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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparison is a method that cannot avoid that its concepts are approximations made for specific audiences or purposes. Deployed to compare armed conflicts, it naturalises the state as the central unit of analysis and the intervention as the external context. This article proposes a strategy that reveals the colonial legacies that form or perform the units of analysis. The possibility of comparing Côte d'Ivoire and Mali appears only when one considers a prior comparison: between Francophone Africa and other 'worlds'. The construction of a French privileged sphere of intervention is inextricably tied to establishing a privileged sphere of comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]