This book project has cooked for a long time, and many have helped stir the pot. I warmly thank Celestino Jemusse Jackson Silva and Adélia Alberto Martíns for their research assistance in Mozambique. I thank them and Arcenia Guambe Horstmanshoff for their ongoing inspiration and friendship. I also express my deep gratitude towards all those interviewed across Mozambique who...

I did not begin this study of post-war international statebuilding interventions expecting to find failure. I was in fact looking for success. Mozambique seemed worthy of study because of its relative neglect in the scholarly literature, except that it had been...

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International interventions in post-war or post-crisis environments are particularly...

So, what is to be done? The Eurocentric tendencies in much of the present literature place limits on how we understand international intervention. As noted in the previous chapter, these tendencies work in different ways, and many of them are ‘anti-imperial’ in their sensibilities. However, they have the collective effect of heavily circumscribing the ontological and...

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When you are poor, you have to accept the game.

We’re only asking for help. That you help us, because each time they call a meeting, they ask us the same things and don’t help us with anything, they don’t do anything we ask – they only know how to call us for meetings. What’s...

Another thing is that local workers and international workers for an organisation have a big difference in contractual conditions. They treat people as nationals and internationals – and what is the justification? They say we base the pay on what is in Europe … When basic needs are met, it’s ok … of course I am going to do my job, but if I ask, between me and...

We cannot adequately study any kind of politics by only thinking with or about the powerful parties. For a standpoint theory tradition this is a form of ‘pseudo-objectivity’ which ultimately naturalises the subordinate status of the disempowered. In this study, I have sought to cultivate a sense of how international statebuilding is understood by its intended targets,...

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~Academic Action for the Development of Rural Communities (ADECRU), 101

Meera Sabaratnam is Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. She is a founding co-convenor of the Colonial / Postcolonial / De-colonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association, founding member of The Disorder of Things blog and an Online Editor for International Studies Quarterly....

This is the first series to mark out a dedicated space for advanced critical inquiry into colonial questions across International Relations. The ethos of this book series is reflected by the bricolage constituency of Kilombos – settlements of African slaves, rebels and indigenous peoples in South America who became self-determining political communities that retrieved and renovated the...