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55 books match the query 'Education and state' and 3 start with b

cover of Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

Becoming Rwandan

Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

S. Garnett Russell

Rutgers University Press, 2020

In the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government has attempted to use the education system in order to sustain peace and shape a new generation of Rwandans. Their hope is to create a generation focused on a unified and patriotic future rather than the ethnically divisive past. Yet, the government’s efforts to manipulate global models around citizenship, human rights, and reconciliation to serve its national goals have had mixed results, with new tensions emerging across social groups. Becoming Rwandan argues that although the Rwandan government utilizes global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the intention of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and undermining a sustainable peace.
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cover of Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth

Betting on Education

The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth

Jennifer Estes

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Educational credentials are one of the most reliable tickets to a middle-class livelihood across the globe today. But as the costs of schooling rise, young people increasingly wonder whether their investment will pay off. Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth follows the experiences of rural secondary school students navigating Cambodia’s semiprivatized state education system. It reveals that when students are compelled to speculate about the value of their education, the “winners” of this gamble are the ones already most securely part of the middle class. The rest are left behind. In the process, the very meaning of education is transformed, as schooling becomes less about learning and more about its potential financial returns. By situating these stories in the wider global logics of neoliberal capitalism, Betting on Education challenges readers to consider what is at stake when young people must wager so much on the promise of schooling.

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cover of Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia

Beyond International Intervention

Politics of Improvement in Serbia

Katarina Kušic

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in IR scholarship to rethink the very concept of “intervention” by paying close attention to how people actually experience and make sense of those efforts. In particular, the book offers a detailed engagement with ethnographic fieldwork in two policy areas in Serbia—agricultural policy and non-formal youth education. 

By engaging with subjects, the book not only enhances our understanding of intervention, but also uncovers the limitations of the concept. Katarina Kušić argues that the concept limits what we can observe and theorize, and it prevents researchers from engaging with the people living in spaces of intervention as coeval political subjects. As an alternative, she proposes to foreground improvement over “intervention.” This reorientation enables researchers to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy, expands fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves, and seriously considers the contradictions at the heart of liberalism.
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