global North ownership of normative concepts. Lina Benabdallah is known for situating Chinese rationales for global development in relation to the African continent instead of existing understandings that emphasize the importance of North America and Europe in Chinese thinking. Heloise Weber has famously critiqued the comparative method for measuring national development in so far as it eviscerates the relations of domination that underpin the global development project. Craig Murphy has been one of the longest-serving and most consistent voices in IR to take seriously global South actors in global governance, from the new international economic order to the United Nations Development Programme. Samuel Moyn has made crucial interventions in the intellectual history of Cold War liberalism, calling attention to tensions and paradoxes within the rights projects emanating from the global North. Last, but certainly not least, Jennifer Welsh has provided intellectual and practitioner leadership in carefully sifting through the R2P norm to identify its fundamental precepts and principles. Currently, a spine of conflict and war runs from Ukraine, through Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, into Sudan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (There are other conflicts raging too, of course). This connected bloodshed raises the normative and practical prospect of intervention after interventionism. Opinions and judgements differ across the intellectual and geopolitical landscapes: for example, the rights that some people are automatically given are not considered rights for others; meanwhile, some deaths are counted as politically meaningful and others not at all. Multiple actors across the North–South divide are complicit in these conflicts and wars, albeit with different imperial ambitions (aspirational, emergent or established) and with different capabilities (military, economic and others). Rather than generating a cacophony of claims or claiming the end of any general sense of global justice, this forum compels us to pick up and re-weave the threads of self-determination—not simply to pass judgement on the present, but to anticipate the future. Robbie Shilliam, Johns Hopkins University, US From the events leading up to Russia's war on Ukraine, and discussions of a possible NATO intervention, to the ongoing humanitarian disaster visited upon civilians in Gaza by the artillery of the Israel Defense Forces, talk about intervention is abundant in 2024. Yet, despite being able to point to some events and describing them as illustrations of intervention, the concept itself remains highly elusive. Indeed, it is difficult to define intervention, given that it can mean anything from direct encroachment into the sovereign affairs of a state to activities and policies that allow outside players to exercise economic or cultural influence. Hence, Patrick Quinton-Brown rightly argues that intervention is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the field of International Relations (IR) (pp. 2–3). Intervention before interventionism offers a multidimensional and thought-provoking study of the concept that aims at rectifying existing misconceptions. I contend that the book makes three important contributions to IR. First, it recovers the complex genealogical evolution of the concept of intervention. Beginning in 1945, the book traces the genealogy of the intervention–sovereignty debate across time and space. During the debates leading to the establishment of the United Nations, western states sought to interpret intervention along the lines of sovereignty. As the book shows, evoking sovereignty and domestic jurisdiction as a logic for non-intervention actually functioned as an apology for colonialism. Western powers used this ‘colonial-power trope’ to reject calls from global South states to prioritize and universalize the right to freedom from colonial violence (p. 96). Faced with the deliberate use of international law discourse to narrow the scope of intervention, by relegating human rights to the realm of sovereign domestic politics the global South sought to pivot the debate away from sovereignty and into human rights arguments. The ensuing decolonial orientation of intervention therefore moved to bring human rights out of the realm of the domestic, and into the international, and then tied it to self-determination. As Quinton-Brown puts it, the right of self-determination was a move used to ‘legitimate a human rights-based programme of public discussion’ (p. 98). In this way, the reordering of intervention itself was a norm-setting moment, championed by global South states that navigated an international order made to be exclusive by design. Second and relatedly, the book exemplifies what a decolonial approach to intervention looks like. Quinton-Brown examines a wealth of documentation from summits' minutes, speeches at various international meetings, communications to and from leaders and international organizations, as well as other archives. As a result, the author skilfully ensures that voices from the global South are heard. The book delves into the details of the discussions on intervention during the 1955 Bandung Conference between African and Asian states and the Non-Aligned Movement's 1961 meeting in Belgrade. As a result, readers learn a lot about the normative power and agency that global South and Afro-Asian leaders wielded through their exchanges on the state of colonial and imperial subjugations. With a nod to Robbie Shilliam's Decolonizing politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021; reviewed in International Affairs 98: 4, July 2022), Quinton-Brown contends that the ‘imperative is to travel outside the intellectual terrain of the West precisely for the purposes of engaging and contesting our shared modern condition’ (p. 5). In the book, the leaders of the global South that we encounter are engaged in norm-setting and (re)ordering; in contrast, other, Eurocentric, perspectives tend to represent them as passive actors. Third, the book makes a pedagogical and methodological contribution. As Quinton-Brown explores the varied conceptions of intervention that emerged from different international conferences, he also sheds light on the wide range of approaches, interests, tactical calculations and strategic manoeuvres that the various players adopted. The book's multidimensional approach to intervention and its contested meanings is instructive in the way that it analyses divergent ways of looking at intervention. In the United Kingdom and the United States, non-intervention was acceptable as long as it meant that states would refuse to delegate their sovereignty to the UN. For Afro-Asian and non-aligned movements, however, it was imperative to distinguish between interventionism and internationalism. For these movements, condemning the end of apartheid in South Africa was not considered intervention—rather, it was seen as a fight against intervention. The Tricontinental Conference of 1966, for instance, declared its support for the national liberation movement in South Africa (during the apartheid era) by ‘all means necessary’ (p. 18). Effectively, assisting national liberation movements in getting rid of foreign intervention was thus not construed as intervention. Instead, it was deemed a solidarist internationalist act of fighting and resisting intervention. Together, these three contributions give the book an edge and make it an essential read for IR students and scholars. Quinton-Brown not only uncovers the history and development of the concept of intervention, but he also bring to the forefront the issues that global South state leaders were negotiating; what visions for global ordering they had; and how they saw their role in the global system, advocating for interdependence between freedom and peace. Lina Benabdallah, Wake Forest University, US Intervention before interventionism is an ambitious book that seeks to develop a (global) genealogy of the concept of intervention in the post-1945 world. The book is substantiated with rich research, including close readings of United Nations resolutions and conventions. Indeed, the broad spectrum of international political contexts covered enriches the debates about intervention. 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