International interventions seen from the ‘Middle’: Perceptions of intermediary actors in Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon

Abstract

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.

Improvising the international: Theorizing the everyday of intervention from the field

“…Existing ethnographically founded accounts of intervention reveals such reflexive insights of interveners, but discounts these as exceptions to the rule (Autesserre, 2014: 251; Cornut, 2015: 398) or as a lack of faith in local populations (Distler, 2016: 326–327). Perhaps to sustain the explanation of the failure of interventions as a failure to understand local conditions, these analyses have tended to disregard how practices of imposition and isolation coexist with daily struggles to transgress these lines of division, as well as the manifest ambivalence expressed by interveners taking part in them (Birkholz et al, 2018). It is this lack I want to address here by bringing interveners’ own experiences and reflections on board as part of the analytic.…”

“…Concerned with the production of power and authority, the negotiated nature of any ‘peace’ shaped by intervention is emphasized (Mac Ginty, 2010; Richmond and Mitchell, 2011). And while the danger of reading intervention as a cultural encounter between a liberal, rational, modern West and a culturally distinct sphere of the local, indigenous and authentic remains (Paffenholz, 2015), a promising literature has begun transgressing the reification of the international and the local as distinct spheres (Albrecht, 2018; Birkholz et al, 2018; Björkdahl, 2016; Boege and Rinck, 2019; Millar, 2018; Schroeder, 2018). This has been done through showing how the templates of global policies are articulated in contingent, unstable and messy interrelationships that make up the ‘lives’ of policies (Stepputat and Larsen, 2015: 4).…”

“…While implementation happens inside and with reference to a social order that structures the actions of people, ethnography enables us to couple such structuring with a space for agency. Intermediaries hold a crucial position in intervention societies by translating external requirements into domestic contexts and shaping the ways in which internationally funded projects are implemented (Birkholz et al, 2018). Translating policy ideas into concrete practice involves highly creative reformulations in close connection with the field.…”