Creating room for manoeuvre: domestic repertoires of action in international post-war interventions

Abstract

This article contributes to debates about the scope and influence of local agency in international state- and security-building interventions by investigating how domestic intermediary actors create and make use of their room for manoeuvre in intervention processes. The article empirically reconstructs a set of distinct domestic repertoires of action in intervention processes to highlight the different ways in which domestic actors ‘manage’ and ‘push back’ international donors. The article bases its argument on a qualitative study of domestic agency in two post-war political settings that have been exposed to multiple international state- and security-building interventions. It draws on problem-centred and expert interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016 in Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon to make its case.

Keywords:

• International interventions
• peacebuilding
• state-building
• local turn
• local agency
• Lebanon
• Côte d’Ivoire

Introduction

After the death of Hariri, we had a situation like after a cyclone, or an earthquake. It was really like after an earthquake, when plane after plane arrives, unloading the same kind of stuff, bottles of water, all planes unload bottles of water. … Everyone delivering the same kind of stuff. There was no coordination. So everyone brought the same equipment, the same telecom equipment, the same trainings. We took everything because we were embarrassed to say no. You have all these white men coming and you don’t want to say, ‘You travelled so far … to bring me a blanket, even though I have a Ferrari at home.’ But that’s how they imagine us, the Arabs. So in 2009 it started that we said, ‘No. Thank you, but no.’ And a planifaction [sic] team was set up, with roadmaps. (Security agency lieutenant colonel, Lebanon, March 2015)

The rise of international state- and security-building interventions in states emerging from violent conflict has extended and deepened external engagement in post-war situations. In contrast to long-established peacebuilding and reconciliation activities that are often directed at civil society organisations in post-war societies, these more recent interventions primarily focus on the rebuilding and reform of political and security institutions in states emerging from war. Questions about the overall effectiveness and, frequently, the shortcomings of these ambitious attempts to reform and rebuild political and security systems have received significant research attention. How these interventions work in practice and how relations between ‘international’ interveners and ‘local’ actors play out on the ground has received comparatively less attention.¹ In this context, recent research has moreover largely remained concerned with studying the agendas and perceptions of international actors in intervention processes.² However, we still know too little about the different ways in which local actors perceive of and engage in intervention processes. This article contributes to the emerging debate on the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’ of post-war interventions³ by examining how key domestic actors create and make use of their room for manoeuvre in state- and security-building interventions.

In recent research debates surrounding the ‘local turn’ in critical peace research, crucial new studies have extended our understanding of the agency choices of local actors in peacebuilding processes.⁴ What we often find in this literature, however, is an implicit binary depiction of local agency. On the one hand, critical peace research identifies local (everyday) forms of resistance to the imposition of international priorities as crucial.⁵ The local is here ‘defined in opposition to international, and local agency as resistance to the liberal peacebuilding project’.⁶ On the other hand, critical peace research has explored the risk that local actors in the peacebuilding field – for instance, local civil society organisations⁷ – are created by, co-opted into, or otherwise instrumentalised by the liberal intervention project and are thus deprived of their capacity for resistance.⁸

This article argues that we need to give more nuance to this binary understanding of local agency in intervention processes to better understand how interventions function and often fail. We therefore deepen and extend recent work that introduces typological theorising about local agency and places agency on a continuum ranging from the adoption of international goals and programmes to their appropriation or rejection.⁹ We contribute to this emerging debate by reconstructing an empirically saturated set of domestic repertoires of action in intervention processes that emphasises the active and strategic engagement of domestic actors in intervention processes. We show in detail how domestic actors strategise, ‘manage’ the intervention process and ‘push back’ against donor agendas. By paying close attention to the different strategies of navigating the logics of international intervention processes, the article complements the sometimes more broad-brush dichotomies of ‘resistance to’ or ‘co-optation into’ external agendas, which run the risk of stripping domestic actors of their creative and strategic agency by arguing that interventions are essentially donor-imposed processes.

We develop our argument by closely studying how domestic actors make use of the complex organisational procedures and bureaucratic logics associated with international assistance projects in two cases of long-standing international state- and security-building intervention. We also show that choices for a particular repertoire of action depend on the specific timing of an intervention process, especially on the overall political climate and the phase of the project cycle, as well as on the type of domestic actor the intermediaries represent and their structural and individual relationship with donors. Paying closer attention to these differences allows us to identify what room for manoeuvre domestic actors have to shape intervention processes.

