Conflict, International Intervention and Local Agency: Education in a Changing Global Order

This book analyses international interventions in the education sector of conflict-affected countries in a world order shifting towards multipolarity.

The work presents a genealogy of interventions in the education sector and unravels which agendas, among security, peace, humanitarianism and emergency, underpin such interventions. By using a comparative case study analysis across
three regional expanses and, more specifically, three countries - Kosovo, Niger and Jordan - the book aims to contribute to reflections on the interaction between the national and the international. The research finds that an overarching stabilization imperative has informed international projects on education reform in the three respective countries. As the world is becoming increasingly multipolar and new threats are being framed as challenging and threatening the security of Western donors, local actors have more agency towards international templates of intervention. The book shows how contemporary processes of state- and nation-building in conflict-affected global peripheries are shaped by substantial forms of external intervention, in which practices of sovereignty and statehood are continuously supervised and negotiated. The author advocates for a re-adaptation of International Relations theoretical lenses, which goes beyond the methodological nationalism and disciplinary parochialism that has characterized much of the existing literature on state making/unmaking and international interventions in a globalized world.

This book will be of much interest to students of education, international intervention, peace studies, security studies and International Relations.

Ervjola Selenica is a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor in Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the University of Bologna, Italy, and associate research fellow at the University of Sussex, UK.