ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the questions how people face post-conflict fragility and how policies and aid interventions can enable their socio-economic recovery – or fail to do so. It focuses on socio-economic recovery on the relations between the social and the economic. The book elaborates the idea of social embeddedness a useful connecting frame to study the interfaces between economic life, governance institutions and aid interventions. It details how a single policy notion may derive from different institutional histories that continue to echo in different meanings and policy practices. The book shows some of the implications for poor farmers in northern Uganda of the Government's policy to modernise agriculture. It emphasises that the micro-dynamics in the social sphere can have major implications for macro-level socio-economic recovery and bottom-up democratic development.