Conceptualising intervention as a social process,¹⁰ we focus our empirical research on understanding how interventions manifest themselves on the ground and how they take a specific shape through people’s (inter)actions. Such an emphasis on the everyday activities that constitute interventions and on the perspective of those who actively engage in them daily complements existing studies that focus exclusively on the level of political leadership.¹¹ It also constitutes an effort to sound out in more detail the ‘margin for action and space for negotiation’ that domestic actors have.¹² To do so, we consider the specific group of ‘intermediary actors’ as particularly relevant for studying agency in intervention contexts. Alternatively called ‘brokers’ and ‘intermediaries’, these individuals are widely recognised as being significant for the shaping and reproduction of interventions.¹³ What lies at the core of the different definitions of ‘intermediaries’ is usually a broker’s activity or ability to bridge a gap – be it between centre and periphery, between different institutional levels and lifeworlds,¹⁴ or between global and local, external and internal. As outlined below, intermediary actors are by no means a homogenous group; they include a wide range of positions, career trajectories and capital endowments.

To reconstruct the spaces for intermediary agency, and to analyse the underlying power constellations in which the use of domestic repertoires of action is bound, we draw on qualitative empirical research. Between the beginning of 2015 and the end of 2016, we conducted field research in Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon for five months and ten months, respectively, and around 60 problem-focused expert interviews and background conversations.¹⁵ In line with recent methodological debates in political science and international relations (IR),¹⁶ we adopt an abductive research logic, relying on the movement between theory and empirics to design the research, analyse the empirical material and to build our case. For reconstructing the repertoires of action specifically, we first deduce standard categories (e.g. resistance to and compliance with) from existing research and complement these with the more fine-grained, inductively built categories represented in this article.

Room for manoeuvre: agency, power and repertoires of action

Our conceptualisation of the agency of the governed combines attention to crucial power relations in intervention processes with a pragmatist understanding of agency. Studies of local agency in international peace and state-building processes have so far remained relatively agnostic about the shapes and types of power at play in these situations. An implicit understanding of power that pitches powerful interveners against the relatively powerless intervened permeates current studies of intervention. Where power is explicitly part of the analysis – for example, in studies of resistance against interventions that build, for instance, on Scott’s work on ‘weapons of the weak’ – power is primarily seen as the ability to block, sabotage or avoid external interveners. Even where power is attributed to ‘the intervened’, it is often conceptually limited to the binaries of submission or rejection. Our research in two intervention contexts, however, shows that agency is crafted situationally in response to a (temporarily) existing power distribution.

In line with Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy of power – which distinguishes between compulsory, institutional, structural and productive forms of power – we assume that power comes in different forms. Our analysis shows that Barnett and Duvall’s ‘structural power’ is crucial for explaining domestic intermediaries’ perceptions of the room for manoeuvre they have in interventions.¹⁷ Structural power produces the social capacities of subject positions in direct relation to one another. It allocates differential capacities and typically differential advantages to different positions while simultaneously shaping the self-understanding and subjective interests of actors in these positions. Domestic actors’ room for manoeuvre within intervention societies is linked to these unequal positions. In short, agency emerges within the context of the possible. While structural power constitutes the overarching framework in which domestic actors find room for manoeuvre, intermediaries’ repertoires of action point to the importance of situational power relations that result from the mutual dependency in implementing intervention projects. Furthermore, this mutual dependency plays out differently across time: both the current phase in a project cycle and the long-term development of relations between different actors in the intervention field provides the context against which intermediaries create room for manoeuvre.

To ascertain what room for manoeuvre is available domestically in intervention processes, we reconstruct central ‘repertoires of action’ that intermediary actors use. Building on the notion of ‘repertoires of contention’, we define a repertoire of action as a range of activities and skills that are familiar to members of a specific group and from which they can choose to pursue a certain end.¹⁸ Not only does the notion of a repertoire emphasise a certain habitual element of action, it also implies innovation, in that it involves experimenting and improvising both with known and handed-down templates and through interactions with other actors involved.¹⁹ The practical repertoires found in our case analyses are thus understood to be ‘limited by individual and collective histories and may be more or less extensive and flexible’ and ‘require a certain degree of manoeuvrability in order to ensure the appropriateness of the response to the situation at hand’.²⁰ Thus, repertoires are not mechanically employed or routinised – they can and will change over time.

Agency, in a pragmatist understanding, cannot be abstracted from concrete situations and contexts, as actors are not understood as pursuing pre-established ends. Following Joas’s depiction of the ‘creative character of human action’,²¹ action is not simply the ‘realization of ends set beforehand’, as the setting of ends does not take place outside the specific context of action but is contingent on the specific situation and depends on the situationally embedded ‘creative solution of problems by an experimenting intelligence’. In short, action is creative, improvisational and foresightful. This conceptualisation of agency allows us to understand how actors are able to creatively shape their environments despite being embedded in structural relations of power.

