CfP: “Beyond Success and Failure, the War on Terror, and Liberal Peace:
Charting New Directions for an Anthropology of International Intervention.”
Association of Social Anthropologists annual meeting. August 24-27, 2020.
University of St. Andrews.
Panel Abstract: Anthropologists studying international intervention have
reached a crossroads. Many of our 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 inventive 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 storytelling to
foreground marginalized voices and experiences and better capture the
complex life-worlds of intervention.
For more information about the conference and how to submit a paper, visit
https://www.theasa.org/confere
is *March 15*. If you have any questions, email the conveners: Susann
Kassem (susann.kassem@area.ox.ac.uk) or Andrew Gilbert (
andrew.gilbert@utoronto.ca)