Publication Type
Book Review
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2024
Abstract
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.
Keywords
International relations, Global governance, Imperial norms
Discipline
International Relations
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
International Affairs
Volume
100
Issue
6
First Page
2649
Last Page
2661
ISSN
0020-5850
ISBN
978 0 19888 645 7
Identifier
10.1093/ia/iiae264
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
SHILLIAM, Robbie, BENABDALLAH, Lina, WEBER, Heloise, MURPHY, Craig N., MOYN, Samuel, WELSH, Jennifer M., & Patrick QUINTON-BROWN, .(2024). Review forum : Intervention before interventionism : A global genealogy. By Patrick Quinton-Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024.. International Affairs, 100(6), 2649-2661.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4119
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae264
Comments
Pdf provided by faculty.