Reconstructing domestic repertoires of action in Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon

We use two long-standing international state- and security-building interventions in Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon as research sites for exploring the modalities of domestic agency. By focusing on more than one research site, as is often the case in current research, we seek to identify more generalisable patterns of domestic agency through pertinent examples.²² While it is obvious that both sites differ fundamentally in terms of domestic conflict experiences and political orders, both political systems have hosted multiple comprehensive and long-term external interventions.²³ The intervention in Côte d’Ivoire represents a quasi ‘standard model’ of current state- and security-building interventions under a United Nations (UN) mandate. Here, the 2004 deployment of the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) – a large-scale peacekeeping effort – followed the outbreak of civil war in 2002, when northern rebel forces launched an armed uprising against government forces. After renewed fighting during the post-election crisis in 2011, multiple external actors (re-)launched international activities in Côte d’Ivoire with the goal of stabilising the country and supporting the Ivorian government in both disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) and security sector reform (SSR) processes. In Lebanon, external powers have long been a mainstay of the country’s domestic political order, which has been divided by more than a decade of civil war. Multilateral attempts at good governance and security-building were scaled up after the end of the Syrian occupation in 2005, while there was an upsurge in internationally supported reconstruction activities following the July 2006 war with Israel. However, the work of the multilateral UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is geographically and organisationally detached from the host of governance intervention projects that are financed by a large number of bi- and multilateral donors and coordinated from Beirut. As an upper middle-income country in the Middle East whose diaspora is estimated to number around 14 million people, Lebanon’s historical, geopolitical and socio-economic context differs considerably from that of Côte d’Ivoire and allows us to widen the reach of our research findings beyond a single case.

At the two research sites, we focused specifically on those intermediary actors who are involved in the planning and implementation of international programming activities, assuming that these intermediaries have a considerable role in shaping the actual manifestation of the international intervention. The majority of our domestic interlocutors were thus Ivorian and Lebanese nationals who were, by nature of their current jobs, positioned to partner, coordinate and interact with the international donor community on a day-to-day basis. The article is therefore not concerned with the problematic exclusion of domestic actors who do not fit Western interveners’ preferences. This ‘cherry picking’,²⁴ its Eurocentric ideational underpinning, and its far-reaching and often harmful consequences have been elaborated succinctly by other scholars in reference to civil society in intervention contexts.²⁵ We complement these studies by providing a detailed account of the room for manoeuvre of those intermediaries who are included in the project of intervention.

We categorise intermediaries into three rough groups: members of local governments and administrations, members of civil society, and local employees of international aid agencies.²⁶ Yet, as our empirical material and analysis demonstrates, these groups also require more nuanced differentiations in order for us to grasp the dialectic relationship between an intermediary’s position in the field of intervention and an intermediary’s room for manoeuvre. In the interventions we studied, intermediary actors in government or state administrations were often part of the security services – for example, police generals and colonels were often in charge of managing (partially) donor-funded branches of their security agency – or the administrative staff tasked with donor coordination. Civil society cannot be usefully understood as a homogenous group, as civil society in post-war contexts is both complex and fluid.²⁷ This frequently presented itself as an analytical challenge in our contexts, as our interlocutors often wore multiple hats: many of them did not only contribute to the work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) but simultaneously worked as consultants, in academia, or in civil society advocacy campaigns. The article, however, focuses on the local NGO segment of civil society – as these organisations rather than civil society on the grass-roots level constitute the implementing partners of international donors. Finally, we spoke to the local employees of relevant international units, programmes and projects. Besides domestic staff of international NGOs, this also included the ‘local’ employees of the UN, the EU and external companies implementing donor-funded projects and employees of individual donor countries’ aid agencies, embassies and political foundations.

Intervention as a given: mutual dependence and unequal power

Our findings showcase that everyday interactions in the two intervention processes under analysis were characterised both by mutual dependency and by structural inequality. According to one interlocutor, ‘What makes the relation stand is the need of donors to spend their money, and the need of civil society [and other implementing] organisations to get that money’ (NGO president, Lebanon, June 2016). In this relationship, the donor has more structural power because the donor has superior material resources and political clout. This is evidenced by international donors’ abilities to set the overall – and frequently competing – agendas of external intervention processes.

As a result, most domestic intermediaries felt that broader agenda setting in interventions was largely beyond their influence. Instead, they saw their influence as being limited to the specific project types and content to be implemented. In this regard, our study confirms the observation that domestic actors often feel forced to accept donors’ agenda setting – be it for security, stabilisation or improving gender equality.²⁸ Our systematic reconstruction of repertoires of action and perceived room for manoeuvre, however, also reveals that domestic intermediaries’ agency needs to be understood in a more nuanced way – that is, as being shaped against and within the context of such structurally imbalanced power relations. This also became visible in the intermediaries’ priorities and concerns. The interventions as such are generally not the focus of outright contestation and resistance but are rather taken as a given. Instead, our empirical material points to two repertoires of action that we group under ‘managing’ and ‘pushing back’ donor activities. While these repertoires overlap to a certain extent in practice, the logics of action behind them differ: managing donor activity is to a large degree a work on the relationship, specifically the active influencing of the relationship between intermediary actors and donors by investing in knowledge and preparation. Whereas pushing back concerns the substance of programming and includes strategies to change proposed projects through ‘persuasion’ or ‘tweaking’ project content. Both repertoires enrich earlier debates in the literature that have so far not discussed the ability of receiving-end actors to influence the course and substance of interventions in much detail.

