This volume started with a belief that global–local connections were poorly understood by both scholars and practitioners in general, and in Africa in particular. We felt some of these gaps could be addressed by bringing different perspectives into creative interaction with each other, both within disciplines (e.g. comparative politics and international relations within the discipline of political science) and across them (e.g. history, political science, and anthropology). Our entry into these issues was via what is usually termed international “intervention” and the question of how “networks” that form between global, state, and local forces channel these interventions in ways that often produce unintended outcomes. Our notion of intervention was expansive: we included not just peacekeeping forces or structural adjustment packages (i.e. the activities of juridical international institutions) but a wide range of practices by “external” institutions that shaped political processes in Africa – commercial circuits, NGOs, mercenaries, and missionaries, for example.

Although we began with an expansive view of intervention, we soon discovered that it was not adequate for examining these processes as they involved the production of authority and order “on the ground.” It became clear that we needed to focus on how networks, and the goods, power, and ideas that flow within them, “bumped into” broad political and economic structures, global discourses, and local socio-economic and political practices.