Beyond International Intervention:
The Politics of Improvement in Serbia
The book is coming out with University of Michigan Press, as a part of the series Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics.
Book summary
How does the focus on different subjects disrupt the confines of established scholarly and policy discourses on international intervention? Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticised for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Yet, these debates have not considered that an engagement with different subjects might not only help us understand intervention better, but also move us beyond its conceptual confines. Through its engagement with youth and agricultural producers in Serbia, the book argues that the conceptual parameters of intervention hide more than illuminate in the project of changing the subjects of our scholarship. As an alternative, it proposes to see intervention as part of a wider politics of improvement. This reorientation enables researchers to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy; it expands fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves; and takes seriously the contradictions that stand at the heart of liberalism.
Table of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Seeing like an intervention
Chapter 2. Fieldwork beyond intervention
Chapter 3. Subjects and effects of non-formal education
Chapter 4. Beyond intervention: NFE, unemployment, and resistance
Chapter 5. Governing agriculture through ‘Europeanisation’
Chapter 6. Beyond intervention: Land, investment, and resistance
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography