ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the gap between the aspirations and actualities of musical-social projects in conflict-affected settings. Applying a conceptual lens of order and disjuncture and drawing on perspectives of participants from projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, it examines three episodes where internal and external forces created a rupture in the idealised ‘order’ of a project. However, rather than seeing the resulting experience of disjuncture as anomalous, the chapter argues that disjuncture is more productively understood as the norm, and an important source of insight about the potential and limitations of music as an agent of change in complex and conflicted settings.
