Building Democratic States after Conflict: Institutional Design Revisited

Abstract

Building States to Build Peace. Edited by Charles T. Call, Vanessa Wyeth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008. 438 pp., $24.50 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-480-0). Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation? Edited by Sujit Choudhry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 474 pp., $100.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-19-953541-5). From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding. Edited by Anna K. Jarstad, Timothy D. Sisk. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 290 pp., $29.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-71327-6). Driving Democracy: Do Power-sharing Institutions Work? By Pippa Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 306 pp., $24.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-69480-3). Few debates have engulfed the literatures of comparative politics and international relations for as long and as intensively as that between advocates of different schools of thought on how to build stable and democratic polities in divided societies. Especially when such societies emerge from often long and vicious conflict, the task is formidable at the best of times, and the track record of success patchy. The question, therefore, is which approach is the most promising to attain the twin goals of peace and democracy is not merely academic navel-gazing but of immediate and lasting relevance to the countries embarking on state-building after conflict and is, by extension, often also significant in its implications for regional and international security more broadly. It is, thus, to be welcomed that scholars of political science and international relations, as well as relevant related disciplines, such as constitutional and international law, continue to engage with the issue of democratic state-building after conflict and that they do so in an increasingly constructive fashion. This is not to suggest that any of the enduring rivalries in the field of conflict settlement have been resolved, but rather that the debate has become more sophisticated in the conclusions it offers. This is partly because of the growing interdisciplinarity of the engagements (in particular the contributions made by legal scholars), and partly because of the richer empirical basis from which arguments are derived. All four books reviewed for this essay display these characteristics in one way or another and make important contributions to what remains an ongoing debate far from conclusion. The existing literature on state-building more generally, and the four recent contributions to it reviewed here more specifically, do not dispute the importance of designing institutional frameworks within which disputes between different conflict parties can be accommodated such that …