Description
How does the focus on different subjects of intervention disrupt the confines of established scholarly and policy discourses on international intervention? Studies of international intervention have been heavily criticised for their disregard for the experiences, actions, and thoughts of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Much of this literature, moreover, has contributed to putting the problem of Eurocentrism—and ways in which it shapes engagement with difference—squarely in the centre of academic debates. Yet, these debates have not considered that an engagement with different subjects of intervention might not only help us understand intervention better, but also move us beyond its conceptual confines. This paper takes on this issue. It first distils the limitations of intervention thinking, and then presents the politics of improvement as a conceptual alternative that can better investigate the multiple scales of power and inequality involved in liberal interventionism: able to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy; expanding fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves; and taking seriously the contradictions that stand at the heart of liberalism. The potential of thinking about statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions within a wider politics of improvement is demonstrated by drawing on research in non-formal youth education in Serbia and showing how it functions within the larger politics of youth (un)employment.
