International Intervention
My first major research project focuses on the practices and politics of international intervention. Drawing upon years of ethnographic field research, I seek to advance a specifically anthropological approach to the study of intervention, be it under the sign of humanitarianism, democratization, state-building, or post-war reconstruction. The most comprehensive account of my approach is laid out in my book, International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy. Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (with Cornell University Press). In it, I argue for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the questions of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. I analyze the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identify key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. The book highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. In doing so, I reveal the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.
Individual articles analyze mass media as a site and instrument of intervention; the challenges aid workers face in maintaining the humanitarian status of their projects; and the dilemmas caused by the ways in which the international agents of intervention legitimize their presence and power. Over the past decade I have also taught courses that develop these themes, as well as organized conference panels and an international workshop dedicated to exploring the anthropology of international intervention.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to this research by the International Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils, American Councils for Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.