International Intervention and State-making

How Exception Became the Norm

This book analyses the changing dynamics of sovereignty resulting from contemporary international state-building interventions.

It aims to highlight how the exercise of ‘exceptional’ forms of power by intervening agencies impacts on the sovereign capacity of intervened states. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of three case studies – Kosovo, East Timor and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the book shifts the focus of the debate to the nature of contemporary intervention as an act of statemaking, and argues that foreign intervention changes the dynamics of political power upon which sovereignty is structured. At the same time, it reveals how intervention reproduces the imposed conditions of international state-making, thus permanently internalising external regulatory mechanisms. International intervention, in other words, becomes the constitutive element of governance in the newly created state.

This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, war and conflict studies, global governance, security studies and IR.