The Imperative of Intervention

This chapter sets the scene for Somaliland’s place within debates about the utility of northern intervention against violence and poverty in various southern contexts. It explores the way that the dominant discourse about state fragility frames the quality of domestic governance institutions in the Global South as both cause of, and solution to, the prevalence of conflict and poverty. In so doing, it brackets out alternative—nondomestic and noninstitutional—ways of understanding peace and development in the Global South. These exclusions also frame international intervention as self-evidently useful in making the world more peaceful and prosperous. The chapter argues that this dramatically overstates the impact that development or state-building interventions have because they constitute a small part of the means by which power and resources move between north and south.