‘Managing the donor’: influencing through preparation and knowledge

The active management of donor activities represents an important repertoire of action in our intervention contexts. With the right preparation and knowledge-based strategy, a domestic actor can get into a position where the actor is able to influence donors’ funding allocations. In the words of a general from a Lebanese security agency, ‘It’s up to us to know what we need and to control everything’ (Lebanon, April 2015). Clearly positioning oneself in the ‘game’ – by knowing and showing what you want, by being proactive and by directing donors – is perceived as an essential precondition for achieving one’s goals. The following activities were particularly important for the managing-the-donor repertoire: the cultivation of contacts in the international donor community; the deliberate studying of donor profiles, preferences and working procedures; the advanced planning of activities, and the strategic coordination of donor preferences and resource allocations.

Actively engaging in the cultivation of personal contacts in order to enlarge one’s network is expected to increase one’s possibilities for funding and collaboration with the donor community. Our interlocutors highlighted proactivity and perseverance as two important aspects when nurturing these contacts. In Lebanon as much as in Côte d’Ivoire, intermediaries see conferences, workshops and receptions as core networking opportunities where you can ‘make yourself known’,²⁹ ‘be vocal’, ‘hand out business cards’ and ‘institutionalise a regular contact’ with the international donor community (NGO director, Côte d’Ivoire, February 2016; state official, Côte d’Ivoire, March 2016; international NGO national staff member, Côte d’Ivoire, February 2016).³⁰ The consistent cultivation of contacts among the international donor community is widely perceived as a highly challenging task that despite requiring learning and a lot of work, increases one’s room for manoeuvre:

It’s a battle … You have to constantly pester, ... knock on people’s doors, … show courtesy, shake many hands, show presence … it’s really not easy. If I send a letter to [my international contact] and he doesn’t reply, do I sit here and wait? No! … What do you do? You have to insist, remind him/her … You have to maintain contact and open lines of communication. (International NGO, national staff member, Côte d’Ivoire, February 2016)

The deliberate studying of the donor complements this form of action. Knowing about the respective donors’ preferences for funding particular institutions or thematic areas and figuring out ‘who is sensitive to some subject’ (UN national staff member, Côte d’Ivoire, March 2016) is deemed an essential precondition for successful in advance planning of donor-funded activities:

You need to understand the structure of the counterpart to know which questions to ask to whom to get the right answers. You need to understand how they think, maybe not necessarily how they think, but how they work, how they are structured. (Security agency colonel, Lebanon, April 2016)

When entering into negotiations about funding allocation, numerous interlocutors have pointed to the necessity of proactive advanced planning of activities. As one interlocutor explained, ‘If we, the client, know what we need, then we have usually good results’ (Security agency general, Lebanon, April 2015). The primary purpose of a comprehensive and well-established ‘action plan’ is to limit donors’ abilities to impose their ideas and preferences:

We have been successful … in defining for ourselves what we want for our institution, for our country, and it’s up to us to define! … and then it needs to be us who approach the donors for funding or for technical assistance, but it’s not the donor who gives you your ideas … So, this is really important: define everything, [your activities,] have a good action plan before approaching the donor. Because, if we were to go to the donor without having a solid idea about what to do, we would subject ourselves to their diktat. (State official, Côte d’Ivoire, March 2016)

Domestic actors also pointed out that donors’ coordination strategies increase their room for manoeuvre. One form of coordinating relies on donors planning documents and, specifically, ‘pointing out to each country what they could work on’ (Security agency lieutenant colonel, Lebanon, March 2015). Through this process, the international donor is satisfied that it was able to support one specific issue area (a specific institution or thematic area) and allocate funds in a (supposedly) ‘meaningful’ way. This repertoire also involves intermediaries actively trying to stimulate and then exploit a sense of competition among the donor community:

Don’t go to the donors one by one. You can organize some kind of session where you have all the donors, a roundtable, and then you present them your programme. Once there is a competition between donors, more can be done ... if, for example, the German ambassador says, ‘OK, me, I’m interested in this one’, the French then says, ‘Oh, I would also like to engage …’ So, you have to do a kind of competition between donors. And if for example one of them finances one of your programmes, you say, ‘OK, on that programme we prefer this donor.’ The donor feels proud and gives money. (UN national staff member, Côte d’Ivoire, March 2016)

As domestic actors consciously seek to manage donors and continue to forge a close working relationship, they increase their confidence and room for manoeuvre to push back some of the donor-suggested activities and terms of engagement through explicit or implicit tweaking or persuasion. Here, domestic actors often perform a tightrope act as they do ‘not want to discourage them [the donor] but … to give them a push’ in the right direction (Security agency former general, Beirut, April 2015). The following section explains how our domestic interlocutors have pushed against proposed donor activities.

