Humanitarian Intervention and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Naivete

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"This highly original and meticulously argumentative study shifts the tectonic plates of IR theorizing and dislodges the canonical obsessions of critical theory. It takes deep engagement with tragedy, irony, and frustration to do this when addressing the naivete of humanitarian interventions. Akrivoulis has gifted us with a hermeneutics of suspicion that Shakespeare would recognize."

Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol, UK

"This is a highly sophisticated book that puts into conversation a detailed understanding of critical theory with the masters of realist and Marxist IR. Focusing on the trope of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion,' it shows that IR theory misunderstands the concept developed in the work of Paul Ricoeur and treats the declared motives behind recent 'humanitarian wars' as naive misrepresentations and deceitful. Hermeneutical phenomenology helps correct IR theory. Analysing the processes of representation, interpretation, and meaning creation it shows that these wars, which kill humans in order to save humanity, are motivated not just by material interests but by deeper ideological factors. The book offers a paradigmatic use of critical thinking, coherent, creative, and elegant. IR theory on the hermeneutics of suspicion and humanitarian wars will be reread and reconstructed after Akrivoulis's book. It offers not just a meticulous interpretation of the hermeneutics of suspicion but also a paradigmatic performance of how to be suspicious without losing the complexity and polyvalence of texts and actions."

Professor Emeritus Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck Law School, University of London, UK

"There is a well-established hermeneutics of suspicion to be found among scholars studying humanitarian intervention in international relations. What is common to these is the claim that state actors who describe a given policy as 'humanitarian intervention' often use the phrase to hide their real self-interested motives for following certain lines of action. More radical criticisms of the idea suggest that this preoccupation with 'motives' is itself misplaced, for all international action is driven by the struggle for power. On this view, humanitarian intervention is no different -it is a power play. In this book Dimitrios Akrivoulis, building on the insights of Paul Ricoeur, takes issue with such superficial accounts of humanitarian intervention. He makes a convincing case for a more profound interpretive approach. It shifts emphasis away from the indiscernible motives of agents to all those discursive practices that mould the wider political mindset in which their actions become meaningful in the first place."

Mervyn Frost, Professor of International Relations, King's College London, UK

"In this powerful book Dimitrios Akrivoulis develops a masterful analysis of our current international moral dilemmas. Using Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion to critique humanitarian intervention, he provides evidence that the horror of the Holocaust is used to privilege state sovereignty over international laws and to give new purpose to America's hegemonic ambitions. Akrivoulis's brilliant analysis of domineering ethico-political narratives is a three-part Ricoeurian model: he challenges our first naivety, then offers us a hermeneutics of suspicion to doubt what we accept as justice, and brings us finally to a second naivety, in which we question the repeated violations of international legality particularly in Kosovo in the 1999 intervention, and also Gaza and Rwanda. For the Kosovo analysis, Akrivoulis also deploys the public papers of the US Presidents and the Congressional Record during 1994-2009, and assertions from the Secretary and leading figures of the Department of State during the second term of the Clinton administration (1997-2000)."

Professor Alison Scott-Baumann, SOAS, University of London, UK