Alumnus Patrick Quinton-Brown wins top book award for tome on intervention/non-intervention

DPIR alumnus Patrick Quinton-Brown (DPhil IR, 2021) has won the Sussex International Theory Prize for his book Intervention before Interventionism – A Global Genealogy.

Published by Oxford University Press, the book explores the ways in which statespeople have reordered intervention and non-intervention since the middle of the 20th century.

The book focuses primarily on non-Western contestations of Western-dominated global order.  It illustrates institutional change in and through decolonisation; and it provides a conceptual roadmap for understanding dilemmas of intervention and non-intervention today. This is particularly in relation to contestation as it has re-emerged in the 21st century.

Commenting on his award, Patrick said: 

"It means more than I can say. The book has come at a dire time. The concept of intervention needs desperately to be re-assessed and its meaning is that of its contested history. 

One purpose of writing the book, and reading it now, is to recover a language of solidarity and sovereignty that stands for and with the Global South."

The Sussex International Theory Prize is awarded annually by the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT), established by the Department of International Relations within the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

The prize is meant to honour the best piece of research in International Relations published in book from the year before.

Commenting on the winning book, the CAIT book award panel remarked: 

'Intervention before Interventionism: A Global Genealogy captures international politics at a critical juncture. It seems that arguments for liberal interventionism that have dominated foreign-policy making debates and academic discourses in International Relations for the last two to three decades are in decline, while debates about state sovereignty, borders, and non-intervention, as well as a sharp distinction about domestic and international politics are on the rise again. 

‘…Patrick Quinton-Brown not only provides a comprehensive historical account on why interventionism was an intellectual and empirical failed attempt that was clouded in liberal ideology – and therefore could not understand the limits of a post-Second World War international society and the role of the Global South – but...also offers an epistemological reconsideration of questions of intervention and non-intervention.’