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- Convenors:
-
Andrew Gilbert
(University of Toronto)
Susann Kassem (University of Oxford)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Andrew Gilbert
(University of Toronto)
Susann Kassem (University of Oxford)
- Discussant:
-
Sverker Finnstrom
(Uppsala University)
- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers that critically examine current approaches and chart possible future directions for an anthropology of international intervention.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists studying international intervention have reached a crossroads. Many of their methods and approaches have been adopted by non-anthropologists: political scientists, geographers and inter-disciplinary scholars do fieldwork; they are sceptical of the discursive frameworks (War on Terror) and normative theories (Liberal Peace) employed by intervention sponsors; they identify relations of hierarchy, inequality and outright domination constructed through international intervention; and they have realized the limits of analysing interventions according to the technocratic terms and success/failure concerns of their agents. At the same time, the grand ambitions of post-Cold War nation-building, international peacekeeping, emancipatory development, and universal humanitarianism have receded into reduced hopes to manage or contain conflict and suffering. In other words, global conditions have changed, yet the misery, injustice, and violence that prompt international (and anthropological) responses remain. At this historical moment, what contribution can anthropology make to the study of international intervention? And what is the responsibility of the (Western) anthropologist in intervention contexts? This panel invites papers that critically examine current approaches and chart future directions for an anthropology of international intervention. These could include: - historicizing interventions within a longer trajectory of political-economic and socio-cultural relations; - building upon the anthropology of colonialism, particularly its focus on what was innovative and produced in encounters across difference and inequality; - imagining what calls for a more "engaged anthropology" could mean in present contexts of international intervention; - recuperating anthropology's tradition of ethnographic story-telling to foreground marginalized voices and experiences and better capture the complex life-worlds of intervention.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Susann Kassem (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper situates current UN peacekeeping intervention and boundary contestations in the Lebanon-Israel-Syria tri-border region in a long-term history and imperial legacy in south Lebanon.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses major sites of contestation and local resistance to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon's (UNIFIL) "Blue Line" in southern Lebanon, the unofficial borderline separating Lebanon and Israel. The Blue Line marks the Israeli military's line of withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. Its coordinates are based on adapted versions of the 1920 French and English boundary descriptions of modern Lebanon that often were never fully enforced—until now. There are ongoing contestations about the shape of the frontier in several locations of this geopolitically sensitive border region. This paper situates current boundary contestations in a long-term analysis of the dramatic history and politics of the region. Lebanon's current social turmoil has been shaped by decades of intense political struggles. My research emphasizes the imperial legacy underlying the Lebanon-Israel-Syria tri-border region and places current contestations into a history of foreign intervention and competing projects of internal and external rule. Recent literature emphasizes terrorism and the weak Lebanese state as reasons for current border contestations between Lebanon and Israel. This paper instead aims to foreground the experiences and perspectives of local peasant communities that were and still are directly affected by the enforcing of colonial borders. Based on oral histories collected in several south Lebanese border villages, it links current contestations to previous experiences of local peasants, their self-identities, and their relationship to the land they cultivated. It interrogates the reasons why many of these communities, support Hizbullah, what numerous (largely Western) governments consider an "extremist" or "terrorist" group.
Andrea Steinke (Centre for Humanitarian Action)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper, based on ethnographic analysis of the aid sector in post-earthquake Haiti between 2011 and 2018, will take international intervention professionals at the heart of the analysis and unravel their intimate relationalities to anthropologists.
Paper long abstract:
In 2016, more than 663,000 people worked for the United Nations (UN), the International Red Cross, and major international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) on an international assignment in countries of humanitarian and development intervention. Those “mobile professionals” (Fechter/Walsh 2010) inhabiting “aidland” (Apthorpe 2011), constituting a transnational elite network of privileged work migrants, are often driven by a common set of values, a particular perspective on modernity (Stirrat 2000) and share similar backgrounds, education and trajectories (Goetze 2017).
Studies on the aid system in places like Haiti – a case in point considering the use of Haiti as a laboratory for intervention (Müller/Steinke 2018) – rarely focus on the ones steering the interventions as significant factors of analysis. Especially anthropologists often share time, space, social background and a certain historicity with them. The paper, based on ethnographic analysis of the aid sector in post-earthquake Haiti between 2011 and 2018, argues that the anthropological neglect of the role of the “personal” (Fechter 2012) in those interventions is rooted in an incomplete reflexive turn in anthropology. Little ethnographic attention is given to the interveners, in terms of a “community of practice” (Autesserre 2014) as much as on their individual characteristics (Sending 2017) and how both factors influence the “assemblages of intervention” (Doucet 2106).
Rather than solely inquiring the “otherness” of beneficiaries of intervention, anthropologists should consider including the roots of “sameness” to those “intervention professionals” into their analysis, as the discipline as a whole is intimately related to colonial, developmentalist and humanitarian encounters.