In "Intervention as Indirect Rule", Alex Veit uses a close study of the district of Ituri in the Congo, a major battlefield and a laboratory for international intervention, to explore the micropolitics of warfare and statebuilding. Combining detailed firsthand empirical data with a historically informed analysis, Veit shows the effect that contemporary humanitarian interventions have on state-society relations. He also pays particular attention to the question of why the very organizations that should be helping with international statebuilding efforts - local authorities and civil society groups - so often turn out to be corrupt or hostile. Ultimately Veit argues that international intervention tends inadvertently to replicate - or even amplify - historical structures of political inequality, rather than establishing a liberal form of statehood.
