Building states, empowering citizens: Politics of improvement in Serbia

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 found
in the literature;
2) it is attentive to different ways that these subjects are engaged and can thus take into account seemingly
contradictory 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.