Interventions

This thematic cluster brings together projects that study the practice, legitimization, implementation, and consequences of international interventions. In line with the work of Mark Duffield and of James Fearon and David Laitin, it defines ‘interventions’ as all extraneous actions that aim to steer and inform social dynamics and modernization, often using the momentum and opportunities shaped by a political and societal crisis or conflict. So leaving behind the narrow association of the term with military interventions, the thematic cluster examines a variety of processes and practices that aim to steer and inform economic, humanitarian, political, and societal transformation, starting from the (impacts of the) first- and second-wave decolonisation processes until today. More specifically, this cluster focuses on the following topical fields: the humanitarian-development-reconstruction nexus; military and non-military international interventions; ‘post-aid’, localization and the emergence of alternative and non-conventional forms of aid outside of the international aid system; the UN Sustaining Peace Agenda and its critics; transitional justice, post-war reforms, and resilience interventions; reconstruction and peacebuilding as a space for social engineering and its resistances; ethics of aid, aid interventions and the decolonization of aid; the reintegration of IDP and refugees; peacebuilding as counter-insurgency; the history and historiography of aid and of the system.

Projects

New Publication: Sustaining gender: Natural resource management, conflict prevention, and the UN Sustaining Peace agenda in times of climate catastrophe

This article explores how decentralisation policy and specifically the establishment of communes rurales in DR Congo turned into a profoundly destabilising juncture, shaking existing governance arrangements

by Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta

Social dynamics of private security sector development in west Africa

This project aims to explore how private security firms embody a specific expansion of market logics as a modality of governance and the exercise of violence.

by Tanguy Quidelleur

Gender, Climate Change and Conflict in practice: Adaptation, Resilience and Sustainable Peace in the Africa Great Lakes Region

This project aims to map and examine how local communities in general, and women’s movements in particular, adapt and remain resilient in settings where climate change is exacerbating protracted conflict.

by Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta

Gender, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management

With this project, we propose a deeper critical interrogation of what meanings gender equality and women’s empowerment assume in natural resource management initiatives in conflict-affected countries.

by Jules Bakker

Decolonising social norms change: An analysis of the politics of knowledge production in relation to Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting and child marriage

Warfare and the nature of conflict have substantially changed over the last 40 years. Yet, the procedures and content of peace agreements have not evolved with this change.

by Anneke Newman

The Political Ecology of Conservation Conflicts

This study goes beyond Human-Wildlife Conflict to explore the broader multi-scalar politics that produce both conservation and its conflicts

by Emmanuel Akampurira

Can (some sort of) ‘Donbas separatism’ happen in Kazakhstan?

Warfare and the nature of conflict have substantially changed over the last 40 years. Yet, the procedures and content of peace agreements have not evolved with this change.

by Bruno De Cordier

Relief aid in the context of the Ukraine war(s): towards a redefinition of the humanitarian (space)?

Warfare and the nature of conflict have substantially changed over the last 40 years. Yet, the procedures and content of peace agreements have not evolved with this change.

by Bruno De Cordier

Analyzing conflict mobilities from Uganda’s Nakivale Refugee Settlement

This research project examines to which extent conflict dynamics and refugee policy structures have an impact on broader mobility patterns and dynamics in the war-torn Central-East African region.

by Jolien Tegenbos

What does peace have to do with it? Examining the creation and operationalisation of peace arrangements and their actors in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Warfare and the nature of conflict have substantially changed over the last 40 years. Yet, the procedures and content of peace agreements have not evolved with this change.

by Natalie Domaas