Review forum : Intervention before interventionism : A global genealogy. By Patrick Quinton-Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024.

• Main Authors: SHILLIAM, Robbie, BENABDALLAH, Lina, WEBER, Heloise, MURPHY, Craig N., MOYN, Samuel, WELSH, Jennifer M., Patrick QUINTON-BROWN
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: International relations; Global governance; Imperial norms; International Relations
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4119; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5378/viewcontent/iiae264_Open_Access_Intervention_before_Interventionism.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

What if core concepts in International Relations (IR) yielded multiple interpretations that were connected to various political projects, pursued with differing consequences for global governance? What would be the harm of teaching one interpretation as the only interpretation, connected to the only project, with a singular consequence? How might our analysis of the present and our expectations of the future shift if we pluralized our understandings of the political life of core concepts? Patrick Quinton-Brown's book challenges us to do so with one of the core concepts of IR: intervention.Intervention before interventionism joins recent critiques of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and humanitarianism with a postcolonial sensibility that seeks to renew normative debates arising out of the English School tradition of weighing solidarism and pluralism in international society. Using a genealogical approach, Quinton-Brown maps out multiple intersecting pathways through which government officials and diplomats from the decolonized and decolonizing worlds took issue with the asymmetries of imperial norms concerning who could intervene where, on whose behalf and for what purpose. Here, the author makes a key claim that in some of these pathways, the principle of self-determination did not stand opposed to the practice of intervention—for instance, in the case of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Quinton-Brown's book exposes our presumption that we face a binary, of heartless pluralism versus hierarchical solidarism, as the artefact of one interpretation of intervention. There were, and perhaps remain, others.