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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:
-
Darryl Li
(University of Chicago)
- 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, -Paper short abstract:
This paper conceptualizes an anthropology of international intervention that avoids the limits, blind spots, and intellectual exhaustion of current approaches. It re-imagines the role of the anthropologist and critique by harnessing anthropology’s capacity to surprise and unsettle.
Paper long abstract:
Scholarship on international intervention under its many signs—development, peacekeeping, humanitarianism, democratization, state-building—has been caught at the intersection of broad trends in the social sciences. On the one hand, we find accounts framed around questions of success and failure, and in the terms and concerns of intervention agents. On the other, we find critical accounts dominated by a hermeneutics of suspicion, seeing scholarship as a practice of demystification, denunciation, and unmasking power. Both approaches are limited in that they both miss whole social and political dimensions of intervention projects, and thus also their significance for those involved. These approaches cannot anticipate the complexity or imagine the generative, improvisational, or inventive aspects of the intervention encounter. Anthropology is not immune to these trends, or their limits. In her review of transnational humanitarianism, Ticktin has noted how a “moral imperative to intervene” came to be shared between some humanitarian actors and medical anthropologists, who dispensed with any critical distance in favor of the immediacy of meeting human needs. And the concern with power, domination, and inequality that constitutes what Ortner has termed “dark anthropology” underwrites much of the anthropology of international intervention, which at worst becomes an exercise in “discovering” what we already know. Drawing upon two decades of research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this paper conceptualizes an anthropology of international intervention that avoids the limits, blind spots, and intellectual exhaustion of current approaches. It re-imagines the role of the anthropologist and critique by harnessing anthropology’s capacity to surprise and unsettle.
Paper short abstract:
This ethnographic study of the recent history of implementation of Public Finance Management Reform in Somaliland shows the specific contribution anthropology can offer to understand the complex effects of traveling models of intervention in specific contexts.
Paper long abstract:
Approaching state-building in Somaliland as an ethnographic object, this paper looks at conflicting views, coexisting models, competing approaches, and translation processes of the Public Finance Management (PFM) reform implemented in Somaliland by UNDP and the World Bank in the last two decades. This paper dwells on deep descriptions of negotiations, adaptation, re-appropriations, and conflicting moments to unpack the complex relationship between prescriptive ideas informing programs of PFM and their enactments in the field. In describing the processes of translation of the PFM reform, it pays particular attention to the aspirations and political ideas of an emerging class of young Somali civil servants, who take ownership of the PFM reform while remaining critical of international intervention in their country.
Drawing on science and technology studies, this ethnography of tecno-political interventions in Somaliland focuses on the specificities of a “traveling model” of international governance – the PFM reform – and observes two kinds of effects: the erasure of political claims and conflict in stabilizing this model of governance, and the emergence of new political ownership while strengthening ideas of national identity. Going beyond prescriptive analyses of much international relation and development studies, this anthropological study of intervention escapes binary alternatives of (un-)effective and (in-)efficient programs and contributes to a more complex understanding of the actual effects of intervention by highlighting its contradictions and repurposing alternatives by Somali civil servants.