This article examines the perceptions of domestic actors in international governance and statebuilding interventions. To further decentre a research field that has so far focused primarily on the perceptions and representations of actors in the Global North, the article reconstructs how a specific set of domestic actors sees the presence of donors in international interventions and their own interactions with them. Drawing on recent advances in relational sociology, our analysis focuses on how domestic intermediary actors in two postwar political settings exposed to external state-building interventions conceive of and navigate their social relations with the interveners. We find that they frequently view interveners as mainly interest-oriented, bureaucratic and erratic actors. In contrast to studies that posit a clear-cut and static hierarchy between Northern interveners and Southern targets of interventions, the article moreover paints a more nuanced picture of the interactions and relations between interveners and 'the intervened upon'. The article illustrates its argument by drawing on a series of problem-centred and expert interviews in Côte d'Ivoire and Lebanon.

This article contributes to debates about the scope and influence of local agency in international state-and security-building interventions by investigating how domestic intermediary actors create and make use of their room for manoeuvre in intervention processes. The article empirically reconstructs a set of distinct domestic repertoires of action in intervention processes to highlight the different ways in which domestic actors 'manage' and 'push back' international donors. The article bases its argument on a qualitative study of domestic agency in two postwar political settings that have been exposed to multiple international state-and security-building interventions. It draws on problem-centred and expert interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016 in Côte d'Ivoire and Lebanon to make its case. KEYWORDS international interventions peacebuilding state-building local turn local agency lebanon côte d'ivoire

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