‘Pushing back’: avoiding imposition through tweaking and persuasion

Many interlocutors drew pictures of donors that were unwilling – or sometimes incapable – of adjusting project parameters in response to specific realities on the ground once they had been stipulated in a framework document. As a Lebanese NGO founder reiterated, ‘We’re really fighting for some issues and if it doesn’t work then we should announce it and say it’s not working instead of trying to get the project’ (NGO founder, Lebanon, June 2016, emphasis ours). When asked what information he would pass on to a potential successor, he said he would advise his successor to ‘push back’, reaffirming that ‘it’s OK!’ He further explained that it was important to not let yourself be pushed to accept tasks or terms you do not want to do and to not become enmeshed in a donor’s political agenda that you do not support.

Concrete accounts of intermediaries pushing back, which feature more prominently in the Lebanese context, reveal two main forms: tweaking and persuasion. The problem this repertoire responds to is the mismatch between the donor’s ideas about what and how something should be done, on the one hand, and what the intermediary considers realistic, important, sustainable or useful, on the other hand. These two types of pushing back draw on different logics. Tweaking follows the assumption that the donor cannot be convinced of the intermediary actor’s point of view and that it is not worth the effort to persuade him otherwise. Persuasion, however, is used according to the assumption that, under certain conditions, domestic local actors can openly address problems and contradicting agendas with donors and realistically hope that they can come to an understanding with the donors. For instance, the founder of a Lebanese NGO argued that his NGO’s good reputation allowed them to tell the donor

‘listen, we are having a fight with [state authorities], they are corrupt or whatever. So we are not able always to achieve a project as we said we would do it. We have to do it another way.’ And the donors generally understand it. They know we’re working very hard, it’s not bullshit. (NGO founder and board member, Lebanon, June 2016)

If they consider themselves unable to decisively influence donors’ agendas by persuasion, domestic actors can attempt to push back by tweaking their work in a way that the presentation – but not necessarily the substance – remains in accordance with the donors’ terms of engagement. Projects are thus either ‘relabelled’ (i.e. brought in line with the donor’s preferences or terms of engagement) or ‘window dressed’ (e.g. by trying to shift the donor’s attention to positive examples to diverge attention from setbacks or failures). Our domestic interlocutors describe these attempts as an implicit resistance to international terms of engagement they consider wrong, irrelevant or wasteful. Relabelling or ‘tweaking around a little bit’ as one NGO founder (Lebanon, June 2016) puts it are usually argumentative and discursive moves that employ language and concepts to shift perceptions and serve to protect those lines of work that constitute a productive allocation of resources in the eyes of the intermediaries. These can refer to abstract concepts or more specific project content, and can range from renaming activities to forging new links between previously unrelated thematic fields. The most straightforward form of relabelling is the mere renaming of a project activity without changing its substance. The founder of a Lebanese NGO explained that

we started [some years ago] a project about [X]. We knew that it will not finish in three years, but the EU had to finish it in three years. So we submitted another proposal at that time, called … [Y], which basically did very similar activities. (NGO founder, Lebanon, June 2016)

In this case, relabelling was portrayed as a response to unrealistic donor timelines and a necessary requirement in order ‘not to lose momentum’ and to allow for ‘a continuation of our previous achievements’ (ibid.). Beyond maintaining continuity and effectiveness in donor–intermediary relations, relabelling can also serve as a means to avoid open confrontation and salvage good relationships, as a national staff member of a UN organisation in Côte d’Ivoire pointed out:

You have to make sure that everybody is made happy. When there’s something that, for example, the European Union wants that does not correspond to the vision of the government, you have to find agreement, reformulate certain things, put them in a different context or framework … So this is how you try to juggle until you arrive at a consensus. (UN national staff member, Côte d’Ivoire, March 2016)

Another form of relabelling can be identified in interlocutors’ attempts to write their own field of expertise into the donor’s discourse. This was described succinctly by the programme manager of a Lebanese NGO who had to find a response to a recent shift in donor preferences:

Suddenly, in 2012, things drastically changed … So they are more looking into stability, social cohesion … Which is a bit different from our scope of work … Now we have to address human rights issues with a security discourse … So we are changing the perspective of things. (NGO programme manager, Lebanon, June 2016)

Concretely, for the respective NGO, this meant embarking on a communicative strategy to try to convince donors that human rights violations in relation to prisons and the right to a fair trial are root causes of radicalisation in Lebanon. Thereby, they created an argumentative link between their own human rights work and the donor’s fear of radicalisation and terrorism. This strategy did not require ‘inventing’ connections but instead highlighting a well-established reading of social causality that was not (at that time) prominent in the donor discourse.

