PS-IRAQ · Performing a State: State-building in Iraq (2003-2006).

Performing a State: State-building in Iraq (2003-2006).

This project examines the interconnection of knowledge and practice when statebuilding, a set of practices and ideas with roots in policy and academia, is translated into projects. This project argues that how we understand the state is as important a question as how the state is crafted in particular periods of time. It asks how is the state (as an object of intervention conceived), identified, quantified and acted upon in the production of knowledge about intervention and during the intervention itself? How does the act of intervention and the knowledge that informs it become part of the reality such intervention seeks to amend? This project contributes to a deeper theoretical understanding of the political agency of the “state” and the nature of its relation with the knowledge and expertise that are produced about it and that aim to mould it. It generates conceptual and empirical insights relevant to European external action in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries, especially crisis response and state-building. European excellence and innovation is promoted by developing a reflexive understanding of the relationship between social science knowledge and state-building practice and policy. Lessons from the US experience enhance the mutual understanding of US policy formation and social scientific knowledge formation processes. This will enhance potential for European international cooperation on state-building. The objectives of this MSCA are: 1) Study the relationship between knowledge production and political engineering in state and nation-building of occupied Iraq (2003-6); 2) Analyse how scientific knowledge of the state acted as a constituent element of political agency. 3) Develop detailed analysis of two sites of state and nation-building in Iraq (2003-6). These cases are: a) The occupation’s and US efforts in restoring electrical supply and rebuilding the national electrical grid; b) The occupation's and US effort in the introduction of new Iraqi representative bodies.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз