Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power: The elusive materiality of international statebuilding

This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.

Statebuilding

This chapter analyzes how international statebuilding has shifted from problem-solving to a new discursive regime of acceptance and affirmation. It seeks to explore how the shift to bottom-up or postliberal approaches in the early 2000s led to a focus on epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It describes a process of reflection upon statebuilding as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations in order to take problems seriously further undermines confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of statebuilding, seems to have further intensified it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis is to reject the problem-solving external authority and instead to “unlearn” from the opportunities opened up through the practices of exploring and engaging with the “other.”

Conjuring the Criminal State: The “State-Idea” in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and International Statebuilding

A central challenge of post-conflict recovery is the reconstruction of state institutions, which often emerge from war destroyed or otherwise unable to carry out core administrative activities. But scholarship on international peacebuilding and post-conflict politics tends to focus narrowly on the functional aspects of the state, the state-system, to the neglect of another critical dimension: the state-idea, or its symbolic and normative authority. How do internationally backed institution-building efforts shape the ideational foundations of the state following conflict? Drawing on original interviews and archival research from postwar Guatemala, this article illustrates how, paradoxically, postwar peacebuilding and rule of law initiatives that sought to strengthen the capacity of state institutions simultaneously contributed to the discursive construction of the state as a criminal organization. Specifically, the United Nations’ International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), in seeking to combat state-based criminal structures and bolster institutions, transformed long-held conceptions of Guatemala's “weak” or “failed” state into an alternative vision of the state as a powerful complex of clandestine, predatory networks, and practices. In conjuring the state as a criminal organization that appropriates the formal organs of political power for illicit ends, this international statebuilding initiative generated a coherent and durable state-idea that belies key advances in institutional capacity and the rule of law. Overall, this article contributes to growing debates about the unintended, deleterious effects of international statebuilding efforts by demonstrating how distinct ideas of state power come to fill the void between state capacity and legitimacy.

The Impact of Social Movements on Policy Outcomes in Partly Free Democracies: Evidence from the “Citizens for Macedonia” Struggles in a Captured Macedonian State

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. This article looks at the impact of one of the recent waves of mobilization in the Republic of Macedonia, the “Citizens for Macedonia” platform, over policy outcomes that originally derived from the movement actor. Furthermore, the text highlights the crucial role of the international community in shaping and implementing the policy outcomes, playing the role of international statebuilders in the process of reintroducing of democracy in the captured Macedonian state. The theoretical framework and the literature review present an attempt to bridge contemporary works on social movement studies with those on democratization and international state building. A lot of emphasis is also put on the peculiar political opportunity structure, and the difficult and movement-unfriendly conditions in which the citizens’ platform operated. On the other hand, the article tries to show the gains and losses of a coalition between an established political party, and a loose horizontal network of citizens and citizens’ organizations that advocate for rule of law and protection of human rights. The central conclusions that can be extrapolated from this work are the strong and committed claims by the movement, articulated through various repertoires of action, but also the active role of the international community, which presented a conditio sine qua non, bringing down the regime led by former PM Nikola Gruevski and freeing the state institutions previously occupied by the political parties in power.

“Belgrade to Belgradians, Not Foreign Capitalists”: International Statebuilding, Contentious Politics, and New Forms of Political Representation in Serbia

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. One of the main criticisms concerning the process of post-conflict transition in Serbia has been the lack of context sensitivity and participation of the local population in the decision-making process, especially regarding the most important issues that were addressed during the political and economic transformation of the country that began in 2001. This criticism became especially pronounced from the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, when the negative characteristics of international statebuilding became even more apparent, causing increased dependency on international institutions and further economic marginalisation of the most vulnerable groups. By looking at the movement “Don’t Drown Belgrade” and the series of large-scale protests in Belgrade in 2016, the article seeks to explore the main reasons for social discontent with the international-led statebuilding agenda in post-conflict Serbian society and the local strategies employed to resist and subvert this form of statebuilding.

Introduction: Contentious Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes.

Voice after Exit? Bulgarian Civic Activists between Protest and Emigration

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. Historically, civic activists who left their home countries in the wake of protests would either risk disappearing in anonymity or become engaged in political “exile networks.” However, since the outbreak of the “global wave” of protest, the ability of activists to take advantage of freedom of movement and technological advances in social media changed the framework and conditions of such “exile.” This article addresses the question of what happens when protest activists decide to go abroad to study, work, and build a life. We focus in particular on the case of Bulgaria, the fastest shrinking country in the world. On the basis of structured qualitative interviews with Bulgarian activists who have gone abroad in the aftermath of the 2013 Bulgarian protests, we trace how migration and intra-EU mobility affect the political participation of activists, the ways in which they participate, and their diagnoses of the present. In other words, we explore whether one can speak of “exit after voice,” leading in the long run to decrease in activism. We argue instead that we are witnessing a transformation of the dichotomy “exit-voice” into a more complex scale of forms of protest organization and participation, facilitated by social media and the freedom of movement within the EU. Herein, the real risk might be not that migration leads to political passivity, but that the new “voice” found through the experience abroad remains rather marginal as activists’ networks are transformed and community building becomes a challenge in an increasingly precarious world.

“Vrem o ţară ca afară!”: How Contention in Romania Redefines State-Building through a Pro-European Discourse

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. Massive protest waves, mainly led by younger citizens, appeared during the past years in Romania. [Gubernat and Rammelt] provide an analysis of the production of meaning by the “Romanian street” as a collective actor. They argue that “Vrem o ţară ca afară! (We want a country like abroad!)” became the leitmotif for important parts of the Romanian protests of the past eight years. For so doing, [Gubernat and Rammelt] analyze the discursive underpinnings and the constructed frames in recent protests in Romania. Their demonstration synthesizes a social phenomenon that appeared during the Roșia Montană protests of 2013, continued with the Colectiv protests of 2015 and was reconfirmed during the 2017–2018 anti-corruption protests: the dichotomy between the discursive appropriation of the West, as a benchmark of progress and social modernization and the “self-racism” manifested in these movements. The use of Frame Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis for the study of these waves of protests enables them to show how the Western hegemonic discourse on state-building provides the cultural conditions for social action as well as it enables mobilizing agents to frame national discontent. “‘Vrem o ţară ca afară!’ Redefining state-building through a pro-European discourse in Romania” concludes that recent protests in Romania reproduce Western ideals of modern state and politics through a value-based discourse around the idea of belonging to Europe.