Finally, attempts to direct observers’ attention towards what they would perceive as positive and away from what they might see as failure or resistance are described as ‘window dressing’. One example from Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF) was described by a UN agency member:

They [the ISF] became more careful. There is a human rights component now; they have a human rights division. They have added more women in their staff in their offices. And the women they always put them in the PR posts. They have a beautiful, gorgeous woman, she’s an officer. Whenever they have a PR event they send her. To the extent that we all sit and watch her as she’s pretty. Say that ‘look how ISF is beautiful, ISF is about modernity, ISF is putting the right people’ – but she’s not the main thing, this is deceiving. ISF is a place where policemen still harass. (UN staff member, Lebanon, June 2016)

Understanding the different motivations behind the different forms of tweaking is necessary to avoid reading these repertoires as intentionally deceptive or malevolent practices. Many donor representatives did perceive domestic actors as periodically engaging in acts of deception. Yet, as reconstructed here, while both strategies of pushing back can stem from a certain motivation to resist international donors’ dictates of terms, they also often result from an intermediary’s genuine interest in the meaningful and effective allocation of international funds. Tweaking project content can therefore be read as a ‘creative solution’ to the problems arising from the asymmetrical power relations in interventions.³¹

Variations in the uses of repertoires of action

Overall, we find that intermediary actors’ abilities to carve out room for manoeuvre and to use certain repertoires varies according to the specific moment of intervention, particularly in terms of the phase of the project cycle and the overall political climate, the type of domestic actor they represented, and their structural and individual relationship with donors. In both cases, we find a widespread conviction that domestic actors have little influence on overarching donor agendas. This finding partially results from our choice, given our interest in everyday manifestations of intervention, to not primarily target top-level politicians who conduct political negotiations with the donor government. It is remarkable, however, that agenda-setting powers are attributed primarily to donor governments, while the role of domestic politicians is addressed to a much lesser degree. The design of international projects and their overall agenda thus remains characterised by unequal power relations in which domestic room for manoeuvre remains severely constrained. This changes, however, in line with the project cycle – particularly in phases where funding has been pledged for concrete programmes or projects and domestic actors are able to manage donors or even push back against specific ideas and projects during the implementation phase.

Yet, as instances of relabelling show, domestic actors’ use of a certain repertoire during the funding and implementation phase sometimes constituted a response to changing political circumstances and subsequent agenda changes on the part of donors. For example, when terrorist attacks in Europe and the ‘refugee crisis’ came to dominate the European political debate, European donors’ agendas and their willingness to allocate funds to certain sectors in Lebanon shifted. New priorities regarding the cooperation with and funding of Lebanese security agencies at the expense of human rights compliance and funding of civil society actors working on human rights negatively affected the availability of funds for NGOs and decreased NGOs’ power vis-à-vis donors and their relative position vis-à-vis domestic security agencies. As we saw, the NGO whose programme manager described their discursive adaptations responded to this new situation by persuading donors that their work remained relevant to donor interests. It is likely that this particular NGO felt empowered to engage in such a strategy of persuasion because it had already established itself as a prominent, visible and trusted partner to international donors in the human rights field in Lebanon. This highlights that, in practice, investing in successful ‘relationship work’ (e.g. in the form of managing donors) increases the room to push back.

This example also reminds us that the specific characteristics of an intermediary actor (e.g. its position in transnational and national networks of power and its dependence on external resources) condition its ability to act. Representatives of security agencies and other government institutions are more powerful vis-à-vis donors as they are often approached as a ‘partner by default’ by external donors. When security and stabilisation constitute high priorities on the donor agenda and lead to a refocusing of cooperation on these goals, certain ministries and state security institutions become partners and usually cannot be side-lined; this can also be observed in the domains of democracy promotion, rule of law reform and good governance. One effect of the liberal international state-building model and its strong and ingrained preference for formal state institutions is that donors tend to see cooperation with state institutions as the natural way of ‘going about’ international assistance.

If, however, the relevant responsibilities are formally and practically spread across various agencies – as is the case in the security field in Côte d’Ivoire and even more so in Lebanon – competition arises between different state agencies. In these cases, intermediaries tend to engage in practices which we broadly assign to the repertoire of managing the donor. In such a situation, the structural position of a state agency intermediary is closer to that of an NGO intermediary, whose room for manoeuvre is strongly defined by the perception that it finds itself in competition with other NGOs and is thus structurally more dependent on the donor than the donor is on it. Another fundamental difference between state actors and NGOs relates to the availability of core funding and the dependence on project cycles. As most donors have cut down or completely phased out core funding (i.e. non-project funding for running costs, such as staff salaries and office rent), most NGOs in our cases depend almost exclusively on project funds, whereas state actors’ positions are seemingly less precarious. Even if state actors depend on international funds for operation, their fundamental institutional existence as such is never seriously at stake. In the same vein, international NGOs and development agencies (e.g. various UN agencies) have a comparative advantage over national NGOs when it comes to acquiring funding from donor governments.

