Intervention: An Eastern Mediterranean genealogy
Presenter: Andrew Arsan (University of Cambridge)
Respondent: Aaron Jakes (New School)
Moderator: Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University)
The times in which we live are rife with interventions - humanitarian, financial, and political - into the inner affairs of sovereign states. Deep incisions into the body politic, they injure even as they seek to heal, upturning conventional understandings of the state as an autonomous entity by inserting foreign elements beneath its skin. This paper sketches out a genealogy for these practices, tracing them back to the nineteenth-century Mediterranean and the particular sovereign arrangements born of the Ottoman empire’s unhappy encounter with Britain and France. From the 1830s onward, it argues, these two states devised novel ways of organizing population, territory, and debt and new understandings of sovereignty. And in doing so, they made of intervention a principle of international life
