Abstract
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).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 162-180 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 16 Feb 2016 |
Bibliographical note
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis inJournal of Intervention and Statebuilding on 16/02/16, available
online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17502977.2016.1146503
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Keywords
- Statebuilding
- Neo-liberalism
- Latin America
- Governmentality
- Neo-institutionalism Introduction