Power and Comparative Methods: Performing the Worlds of Armed Conflicts

Abstract

This Special Issue emphasises how power and power relations involved in establishing limits and boundaries to define, categorise and understand the world through comparison are intimately tied to conflict and intervention practices and dynamics. Indeed, when pundits, practitioners, academics and even conflict actors compare settings of armed conflict and intervention, they are participating in an inherently political move. The most off-handed of comments connect to assemblages that enable the production of categories and concepts from which it becomes difficult to think differently. Our comparisons perform worlds of armed conflict, and international interventions more often than not reflect those performances.