Aungo Bw'Onderi Justus Current Project Aungo Bw'Onderi Justus Curriculum Vitae Current Project From Flows to Feuds: Portraits of Development and Projects of Poverty by Non-Governmental Organizations in Bosnia and Kenya Major international NGOs and Aid agencies have been born of crises: ICRC from the 1863 Battle of Solferiono; Save the Children Fund in 1919 out of the 1st World War while OXFAM 1942 and US CARE 1945 out of the 2nd World War (Cross, 2001). To a large degree, militarism and subsequent humanitarianism seem to represent the two sides of the same coin- humankind's failure to manage conflict peacefully (Slim, 1999. Despite absence of large scale conflict in certain places, poverty and disease have made NGOs and other aids agencies focus on development and democratization especially in Africa, Asia, Latin America and East and Central Europe, commonly known as the post-Soviet Countries. In these countries, NGOs have become primary humanitarian and development forces besides and sometimes beyond the state. Most of these NGO and agencies are born out of liberal democracies and economies in the Northern Hemisphere (western countries) to 'bring relief from suffering, sustainable development and democracy' in response to State failure under assault from globalization (Cross, 2001; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001). For my PhD research, I propose to investigate the NGO/expatriate-led projects on post-conflict reconstruction and poverty, and the portraits of development/relief NGOs and the local networks of volunteers/expatriates promote through respective narratives and imaginings with particular focus on selected communities in Bosnia and Kenya. Through this, I wish to contribute to the unraveling of the puzzle: whether the intensity of NGOs, aid agencies and foreign development /relief expatriates/volunteers in poor/ 'dysfunctional' communities translates to development and better living and functioning standards in those communities despite the  NGOs  repeated  claims  towards

the same. I further want to explore whether the flow of development aid and relief translates into specific imaginings and presentations of development, and civic relations and identities for/of the beneficiary communities and at what cost? The emergence of NGOs as a form of local-global mobilization and social movements parallels modernity and its progeny: globalization; emerging as both as agency and elixir to social, economic and political grievances. Their intrusive reconfiguration of space and dialectical manipulation of local reality is intriguing to social inquiry and action. I take the view that NGOs and other civic agencies of development (both local and global) are elite projects and networks negotiating for power, prestige and space ultimately creating and exacerbating inequalities and stratification since they are more exclusive than inclusive. Following Petras and Veltmeyer (2001) I approach them as instruments for delineating hegemonic projects, localizing the global, rearticulating the global neo-liberal agenda. In Bosnia and Kenya, though different in many ways, the place of NGOs and aid agencies in the imagination, making and (re)presentation of development can not be over-emphasized. The study thus will examine how the NGOs and their activities play the role of elite reproduction and exclusion in Bosnia and Kenya with 'orientalist' projections and portraits of the 'other'. Incidents of intrusive violations and violence become reflections of elite power contestation clashes; while echoing and reproducing the old orientalist project of historical imperialism. My proposal to research the work of NGOs as development agents and participants in the local-global power discourse as a comparative study of Africa and Eastern Europe is unique. This is a novel venture which I feel could unearth critical junctions and parallels relevant to development and social engineering. The potential challenges, social-cultural and economic contrasts and geo-politically located realities for the study and myself as an ethnographer from Africa studying Europe makes my study exciting and ground breaking.