Abstract

This dissertation examines the meaning of intervention. Prompted by the practice of humanitarian intervention, it responds to the work of realists, liberals, and legal theorists. The thesis revolves around three core questions: How do we study intervention? What is intervention? What alternatives do we have to intervention, especially in cases of humanitarian need? Chapter two addresses the first question, chapters three through five address the second question, and chapter six addresses the third question. ;The essay employs a methodology derived from linguistic philosophy and constructivist political theory. Drawing on the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Morgenthau, it develops a framework for analyzing intervention that emphasizes its linguistic construction, ethical foundations, and political consequences. Ethically, it is an attempt to achieve a set of moral goods that are defined and publicly articulated by the intervening state. Politically, it seeks to accomplish those as a state agent acting in a public realm, corresponding to the classic Greek understanding of politics--an attempt to present oneself in a public space or assert one's presence in conflict with others. ;By exploring intervention as if it is both ethical and political, and by focusing on the ways in which the practice has been justified during the twentieth century, three distinct meanings become apparent: liberal, colonial, and humanitarian. First, interventions are liberal because they attempt to reshape the political system of the target community along the lines of the intervening state's political system. Second, interventions are colonial because they reflect a belief that the target community requires a more civilized power to guide it to maturity. Third, they are humanitarian because they generally seek to provide either food aid or peacekeeping troops. ;These three meanings of intervention unfold in three historial narratives of intervention: American and British intervention in Bolshevik Russia, 1918-1930; British and French intervention in revolutionary Egypt, 1956; and American intervention in Somalia, 1992-1993. Each displays the three meanings and demonstrates how these meanings are linguistically constructed through the discourses employed in the conduct of an intervention. ;Based on these three historical chapters, the essay draws the conclusion that interventions generally fail. They fail because an intervention, even a humanitarian one, tends to emphasize nation-state construction and protection rather than individual human needs. The essay then uses the three meanings to imagine new methods of preventing the humanitarian crises that prompt intervention. It links intervention to the ways in which nation-states are constructed as acting units and uses those links to discover alternative methods of global politics