BiblioVault

Intervention as Indirect Rule

Civil War and Statebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Alex Veit

Campus Verlag, 2010

One of the largest peace-keeping missions currently being undertaken by the United Nations is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the UN is attempting to deal with the civil wars and other conflicts that have plagued the country since 1996. In Intervention as Indirect Rule, Alex Veit uses a close study of the district of Ituri, a major battlefield and a laboratory for international intervention, to explore the micropolitics of warfare and statebuilding. Combining detailed firsthand empirical data with a historically informed analysis, Veit shows the effect that contemporary humanitarian interventions have on state-society relations. He also pays particular, and much needed, attention to the question of why the very organizations that should be helping with international statebuilding efforts—local authorities and civil society groups—so often instead turn out to be corrupt or hostile. Ultimately Veit argues that international intervention tends inadvertently to replicate—or even amplify—historical structures of political inequality, rather than establishing a liberal form of statehood.

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Peripheral Labour Mobilities

Tanja Višic

Campus Verlag, 2022

An inciteful ethnography of cross-border elder care workers.

The precarious situation in the successor states of Yugoslavia created a specific dynamic in the field of labor mobility. Still, little research has been done in this region on how women, who are older care workers from Serbia or Bosnia commute—often via illegal border crossings—to German households to look after the elderly. In Peripheral Labor Mobilities, Tanja Višic explores this gender-specific migration pattern in the first expansive ethnography of contemporary cross-border elder care in this region. She takes up questions about how the mobility and work practices of women are integrated into the socio-economic networks of the informal care work sector while also looking at worker confrontations with labor laws and border regimes. Illustrative case studies clearly detail culturally specific patterns of perception of care work, family relationships, and the mobility demanded by these labor arrangements.

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Contours of the Illiberal State

Governing Circulation in the Smart Economy

Boris Vormann

Campus Verlag, 2019

The post-Cold War era was marked by the emergence of unprecedented new networks of international private trade, cooperation, and circulation of goods that promised to render the state nearly obsolete—at least in theory. The essays collected in this book dissect the notions of this so-called “smart economy,” revealing the crucial role that government interventions still play in facilitating the production and the global flow of goods. The contributors focus particularly on the role played by the United States, often incorrectly assumed to be the most liberal and least interventionist in the global order. More than a mere market fixer, the United States has long assumed an outsized position in expediting the global circulation of goods through its supply chains and communication channels. Drawing from such diverse fields as political science, urban sociology, and cultural studies, Contours of the Illiberal State takes a broad interdisciplinary look at how nations became active market enablers.

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