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Expansive Intervention as Neo-Institutional Learning: Root Causes in the Merida Initiative

Cover: Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10 (2)

Cover: Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10 (2)

Peter Finkenbusch – 2016

Interventions since the 1990s have greatly expanded in policy scope. While neo-liberals understand expansion as an attempt to work on the enabling preconditions of liberal market democracy, Foucauldian governmentality studies see in expansion a set of increasingly intrusive disciplinary techniques of responsibilization. This paper introduces an alternative lens: neo-institutional learning. Through a case study of the Merida Initiative, a US–Mexican security cooperation agreement, the paper argues that expansion grows serendipitously out of the repetitive discovery of new, ‘deeper’ unknowns within a neo-institutional framework of analysis. Importantly, downward penetration requires deconstructing reductionist liberal-universal knowledge claims. Paradoxically, then, the more statebuilders learn (empirically), the less they know (analytically)

Title
Expansive Intervention as Neo-Institutional Learning: Root Causes in the Merida Initiative
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Location
London
Keywords
Mexico, external actors, security, intervention, Research Project C3
Date
2016
Identifier
ISSN 1750-2977 (Print) 1750-2985 (Online)
Appeared in
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10 (2), 162–180.
Language
eng
Type
Text