Synopses & Reviews
This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of an epochal shift in global order the fact that global-south countries have taken up leadership roles in peacekeeping missions, humanitarian interventions, and transnational military industries: Brazil has taken charge of the UN military mission in Haiti; Nigeria has deployed peacekeeping troops throughout West Africa; Indonesians have assumed crucial roles in UN Afghanistan operations; Fijians, South Africans, and Chileans have became essential actors in global mercenary firms; Venezuela and its Bolivarian allies have established a framework for revolutionary humanitarian interventions; and Turkey, India, Kenya, and Egypt are asserting themselves in bold new ways on the global stage.
In this context, this collection sheds critical light on intersections between imperialism and humanitarianism, between neoliberal globalization and rescue industry transnationalism, and between patterns of geopolitical hegemony and trajectories of peacekeeping internationalism. These case studies are grouped into three clusters (I) Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities, (II) Assertive Regional Internationalisms, and (III) Emergent Alternative Paradigms. Together, these articulate a new research agenda and offer significant contributions to fields of global studies, transnational gender and race studies, critical security studies and peace studies, comparative politics, police and military sociology, Third World diplomatic history, and international relations.
This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.
Synopsis
In the 21st century, globalizing development agendas have often become inseparable from militarized or securitized interventions: aid missions embed themselves in walled police compounds, international organizations focus on quelling insurgencies, private investments flood the protection sector, and trade agreements are built on or broken by questions of national security, food security, oil security, etc. Recent studies have argued that this merging of developmentalism and securitization has been legitimized and enacted by discourses of humanitarianism and human security, and by the neo-colonial politics of tutelage and protection.
The scholarship on this development/security nexus has focused its critique on European or North American interventions, particularly in states occupied in times of war, or in so-called failed states where national sovereignty is weak and imperial legacies are strong. But these studies have left unexamined the role of states and transnational formations in the global south as agents except when seen as receivers or victims of Eurocentric agendas. This collection addresses these gaps in the literature by focusing, instead, on emergent powers in the global south that are transforming and deploying distinct internationalist security and development models.
This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.