Building States, Empowering Citizens: Rethinking intervention as politics of improvement

帮助、发展和赋予全球各地人民和地方权力的努力既塑造了政策，也塑造了想象力。无论是英国脱欧重组发展和维和费用的计划，委内瑞拉援助运输的僵局，还是欧盟与其邻国和候选国不断变化的关系，为了援助和发展而跨境干预项目的新闻似乎无处不在。这个项目从观察到引人注目的“干预事件”开始——发展中国家的捐赠项目或欧盟与第三国的谈判——是由无数的大小项目支撑的，这些项目寻求以更微妙和广泛的方式赋予个人权力，建立和平，促进经济进步，并确保民主。这些努力的范围从技术援助和财政援助到能力建设和小型教育讲习班。虽然它们为应对不断变化的情况而进行调整，但它们显然是国际政治的永久组成部分，具有讽刺意味的是，它们的延续取决于永远无法实现其目标。“建设国家，赋予公民权力：将干预作为改良政治重新思考”项目提出了一个重大转变，即实践者和学者对待发展和国家建设等干预措施的方式。它建议将这些过程作为一种改进的政治来研究。通过使用改善的政治概念，我能够超越在国家建设和发展研究中发现的对干预的经典理解。将它们视为改善的政治，将这些努力与其他旨在改善不同人群和空间的过程放在一起，以及它们对个人的影响和看法。这种跨学科的方法揭示了政治、经济和社会生活的领域，否则就会被忽视，并允许对社会变革及其后果有更全面的理解。具体来说，改善政治的概念在三个方面超越了国际干预：1)通过超越文献中通常发现的地方/国际立场，它能够吸引更广泛的行动者；2)关注这些主题参与的不同方式，从而可以在同一项目中考虑看似矛盾的政策；3)与流行的自由主义/非自由主义诊断相比，它对结果有更细致入微的理解。这种对改进政治的重新定位还包括在方法上承诺利用这些项目受益者的经验作为分析起点。该项目使用塞尔维亚的两个政策领域作为研究地点：以民主、人权和赋权学校的形式进行非正规青年教育；以及旨在使塞尔维亚农业现代化并使其更接近欧盟标准的农业政策。在这两个地点，我分析的出发点不是推动干预项目的国际专家，也不是实施这些项目的当地合作伙伴，而是许多生活在这些努力的后果中的人，这些努力赋予公民权力和建设国家。

Efforts to help, develop, and empower people and places around the globe shape both policies and imaginations. Whether they are Brexit plans for restructuring development and peacekeeping costs, stand-offs around aid shipments in Venezuela, or the EU's changing relationship with its neighbourhood and candidate states-the news of intervention projects that cross borders in order to aid and develop seem ubiquitous. This project starts from the observation that the eye-catching 'intervention events' - donor projects in developing countries or EU negotiations with third countries - are propped up by a myriad of small and large projects that seek to empower individuals, build peace, promote economic progress, and secure democracy in more subtle and widespread ways. These efforts range from technical assistance and financial aid to capacity building and small educational workshops. And while they go through adjustments in response to changing circumstances, they are apparently a permanent fixture of international politics whose continuation, ironically, depends on never achieving their goal.The project Building States, Empowering Citizens: Rethinking intervention as politics of improvement proposes a major shift in the way practitioners and academics approach interventions like development and statebuilding. It proposes to study these processes as a politics of improvement. By using the concept politics of improvement, I am able to go beyond classical understandings of intervention as found in studies of statebuilding and development. Seeing them as politics of improvement situates these efforts alongside other processes that aim at improvement of diverse people and spaces, and their effects on and perceptions by individuals. Such an interdisciplinary approach uncovers areas of political, economic, and social life that are otherwise left invisible, and allows a fuller understanding of social transformations and their consequences.Specifically, the concept of politics of improvement goes beyond international intervention in three ways:1) it is able to engage a wider range of actors by looking past the local/international positions usually foundin the literature;2) it is attentive to different ways that these subjects are engaged and can thus take into account seeminglycontradictory policies within same projects;3) it is open to a more nuanced understanding of outcomes than the popular liberal/illiberal diagnoses.This reorientation to politics of improvement also includes a methodological commitment to using the experiences of the beneficiaries of these projects as the analytical starting point. The project uses two policy areas in Serbia as sites for the study: non-formal youth education in the form of schools of democracy, human rights, and empowerment; and agricultural policy that seeks to modernise Serbian agriculture and bring it closer to EU standards. Within the two sites, the starting points of my analysis were not the international experts who drive the intervention projects, nor their local partners who implement them, but the many people who live with the consequences of these efforts to empower citizens and build states.