The Politics of International Administration

Abstract

In the summer of 2003, as the mounting costs and difficulties facing U.S. and British forces in Iraq became ever more apparent, ministers and officials responded to growing international criticism by invoking a plea: the challenge of administrating postwar Iraq following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's odious regime was so unique, so wholly different from what had gone on elsewhere and before, that no amount of prewar planning could have prepared them adequately for the realities now confronting troops and civilian administrators in that vast, inhospitable, and war-torn country. More time was needed before judgment could be passed. This self-exculpatory plea should not be dismissed out of hand. The violent overthrow of a deeply entrenched and despotic regime by an external military force has created a set of challenges that are, arguably, more akin to those faced by the victorious Allies in Germany and Japan at the end of World War II than they are to those with which international administrators have had to grapple after the Cold War. And yet, there is something plainly disingenuous about the claim that the problems now encountered in Iraq could not possible have been anticipated. The fact is that allied officials, especially in Washington, underestimated the complexity of the postwar administrative and, above all, political challenges presented by an economically weakened, communally fragmented, and religiously divided Iraq. They did so in spite of important lessons that could have been sought from the rich and varied history of international administration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The much more recent experience of international administration after the Cold War also appears to have played little, if any, role in informing and sensitizing officials involved in planning for the postwar reconstruction of the country. This in spite of the fact that governing Iraq has thrown up challenges the nature of which bear strong similarities to those encountered elsewhere in the 1990s, even though the scale of the undertaking in Iraq is clearly more daunting and the wider issues at stake for more critical in terms of both international security and regional stability. It is with these more recent experiences that this special issue of Global Governance is concerned. The period since the early 1990s has witnessed an extraordinary, though still understudied, phenomenon in international relations: a growing willingness on the part of the international community to entrust the United Nations and other international organizations with the authority to govern and administer, on an interim basis, war-torn and contested territories. In Eastern Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor--all covered in detail in this special issue--the responsibilities assumed by external actors have been so extensive as to warrant the politically and historically sensitive labels of trusteeship and protectorate. In these four cases, the remit of international administrators has covered, inter alia, the creation and enforcement of new legal systems; the management and rebuilding of the local economies; the appointment and dismissal of officials; the reconstruction and operation of public utilities; the establishment of effective customs and police services; and, not least, the provision of public security. In other cases, notably Cambodia in 1992-1993 and more recently in Afghanistan, the governance functions assumed by international bodies have been less extensive, though still unprecedented by the standards of the postcolonial period. Not surprisingly, these experiences have generated an impressive body of literature on individual operations and, especially, on the technical and operational challenges that have had to be overcome. The key questions with which much of this literature has been concerned are similar to those that have informed writings on the increasingly complex and demanding character of modern peacekeeping: How does one go about recruiting troops and civilians with the necessary skills to administer war-torn territories? …