Beyond the securitisation of development: The limits of intervention, developmentisation of security and repositioning of purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s policy agenda

Abstract

Through reviewing the UK Coalition Government’s reconfiguration of the security–development nexus, this paper tracks a move away from the ‘securitisation of development’, toward the ‘developmentisation of security’. It demonstrates how discourses of capacity building from the bottom-up have replaced the assertions of global cosmopolitanism of the Blair years. We argue that the Coalition is attempting to portray this as a ‘post-interventionist’ approach, in an attempt to resolve the crisis of faith in legal accountability, moral responsibility and political responsibility inherited from the previous administration, and respond to their legacy of international interventions. Rather than emphasise the agency of liberators, the UK Coalition therefore now cultivates the image of a chaotic world, populated by vulnerable subjects in need of empowerment, where instrumental interventions are less certain. Thus, reconfiguring the intervention/non-intervention binary, more recent engagements in Libya, Afghanistan and the Arab Spring have been framed by and retreated into facilitating the resilience of non-Western subjects.