Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Winter, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The era of liberal interventionism is over and the prevailing international discourse is once again about defending state borders and putting up walls. This broad re-assertion of sovereignty and non-intervention—often considered the normative foundation of the BRICS countries, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Bandung moment, and the “Westphalian” South—raises a series of difficult questions, not least about the management of challenges shared by all. How are we to make sense of re-organisations of intervention and non-intervention in global order? Recently the dominant way of approaching these issues has been through the lens of cosmopolitan or liberal-solidarist duties, including the Responsibility to Protect. Yet it seems doubtful that this framework is still capable of posing the right questions or generating the right sorts of answers. The recent book Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy, by former ARI Postdoctoral Fellow Patrick Quinton-Brown, offers a new approach that provincializes the conventional debate, de-naturalises what it takes as universal or given, and lays out a series of alternatives at a time when non-intervention, quite suddenly, seems everywhere in the discourse of international society.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Patrick Quinton-Brown is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Singapore Management University. Previously he was Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University where he also held a Senior College Lectureship at University College, Oxford. From January 2021 to October 2022, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute in the National University of Singapore.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.