Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Introduction
- PART I The Evolution of Humanitarian Interventions in a Global Era
- 1 Rethinking Humanitarian-Military Interventions: Violence and Modernity in an Age of Globalisation
- 2 Peace in the Twenty-First Century: States, Capital and Institutions
- 3 The Evolution of Economic Interventions and the Violence of International Accountability over the longue durée
- 4 Changing Patterns of Social Connection across Interventions: Unravelling Aberrant Globalisation
- PART II The Limits of Sovereignty and the Ethics of Interventions
- PART III The Politics of Post-intervention (Re-)Building and Humanitarian Engagement
- Index
2 - Peace in the Twenty-First Century: States, Capital and Institutions
from PART I - The Evolution of Humanitarian Interventions in a Global Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Introduction
- PART I The Evolution of Humanitarian Interventions in a Global Era
- 1 Rethinking Humanitarian-Military Interventions: Violence and Modernity in an Age of Globalisation
- 2 Peace in the Twenty-First Century: States, Capital and Institutions
- 3 The Evolution of Economic Interventions and the Violence of International Accountability over the longue durée
- 4 Changing Patterns of Social Connection across Interventions: Unravelling Aberrant Globalisation
- PART II The Limits of Sovereignty and the Ethics of Interventions
- PART III The Politics of Post-intervention (Re-)Building and Humanitarian Engagement
- Index
Summary
History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
(attributed to Mark Twain)The political forms that we once knew – the nation-state, sovereignty, democratic participation, political parties, international law – have come to the end of their history. They remain part of our lives as empty forms, but contemporary politics assumes the form of an ‘economy’, that is, a government of things and of men.
(Savà 2014)The Cynic is a functionary of humanity in general: he is a functionary of ethical universality.
(Foucault 2011: p. 301)Introduction
The last century has seen the creation of a fairer, more stable and prosperous state and international environment than so far ever seen in history, even when seen from the perspective of the citizen. Much of this has been based upon the growing mobility of people, ideas, capital, resources and technology. There has been a transformation since the nineteenth century, based upon a ‘complex configuration of industrialisation, rational state-building, and ideologies of progress …’ which led to a core–periphery system, and more recently to a more decentralised and polycentric world (Buzan and Lawson 2015: 1). That the subaltern positionality is essential in order to understand the conditions for emancipation, strongly supported by certain and probably powerful or influential elites, is widely assumed in critical, liberal and other reformist debates. For many, however, a legitimate reading of the progress seen over this period represents a Rostowian shift from tradition to modernity, spanning thinking associated with Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Rousseau, and on towards modern liberal democracy and global capital (Rostow 1960). It is seen by many thinkers, especially those sympathetic to political, normative, legal and economic strands of liberalism, as a form of meliorism: that the adoption and dissemination of positive peace requires social, state and international reform, as well as the development of the human condition (Malloy 2013: 467). Indeed, fifty years ago, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, now rarely mentioned, placed many of these problems at the forefront of liberal international and state policy (GA 1966).
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- Information
- Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention in the 21st Century , pp. 43 - 73Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017