Can Intervention Work?

Full disclosure: I adore Rory Stewart. I am a huge fan of clinically insane people in government. I think he is incurably, fascinatingly insane, and I always find his writing clever and insightful. Plus, he walked across Asia, taught at Harvard then got elected to Parliament. Like I said, crazy. (Th......more

Two well-written and insightful essays by long-time practitioners of international peace and conflict resolution/state building efforts. The overall message is a sobering one -- peace-building and state-building are not impossible, but they are frequently orders of magnitude more complicated, danger......more

Focusing on Afghanistan since 2001, Rory Stewart identifies reasons for the failure of intervention to achieve a "sustainable solution". Goals have been unclear, obscured by buzzwords and western-style "management speak". Leaders sent in to sort out the problems have stayed for only short periods, w......more

A short (192 pages) but good book with two mostly unrelated essays. The first is by Rory Stewart, detailing the failings of the US state-building project in Afghanistan. Stewart echoes the problems described in Séverine Autesserre's "Peaceland": the international "state-builders" often did not have......more

A thought-provoking book that addresses the issue of intervention in two parts. Rory Stewart convincingly puts forward the case that policy planners working in different countries need to have a proper understanding of the local customs, history and language, drawing on his own experiences in Afghan......more