Intervention and the ordering of the modern world

Abstract

This introductory discussion establishes the notion of intervention as a ‘social practice’ and carves out the contextual and conceptual space for the special issue as a whole. The first move is to recontextualise intervention in terms of ‘modernity’ as distinct from the sovereign states system. This shift enables a better appreciation of the dynamic and evolutionary context that generates variation in the practice of intervention over time and space and which is more analytically sensitive to the economic and cultural (as well as Great Power) hierarchies that generate rationales for intervention. The second move is to reconceptualise intervention as a specific modality of coercion relatively well-suited to the regulation or mediation of conflict between territorially bounded political communities and transnational social forces. Third is to ‘historicise’ the practice of intervention through showing how it has changed in relation to a range of international orders’ that have defined the modern world and which are each characterised by a different notion of the relationship between social and territorial space. Fourth and finally is a brief consideration of the possibility of intervention’s demise as a social practice.