Everyday sovereignty: International experts, brokers and local ownership in peacebuilding Liberia

Abstract

The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of ‘local ownership’, we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community ‘constructs’ rogue or failed polities in ‘faraway’ places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.

Promoting ownership in a “post‐aid effectiveness” world: Evidence from Rwanda and Liberia

“…In practice, the interface entails co‐ordination among donors towards the government rather than a two‐way process. Within several Liberian ministries, international personnel have key roles in enabling ministers to manage relationships with donors through their ability to “help ministers speak the UN or partner language” (de Carvalho et al, 2018, p. 12).…”

“…These are complemented by several strategies at the sectoral level, such as a strategy for developing the health sector following the Ebola crisis. Such policies have frequently been developed with considerable input from donor‐financed experts and are not by definition known nor supported by government leadership (de Carvalho et al, 2018). This not only applies to technical sector strategies, but also for the country’s long‐term strategies such as the 2012 Plan for National Transformation (Republic of Liberia, 2012).…”

“…These examples reveal a tacit conviction among some donors that they know what is best for Liberia’s development. De Carvalho et al (2018, p. 11) similarly observed that “it seemed to us that the international community thought that they knew best what local ownership was in Liberia.” There are encouraging exceptions to this general picture, such as the health‐pool fund that was initiated by the Liberian government and has attracted contributions from several donors. The programme has supported the Liberian health system to reach parts of the country that are not well served by development projects, while also contributing to the capacity of the Ministry of Health (Fading Faith in Good Works, 2017).…”

Liminal sovereignty practices: Rethinking the inside/outside dichotomy

“…Adler-Nissen, 2013; Biersteker and Weber, 1996; Jeffrey, 2013). By and large, however, the discipline of IR has ignored how ‘sovereignty is still wrestled with, constructed, reconstructed and performed on a daily basis’ (de Carvalho et al, 2019: 2). In this section, we begin by summarizing the existing work on international and domestic sovereignty practices, a lot of which is found in other disciplines such as political geography and sociology.…”

The concept of ‘the everyday’: Ephemeral politics and the abundance of life

“…In that sense, ‘the everyday’ foregrounds a horizontal conception of relations. ‘Horizontal’ does not refer to power relations being symmetrical but rather refers to an analytics in which processes like globalisation or sovereignty (on the latter, see De Carvalho et al, 2018), or entities like the state or world-systems, only exist as they are enacted in daily practices, relations and entanglements. In this understanding, ‘the everyday’ disturbs the distinction between micro and macro in terms of both scope and levels.…”