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.