Global Governance and the New Wars

"Partly for its ambition, and also because Mark Duffield is one of the few theorists in international relations who quickly became wise to the conflation of security and development. He also links the changing politics of intervention to the changing politics of aid and asylum. At the end of the Cold War, expectations regarding the right to asylum changed. Today people are often provided with aid in the very places where the conflicts are occurring. And so this requires increasing intervention in those conflicts. Opening up humanitarian aid corridors was presented as progressive, but it was in fact a step backwards because it effectively imprisons people in conflict instead of allowing them to escape. I don’t think it is progressive to imprison people in war zones, which is effectively what the new politics of humanitarian aid is. Or the fact that states are being liberated from having to provide for refugees who flee war zones but instead can now hold them back at arm’s length. States dispatch aid convoys and peace operations and they wash their hands of it. As to the wider question of whether states now concern themselves with issues beyond their own interests – I think it is naive to believe that and it is important to look beyond the rhetoric."