International interventions are long-lasting and complex agents of transformation, composed of contradicting rationales and modalities frequently used with the pretense of restoring social and political order. Despite numerous failures, interventions are still used to address challenges to development, peace, and stability. This roundtable aims to address the problem of interventions’ persistence and multidimensionality by questioning what makes interventions relevant, often unavoidable, and for whom. We aim to bring together scholars working on international intervention, sovereignty, statehood in relation to capitalism and imperialism in a historical and ethnographic perspective with a specific focus on the African continent and the Middle East. How do we make sense of the variety of coexisting intervention modalities across disparate and diffused locations? What are the implications of ongoing interventions for the people most directly affected? How are interventions enacted, adapted, resisted, or re-engineered? Can we draw ethnographic comparisons between military, humanitarian, development and financial interventions in Africa and the Middle East? This roundtable invites ethnographic contributions that take a dialectical approach, emphasizing the competing, contradictory, and frictional dynamics of current interventions. We bring empire and imperialism back into the study of intervention to grasp their multiplicity and interconnections. We welcome interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches that pushes anthropology’s disciplinary boundaries to allow us to address interventions’ long-term multidimensionality, including their violent reconfigurations.