ABSTRACT
In 2008, former UK development secretary Clare Short noted in an interview that, in the post-Cold War era, the legitimacy of combining development, foreign policy and military power as an integrated intervention instrument in conflicts overseas was lost. It had been possible in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, she argued, but with 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the legitimacy of this model had vanished. She would later refer to these events as the 'humanitarian surge and its demise'. 1 The UK government's response to the fundamentally altered context of intervention that emerged in the early-to-mid 2000s was stabilisation, 2 a term and set of practices that describe the prevention or reduction of violence, accompanied by socioeconomic programming to develop state legitimacy. Stabilisation was a continuation of the efforts to merge security and development, but with an emphasis on the former over the latter in the context of the wars of the early twenty-first century.
