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

Abstract

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.