'A university degree is a requirement for national leadership.' This remarkably widely-held view emerged in the twentieth century and was one shared by the Asquith Commission, the 1940s committee whose recommendations rolled out higher education across the late-colonial Anglophone world. Views such as this embedded university students deep within state-centric projects of political and economic development.

This concluded project, financed by the AXA Research Fund, looked comparatively at remote-controlled interventions and the partial withdrawal of international actors from global crisis zones, taking as its starting point the conflict in Mali, West Africa, and the confluence of risks which international interveners have been dealing with there – including, besides security and livelihoods, the perceived ‘risk’ of migration.