Yet, NGOs can approach the status of a preferred partner. This can happen if they manage to gain an ‘absolute advantage’ vis-à-vis other actors in cases where they have managed to position themselves as the undisputed expert on a certain topic or task (NGO president, Lebanon, June 2016). These path dependency tendencies – where one or several donors repeatedly choose the same organisations as partners – are usually criticised for selectively favouring ‘donor darlings’, which constitute ‘small groups of known collaborative partners’.³² Seen from the vantage point of intermediaries and their ability to choose between repertoires, a situation where an NGO becomes a preferred partner significantly enhances the domestic actors’ room for manoeuvre and willingness to push back. If we assume that actors’ goals and ends are not predefined but emerge in concrete situations, domestic actors might only consider pushing back once they believe their action has a realistic chance of succeeding without endangering their partner relationship with the donor.

While we observe these tendencies in both Lebanon and Côte d’Ivoire, intermediaries’ experiences and strategy choices differed in important regards. Overall, our interlocutors in Lebanon portrayed themselves as more self-assertive vis-à-vis donors, more often and more vividly engaging in and calling for forms of pushing back than intermediaries in Côte d’Ivoire. One of several potential explanations for this is the different socio-economic situation in each country and the diverse socio-economic positions of the intermediaries. Many of the Lebanese intermediaries, for example, hold passports from the respective donor countries or previously resided in a donor country. Many of them had PhDs or were considering pursuing one in the future. Thus, the Lebanese intermediaries’ comparatively high socio-economic status might put them on a more equal standing vis-à-vis the ‘internationals’, who represent the donors in direct encounters, and allow them to push back in various ways.

Conclusions

The article reconstructed an empirically saturated set of domestic repertoires of action in post-war state- and security-building interventions. By emphasising both the active and strategic engagement of domestic actors in intervention processes, the article sought to present a more nuanced depiction of domestic agency that goes beyond current expectations of resistance to or co-optation of local actors into hegemonic liberal interventions. We identified two repertoires of action that we believe constitute subtle ways of exerting influence and improving one’s position vis-à-vis international donors. These repertoires usefully expand the typologies of ‘local agency’ found so far in the literature on international peacebuilding and state-building. The two outlined repertoires of ‘managing’ and ‘pushing back’ showed that domestic actors have a clear understanding of funding schemes and cycles, project application logics, and a precise knowledge of the overarching norms that legitimise international project work (e.g. transparency and local ownership). The observed ability of local intermediary actors to learn, understand and use these logics of international project work to their own advantage has, in our reading of the empirical material, empowered domestic actors in long-term intervention processes. This successful appropriation of international project logics, we argue, enabled domestic actors to successfully navigate complex intervention settings and, at times, to outmanoeuvre international donors. We found that the repertoires of action used by domestic intermediaries depended on their relative position in the intervention context and on the specific stage of project design or implementation.

Finally, our attention to how domestic actors engage in intervention processes led us to reconfigure one of the central (though often implicit) assumptions of contemporary interventions research: that domestic agency in intervention societies is above all defined by the intervention and the actions of interveners. We found, however, that this might well not be the case, as domestic agency was not always solely directed at the interveners but followed much more complex rationales and logics that at times appeared to have little to do with what international actors want. We therefore argue that exclusively focusing on intervener–intervened relations conceals the ‘plurality of social logics’,³³ the diversity of goals and interests within the ‘camps’ of interveners and intervened,³⁴ and the importance of (often ambiguous) mundane everyday practices that, together, constitute intervention as a process.

Our in-depth analysis of domestic agency choices has substantial implications for both (international) intervention practices and the study of intervention processes. Even though we found that domestic actors have considerable leeway when managing donor activities, their self-perceived inability to influence the overall agenda of cooperation constitutes a major source of conflict and should be taken into account by international policy-makers. Moreover, we found that tactics which are often perceived as ‘deception’ by international actors can also be seen more neutrally as strategies designed to (i) carve out room for agency in response to the power imbalances of intervention that precede and frame the concrete interaction and (ii) avert the negative consequences of mismatches between external and domestic agendas.

Finally, domestic agency remains a deeply elusive concept that raises a number of difficult-to-overcome methodological challenges. Actions are interpreted differently by various observers. Current research is often not explicit about how observed empirical phenomena are assigned to specific typological categories of action. This points us to a larger methodological challenge: the identification of specific repertoires of action is primarily based on an interpretation of external actors’ and domestic actors’ interpretations of what is happening at the domestic level. While this task of interpreting interpretations is intrinsic to interpretive and constructivist research, we argue that this problem is particularly challenging when conducting intervention research in primarily postcolonial political contexts. Knowledge production dynamics of interventions and their effects are strongly linked to overarching questions about hierarchy and inequality in North–South relations. Recent research has started to address some of the issues concerning unequal knowledge production and representations of ‘the local’ in research by focusing, for instance, on local tactics of resistance against the misrepresentation of domestic agency in academia and on how representations of the local relate to particular political agendas in peacebuilding.³⁵ We argue that it is necessary to build on this research and advance a more reflective research agenda for the study of international interventions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Notes on contributors

Sina Birkholz is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700: Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood, and a PhD candidate in political science at the Berlin Graduate School of Transnational Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.

