Institutions for Sustainable Peace: From Research Gaps to New Frontiers

Abstract

IN DIVIDED SOCIETIES, CHARACTERIZED BY AN ANTAGONISTIC SEGMENTATION among identity groups. formal state are of paramount importance in regulating intergroup Institutional reform is thus an appealing option to shape such state institutions--the system of government, electoral systems and party regulations, territorial state structure, the judiciary, and the security sector--in order to promote sustainable peace and prevent the occurrence or recurrence of violent However, research is far from having arrived at a consensus about what work where and how. Is the choice of institutional design in a postwar situation determined at all by expected political utility? What distinguishable effects can different designs have under what conditions? How do interact--what role does the concert of institutions play in the impact on sustainable peace? This debate is not confined to the ivory tower of academic research, but has important policy implications for national and international conflict management. Building political for peace is high on the international agenda. In recent years, domestic and international reformers have (re)designed state in postwar countries such as East Timor, Burundi, Afghanistan, and Bosnia to promote sustainable peace and democracy--with mixed results. Moreover, the World Bank's 2011 World Development Report Conflict, Security, and Development, the UN Secretary-General's 2011 report on preventive diplomacy, and the UN's 2012 guidance note on mediation all emphasize the significance of postwar institutional designs. In 2005, the General Assembly and the UN Security Council explicitly mandated that the UN Peacebuilding Commission should focus attention on the reconstruction and institution-building efforts necessary for recovery from conflict. Thus, closing the research gaps on in postwar and divided societies not only advances the academic knowledge in the field, but speaks directly to current national and international peacebuilding agendas. In this article, we discuss research gaps and avenues for more integrative research on the origins of and their effects in postwar societies, and we identify the missing pieces of data collection in the study of postwar institutional reform. Origins of Institutions in Postwar Societies Why and how do particular political emerge in some postwar contexts but not in others, and how are institutional origins related to their effect on peace? In answering these questions, the study of institutional engineering has so far neglected to comprehensively address three interrelated elements: causes and dynamics of war, internal elite dynamics, and external interventions. First, we need to more systematically connect theories of civil war onset and war dynamics to theories of institutional design. If institutional reform aims at preventing the recurrence of organized violence, research on institutional choice should examine this reform process in the light of why societal conflict escalated into organized armed violence. Both the causes of war (be they motives, opportunities, or a mixture of both) and war dynamics (like conflict intensity) may crucially impact the design of postwar institutions. If studies on institutional reform then do not take into account causes that triggered the escalation of conflict, they are unlikely to explain the causal chain that connects institutional design and the prevention of a relapse into war. Second, there is a lack of research on internal political and economic cost-benefit calculations of elites: Why and how do leaders choose particular during and after a war-to-peace transition under the uncertainty of cooperating with former enemies? On the one hand, we are particularly missing studies that complement the rational actor assumption widely employed in political economy by exploring additional starting points for institutional choice such as culture, prospect theory, or path dependencies. …