Improvising the international: Theorizing the everyday of intervention from the field
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836719896609 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836719896609
Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(2) 151 –169
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836719896609
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Improvising the international:
Theorizing the everyday of
intervention from the field
Lise Philipsen
Abstract
In this article, I argue that the introduction of ethnography to International Relations has not
taken full advantage of the potential of bringing these two fields together. Using international
intervention as an example, I suggest that to bring out this potential we need to be more attentive
to the classical virtues of ethnography. This means taking the subjects of our studies much more
seriously, as people capable of making sense of and reacting to the structures of power they are
embedded in. Here implementers tasked to put international policies into action in relation to a
concrete context provide an overlooked source of knowledge. Using their experiences, reflections
and ways of dealing with the concrete dilemmas that arise in their daily work enables us to analyse
intervention as concrete relations of power that play out, affect and are mitigated by people in the
field. Seeing knowledge as in this manner arising from the field provides a deeper knowledge that is
necessary if we want to read intervention not only as an exertion of power from the international
to the local, but as dynamically reshaped, resisted and made sense of in the field.
Keywords
Ethnography, everyday IR, improvisation, intervention, implementation, practice turn,
performativity
Introduction: meaning-making in international spaces
As witnessed in the recent ethnographic and practice turns (Hopf, 2010; MacKay and
Levin, 2015) International Relations scholars should be interested in how interventions
in different parts of the world are not only theorized and legitimized, but also enacted.
The expanding field of studies that engage with the international from an ethnographic
stance clearly demonstrates the value of ethnographic insights, showing that underneath
the consistent logic of policy documents lies a whole world of important social dynamics
(Autesserre, 2014; Barnett, 2002; Dauphinee, 2013). But while the introduction of eth-
nography to IR has been hugely successful as a source for questioning practices and
Corresponding author:
Lise Philipsen, The Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5,
1353 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Email: liseph@gmail.com
896609CAC0010.1177/0010836719896609Cooperation and ConflictPhilipsen
research-article2019
Article
152 Cooperation and Conflict 55(2)
truths that are often held self-evident in IR, the sense-making of the people situated in the
sites of intervention has been strangely disregarded. This is a shame, because listening
more carefully to the experiences and reflections of the people tasked to implement inter-
national interventions can help us gain a deeper understanding of what intervention
amounts to as a practice of power.
In this piece, I argue that to take full advantage of the promise of bringing ethnography
into IR we need to take the knowledge of the field and the people in it more seriously.
Only by zooming in on the concrete relations through which global policies are brought
into practice can we understand the political impact of the international. Here the imple-
menters tasked to put these policies into action provide a particularly illuminating source
of information, enabling us to analyse how different policies are enacted in specific set-
tings. Crucially, if we pay attention to the experiences, reflections and actions of people in
intervention spaces, we see how international policies are not uncritically accepted, nei-
ther by the subjects they encompass, nor the implementers handling their difficult transla-
tion into contexts that carry their own structures of power, and often affect interveners as
much as they are able to affect it. By listening to the everyday concerns of interveners and
engaging with their knowledge, we can gain a deeper understanding of how interventions
work as daily assertions and appropriations of power. Studying intervention through the
lens of implementers here reveals intervention as characterized by ambivalence, rather
than confidence in the practices they themselves are part of.
While ethnographers have discussed the implications of interventions at the local level
for decades, and practice turn scholars have traced problematic patterns of behaviour
among interveners, the reflections of interveners have not been used as a source of knowl-
edge to understand intervention as a practice of power. This silencing of the people in the
midst of the power structures at play strips ethnographic knowledge of much of its politi-
cal force. Leaving out the knowledge, reflections and emotions of the people at the centre
of the practices of power we are studying, diverts attention away from how power is
constantly disrupted in the field, even by the people who are supposed to support it. What
I aim to do here therefore is not an attempt at showing the effects of intervention at the
local level, but to argue that in the adoption of ethnographic data into IR, crucial elements
are missing curtailing ethnography’s critical ability to reveal the complexity of power as
it is resisted and questioned in the field. We can retain this by recalling traditional virtues
of ethnographic knowledge as derived from our informants in the field. Allowing the
people in the middle, the interveners, to speak of their experiences of doing intervention
helps us nuance the overtly structural explanations of what intervention amounts to as a
practice of power, which has characterized the adoption of ethnographic data into IR so
far. Taking such questioning and sense-making in the field seriously is key to doing eth-
nography and should accompany its adoption into the study of intervention.
I proceed in three steps. First, I elaborate the claim that recent Bourdieusian accounts
of the everyday of intervention have not taken the knowledge of the field seriously
enough; I argue that deeper engagement with the people carrying out intervention is
needed. I then explain why theorizing from the field, which is characteristic of ethno-
graphic knowledge, is crucial to capture the site of intervention as a dynamic field of
power, by identifying four qualities that enable ethnographic analysis to bring about
unique knowledge. This understanding lays the foundation for a theorization that reads
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