Reconfiguring Intervention

This edited volume critically assesses emerging trends in contemporary warfare and international interventionism as exemplified by the ‘local turn’ in counterinsurgent warfare. It asks how contemporary counterinsurgency approaches work and are legitimized; what concrete effects they have within local settings, and what the implications are for how we can understand the means and ends of war and peace in our post 9/11 world. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding recent changes in global liberal governance as well as the growing convergence of military and seemingly non-military domains, discourses and practices in the contemporary making of global political order.

• counterinsurgency
• interventions
• complexity
• resilience
• local turn
• warfare
• liberalism
• global governance

“This book brings fresh theoretical and empirical insights to contemporary counterinsurgency and its relationship to liberal peace-building, humanitarianism and population-centric warfare. It offers a provocative analysis of the ways in which counterinsurgency is moving beyond the parameters of state- and nation-building  outlined in FM 3-24 to a qualitatively new development in which the main objective of intervention is managing life at the local level.” (Alice Hills, Durham University)

“As Western powers are reflecting on the not-so-successful counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan, this volume looks into the more recent transformations in counterinsurgency practices elsewhere, in international as well as national operations. By scrutinizing the forms and implications of the current ‘turn to the local’ in counterinsurgency practice and doctrine, Moe, Müller and the contributors give us a very timely, necessary and concise update to the analysis of changes and (not least) continuities in the relation between liberalism and the use of force in the current world.” (Finn Stepputat, Danish Institute for International Studies)>

• Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark

  Louise Wiuff Moe

• Freie Universitaet (FU) Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  Markus-Michael Müller

Louise Wiuff Moe is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, global security governance and peacebuilding, with a regional focus on East Africa.

Markus-Michael Müller is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the ZI Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on transnational security governance, knowledge production, and violence. He is author of Public Security in the Negotiated State. Policing in Latin America and Beyond (2012) and The Punitive City: Privatised Policing and Protection in Neoliberal Mexico (2016).

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