Introduction to the Handbook on Intervention and Statebuilding: moving beyond the current orthodoxy

There is a wide consensus among researchers and practitioners on the importance of state weakness or state collapse in contemporary world politics. After all, a number of issues are subsumed under the wide rubric of state collapse, including ethnic conflicts, refugee flows, governance issues or threats to human security. For the authors of the 2018 SIPRI Yearbook, one of the important issues was how criminal violence thrives in areas of a country in which central state control is absent, limited or corrupted (Smith 2018, p. 19; see also Chapter 27 by Lorraine Elliott in this volume for a focus on transnational crimes and statebuilding). The everyday challenges for citizens living in Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan are hard to ignore. In the face of these challenges, only a marginal cluster of authors argue for hardline non-interventionary policies (for an overview of this discussion subsumed under the ‘fresh start’ approach, see Lemay-Hébert 2019). However, if there is a consensus on the importance of external assistance for states undergoing major crises, the exact nature of this external assistance – and the usefulness of specific types of interventions – is still widely debated. The failure of past interventions – the 2003 Iraqi military intervention and consequent occupation being on everyone’s mind – but also the lack of progress in Afghanistan since 1999, in Haiti since 2004, or in many African countries with a peacekeeping presence, has led to a new era of doubt in policy circles regarding the usefulness of interventions. After the certainties of the 1990s and early 2000s, marked by a modernistic logic of listing failed states, which legitimized subsequent top-down interventions following simple causation logics (‘intervention A’ responding to ‘problem B’ and leading to intended ‘outcome C’), interveners are now familiar with complexity theories and (sometimes instinctively) understand the full reach of possible unintended outcomes for each intervention (‘intervention A’ is meant to respond to ‘problem B’ but can lead to a multiple set of outcomes – from C to Z – as well as potentially creating new problems; see also Chapter 2 by David Chandler in this volume). The experience of Iraq – where the military intervention led to years of chaos, insecurity, and the concomitant rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (see Chapter 31 by Yasmin Chilmeran and Jacqui True in this volume for a discussion of peacebuilding in Iraq); the peacekeepers’ introduction of cholera in Haiti – an illness which killed more than 10,000 people and infected 10 per cent of the population; and the multiple sexual scandals involving peacekeepers helped drive the point home that interventions are more likely to produce non-linear outcomes. Adaptability becomes the new motto for interveners, and small, targeted interventions have tended to replace the modern top-down interventions. This Handbook starts from the premise that statebuilding is intractably linked to international interventions. For a start, we know that state fragility is linked to statebuilding interventions, both in theory and in practice (Lemay-Hébert 2020). Hence, state weakness