ABSTRACT
This chapter theorises the field of intervention based on the re-reading of the critical intervention literature with political discourse theory. It introduces discourse as an ontological concept, discusses previous work on discourses and interventions, as well as explicates this book's take on interventions as discourses. The chapter also introduces the concept of dislocation, relating it to research on violence and emergency. It argues that interventions are often imagined as an external attempt to reinsert closure into a dislocated space. The chapter conceptualises this external closure as hegemony, introducing the concept and relating it to research on the liberal peace and the local turn. It discusses how to situate regional interventions into the logic of hegemony and counter-hegemony. The problematisation of large-scale violence as crisis nevertheless reveals a certain structuring of the field of intervention. Discourse theory helps to further conceptualise the emergence, perpetuation, and transformation of subjectivity in the field of intervention in general and in regional interventions in particular.
