Description
The current global political moment can be characterised as a crisis of culture wars, identity-based social conflict, massive economic inequality and environmental destruction, all of which are driven by factors such as misinformation, excessive capital accumulation and racial/sexual normativities. Given that many of these conditions are traceable back to early European colonialism, insufficient attention continues to be paid to the epistemic frameworks that underpin global politics. In response, this paper takes humanitarian intervention as a strategic object of study, in order to draw attention to the ongoing coloniality of the Western state. Focusing on House of Commons debates on humanitarian intervention from 2011 to 2018, it explores the extent to which racism and heteronormativity, rooted in colonial understandings of temporality, are enacted through the UK’s responses, or non-responses, to atrocity crimes. This paper clearly does not provide a resolution to our current global crisis. Rather, it aims to draw attention to some of the deeply problematic logics that continue to inform Western foreign policy, in the belief that their endurance is likely to worsen the global crisis we are currently experiencing.
