Beyond International Intervention Politics of Improvement in Serbia

• Main Author: Kušic, Katarina
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press 2025
• Series: Configurations: Critical Studies Of World Politics
• Subjects: agriculture; Balkans; ethnography; Foreign relations; Interdisciplinary studies; international intervention; International Relations; interpretive methods; Nation-building; Peace; Peace studies and conflict resolution; Peace-building; peacebuilding; political education; Political Science; Politics and government; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; rural development; Serbia; Social conditions; Society and Social Sciences; Southeast Europe; statebuilding; youth politics; Yugoslavia; Serbia
• ISBN: 047207735X; 9780472057351; 9780472077359; 0472057359; 0472904957; 9780472904952
• DOI: 10.3998/mpub.12876501

Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in IR scholarship to rethink the very concept of “intervention” by paying close attention to how people actually experience and make sense of those efforts. In particular, the book offers a detailed engagement with ethnographic fieldwork in two policy areas in Serbia—agricultural policy and non-formal youth education. By engaging with subjects, the book not only enhances our understanding of intervention, but also uncovers the limitations of the concept. Katarina Kušić argues that the concept limits what we can observe and theorize, and it prevents researchers from engaging with the people living in spaces of intervention as coeval political subjects. As an alternative, she proposes to foreground improvement over “intervention.” This reorientation enables researchers to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy, expands fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves, and seriously considers the contradictions at the heart of liberalism.