Dialectics of International Interventions through Scale, Space, and Time

This Special Issue questions the problem of international interventions’ persistence and multidimensionality by asking what makes interventions still relevant and for whom. In this introduction, we advance a dialectical understanding of interventions to study their diverse modalities and enduring mechanisms of order-making, with specific attention to space, time, and scale. We elaborate on Laura Doyle's interimperial method to highlight interventions' relational, transformative, and durable aspects. We interpret interventions as coconstituted by diverse, overlapping, and contradictory rationales and modalities. We stress the intertwined histories and practices of interventions as integral components of colonial modernity in relation to empires, imperialism, and their contemporary rearticulations. As a method, we identify three key historical processes for a dialectical understanding of intervention: the coformation of interventions’ state-building, economic development, and cultural practices; the coproduction of institutions and infrastructural systems; and the cumulative accretion of interventions’ infrastructures and imaginaries.