More about the project

• Core Research Questions

  • How do diverse actors — gorvenment officials, UN agencies, NGOs, foreign missions — conceptualize and enact "the state" in conditions of prolonged insecurity and overlapping intervention? 
  • How are global frameworks of capacity-building, partnership, and post-conflict reconstruction translated into practice, and how do they encounter friction and get reworked through interaction? 
  • How are legitimacy, sovereignty, and accountability defined, performed, and redistributed through encounters between national and international actors? 
  • How do colonial histories and geopolitical asymmetries structure the terms on which contemporary intervention unfolds, without fully determining its outcomes? 

• Research Team

  Flávio Eiró — Principal Investigator 
  Assistant Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology · VU Amsterdam 

   Flávio Eiró works at the intersection of political anthropology, sociology, and public administration, with research on how citizens, frontline workers, and political actors construct and contest the state in everyday practice, primarily in Brazil. His research focuses on how international interventions reshape state authority and everyday institutional practice, with particular attention to legitimacy, accountability, and colonial entanglements. 

  Within this project, he leads the Haiti subproject: an ethnographic study of how diverse actors — Haitian officials, international organizations, NGOs, and foreign missions — enact and contest "the state" in a context of prolonged insecurity and dense external intervention. Fieldwork follows meetings, coordination platforms, and inter-organizational interfaces as the primary sites where governance is assembled. 

  Eva van Roekel 
  Associate Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology · VU Amsterdam 

   Eva van Roekel works at the intersection of visual anthropology, phenomenology, and the anthropology of violence, with long-term fieldwork in Venezuela and Argentina on morality, emotion, and crisis. Her contribution to New Imperial Utopias centers on Venezuela, where she leads a transdisciplinary project examining how state imaginaries are made and unmade in domestic space. 

  Working with collaborators from Palta Film, the Venezuela subproject develops an ethnographic film tracing how ordinary Venezuelans live the waning presence of the state through decaying homes — crumbling walls, flickering electricity, empty containers — that serve as lived archives of what the state once promised and has since abandoned. The project attends to the intersecting temporalities of oil boom, economic collapse, and uncertain foreign intervention. 

   Wiebe Ruijtenberg 
  Assistant Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology · VU Amsterdam 

   Wiebe Ruijtenberg works at the intersection of migration studies, social citizenship, and the anthropology of the state, with prior research on how migrants and institutions negotiate belonging and welfare in Amsterdam and Cairo. His subproject focuses on Gaza and the West Bank, juxtaposing Palestinian efforts to build a state with international efforts to develop and reconstruct the territory. 

  Through ethnographic fieldwork and policy analysis, the Palestine subproject examines how facts on the ground are unmade and remade as a diverse and unequal set of actors negotiate the conflicting ideals of national sovereignty, humanitarian protection, and integration into the global economy. The project focuses on infrastructure reconstruction as a site where authority is established, contested, and redistributed. 

• Approach and Method

  The project is grounded in multi-sited organizational ethnography. Rather than studying communities from the outside, it follows actors embedded in administrative, diplomatic, and development infrastructures — attending the coordination meetings, policy negotiations, project events, and institutional routines through which governance is constituted in practice. 

  This means treating documents, agendas, reports, and inter-organizational correspondence not as records of decisions already made, but as active sites where authority is performed, contested, and redistributed. The aim is not to evaluate policy effectiveness, but to understand the conceptual and institutional work through which different actors construct, claim, and contest the authority to govern. 

  The three case studies — Haiti, Venezuela, Palestine — are not treated as comparative units, but brought into productive analytical conversation around shared questions: how intervention imagines and enacts "the state"; how legitimacy is claimed under conditions of external dependency; how colonial and geopolitical asymmetries structure the terms of governance. 

• Advisory Board

  The project counts on the expert advice and is accountable to its advisory board: 

  Prof Inanna Hamati-Atay
  Professor of global political anthropology, university of groningen 

  Prof Rosana Pinheiro-Machado 
  Professor of global Studies, University College Dublin 

• News & Events

  Launching: October 14, 2026, 11:00. Contact Dr Flávio Eiró for more information. 

• Outputs & Publications

  Launching: October 14, 2026, 11:00. Contact Dr Flávio Eiró for more information. 

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