Tilmann Scherf is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700: Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood, and a PhD candidate in political science at Freie Universität Berlin.

Ursula C. Schroeder is Professor of international security at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and directs the research project ‘The Politics of State- and Security-Building in Areas of Limited Statehood’ at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700: Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood.

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to our many interview partners and interlocutors in Lebanon and Côte d’Ivoire. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from Third World Thematics for their substantive comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, we wish to thank the participants of the workshop ‘Aneignung und Abwehr – Die Auseinandersetzung lokaler Akteure mit globalen Normen und Politiktransfers’ (Freie Universitaet Berlin, 23–24 October 2015) for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article and Jill Poeggel, Patrick Mesenbrock and Manuela Peitz for excellent research assistance.

Notes

1. While this article uses the terms ‘external’/‘international’ and ‘local’/‘domestic’, we consider these labels as social constructs, although this makes them no less real (Merton, “Thomas Theorem,” 380). We found that in our intervention contexts ‘the international’, ‘the expat’, and ‘the donor’ constituted central categories in our interlocutors’ world construction, irrespective of their own position. We have therefore maintained these labels where they reflect the socially constructed positions in the field.

2. See e.g. Autesserre, Peaceland; Hirblinger and Simons, “The Good, the Bad, and the Powerful”; and Koddenbrock, The Practice of International Humanitarian Intervention.

3. See Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding”; and Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance.

4. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building.”

5. See e.g. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; and Leonardsson and Rudd, “The ‘Local Turn’ in Peacebuilding.”

6. Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding,” 861.

7. See e.g. Verkoren and Leeuwen, “Civil Society in Peacebuilding”; Cubitt, “Constructing Civil Society”; and Pouligny, “Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding,” 501.

8. See e.g. Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn in Peacebuilding”; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace.”

9. See e.g. Björkdahl and Gusic, “‘Global’ Norms and ‘Local’ Agency”; Björkdahl and Höglund, “Precarious Peacebuilding”; and Keranen, “International Statebuilding as Contentious Politics.”

10. See Long, Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives.

11. See e.g. Fisher, “When It Pays to Be a ‘Fragile State.’”

12. Verkoren and van Leeuwen, “Civil Society in Peacebuilding.” 169.

13. Lewis and Mosse, Development Brokers and Translators; Schlichte and Veit, “Three Arenas”; and Bierschenk et al., Local Development Brokers in Africa.

14. Bierschenk et al., Local Development Brokers in Africa.

15. See e.g. Bogner et al., Interviewing Experts; and Witzel and Reiter, The Problem-Centred Interview.

16. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, Interpretation and Method; and Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design.

17. Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” 52f.

18. Tilly, Contentious Performances.

19. For these distinctions, see Alimi, “Repertoires of Contention,” 1, 2.

20. Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency?” 980.

21. Joas, The Creativity of Action, 274.

22. See Flyvbjerg, “Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research,” 288.

23. For the case of Lebanon, see Knudsen and Kerr, Lebanon: After the Cedar Revolution; and Ṭarābulsī, A History of Modern Lebanon; for the case of Côte d’Ivoire, see Bellamy and Williams, “Local Politics and International Partnerships”; and Mehler, “From ‘Protecting Civilians.’”

24. Cubitt, “Constructing Civil Society,” 97, 98.

25. See Cubitt, “Constructing Civil Society”; Datzberger, “Peace Building and Depoliticisation”; Howell and Lind, “Manufacturing Civil Society”; and Verkoren and van Leeuwen, “Civil Society in Peacebuilding.”

26. See Schlichte and Veit, “Three Arenas.”

27. Verkoren and Leeuwen, “Civil Society in Peacebuilding,” 168; and Pouligny, “Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding,” 48ff.

28. Datzberger, “Peace Building and Depoliticisation”; and Howell and Lind, “Manufacturing Civil Society.”

29. This and all subsequent quotations from interviews in Côte d’Ivoire have been translated from French into English by the authors.

30. While the quotations illustrating this repertoire mainly stem from Côte d’Ivoire, the data from participant observation in Beirut confirms the findings.

31. Joas, The Creativity of Action, 274.

32. Cubitt, “Constructing Civil Society,” 102.

33. Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, xii.

34. Denskus, “Performing Peace-Building.”

35. Kappler, “Coping with Research”; and Hirblinger and Simons “The Good, the Bad, and the Powerful.”