War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention

This edited volume seeks to make a clear and potent intervention in debates on contemporary international politics, intervention, and war by highlighting the different dimensions of warpolice assemblages therein.The New Interventionism reflects on the way in which war and police/policing intersect in contemporary Western-led interventions in the global South. The volume combines empirically oriented work with groundbreaking theoretical insights and aims to collect, for the first time, thoughts on how war and policing converge, amalgamate, diffuse and dissolve in the context both of actual international intervention and in understandings thereof. Until now, theoretical work on international intervention has tended to focus on the discourses of international intervention, whereas the bulk of studies examining police in the international context have been empirically oriented in examining distinct practices strictly institutional in focus, or in search of a transnational ethics of police. Invoking the concept of assemblages in this volume signals an equal concern for discourses (political, legal, ethical), practices, and materialisms of the war/police intersection. We use the caption WAR:POLICE to highlight the distinctiveness of this volume in presenting a variety of approaches that share a concern for the assemblage of war-police as a whole. The volume thus serves to bring together critical perspectives on liberal interventionism where the logics of war and police/policing blur and bleed into a complex assemblage of WAR:POLICE.Contributions to this volume offer an understanding of police as a technique of ordering and collectively take issue with accounts of the character of contemporary war that argue that war is simply reduced to policing. In contrast, the contributions show how - both historically and conceptually - the two are 'always already' connected. Contributions to this volume come from a variety of disciplines including international relations, war studies, geography, anthropology, and law but share a critical/poststructuralist approach to the study of international intervention, war and policing. The contributors analyse specific assemblages through a number of concepts that are related to policing and war. These include concepts such as order(ing), notions of the enemy or"other", transformation and containment, violence and consent as well as law and legitimisation.This work will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas including international intervention, contemporary war/military studies and conflict and post-conflict reconstruction and management.