Rethinking international intervention through coeval engagement: Non-formal youth education and the politics of improvement

After important critiques highlighted that studies of peacebuilding and statebuilding tend to bypass people living the consequences of intervention, scholars moved to include local experiences and subjects into knowledge production. This article builds upon these efforts by identifying and then furthering their common goal of coeval engagement. Coeval engagement implies encountering interlocutors as contemporaneous subjects of international politics and centring their experiences as a base for knowledge production. While the urgency and ongoing failures of coeval engagement are widely discussed, I focus on a thus far unconsidered possibility: that coeval engagement is impossible within the conceptual confines of intervention itself. The article delineates two defining parameters of intervention thinking that limit ongoing efforts at coeval engagement: predefined fields of visibility and the local-international binary. As an alternative, it proposes seeing intervention as part of a wider politics of improvement. This conceptual shift leads to unexpected empirical sites and continues challenging intervention’s constitutive binaries. The potential of this reorientation is demonstrated by showing how a common tool of ‘soft’ statebuliding – non-formal youth education – functions within the politics of youth (un)employment in Serbia.