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Chapter 3 examines the leadership role of the United Nations, from 2001 to 2005, in helping the government and people of Afghanistan to build democratic institutions and practices at national and local levels. The UN, seeking a better form of governance that could also politically unite non-Taliban factions through the Bonn Agreement, pursued with Afghan elites a risky strategy of democratization with a “light footprint” during a (at the time) low-intensity insurgency. Despite skillful efforts to engage traditional authorities and governing institutions, such as the loya jirga, moving politics away from ethnicity, sectarianism, and other forms of division embedded in Afghan society to something more merit-based and rooted in modern democratic values faced innumerable challenges, especially given the insufficient international resources allocated. By pinpointing shortcomings from the Bonn Agreement implementation period, the “Post-Bonn Strategy,” designed in late 2005, is shown to give heightened attention toward building local capacity for subnational governance, executive—legislative relations, managing elections, and strengthening the rule of law and fight against corruption.

The European powers who ruled areas of Africa during parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought with them ideas about public administration. Although they may have governed their colonies somewhat differently, they did use models of public administration brought from home to rule, and also to train local administrators. After independence the former colonial powers continued to have some influence over governance in the new nations. This chapter examines the extent to which the administrative traditions have influenced administration in the former colonies, as well as the interaction of traditional forms of governance with “modern” styles of governance coming from the Global North. This chapter focuses on Africa but the same questions could be raised about the impact of colonial administration in other parts of the world.

Oral histories of Pacific Islanders who lived through World War II and its aftermath burst with memories of food: the hunger and deprivation of wartime, the forced agricultural labor, and the revelatory liberation of a full plate after the guns finally fell silent. The image of generous Americans bearing food is pervasive in written accounts of the war as well. But on bypassed islands like Pohnpei in the Central Carolines the story was never quite so clear-cut, if indeed it was anywhere. On Pohnpei, American personnel landed in small numbers without an overabundance of supplies, plunging into a society that had used food and gift giving to define its social identities, politics, and relationships with outsiders for centuries. Pohnpei therefore offers an opportunity to rethink military gifts of food on an island where gifts were few and often contested, where American sailors imbued food and nutrition with their own anxieties over race and modernity, where military planners moved to assert control over imports to shield the region from subversive foreign influence, and where Pohnpeians swiftly drew American military personnel into the logic of their own food politics.