International Statebuilding Research Articles

Weapons of the weak state: How post-conflict states shape international statebuilding

International Organizations (IOs), such as the United Nations (U.N.), engage in statebuilding in a range of post-conflict states. Statebuilding scholarship largely assumes that IOs, backed by their powerful member states, have at least temporary authority over the seemingly “weak” states in which they intervene. We argue, in contrast, that many post-conflict states shape IO statebuilding efforts through many statebuilding contracts, which we call incomplete arrangements, that give the post-conflict state the residual rights of control over the unnegotiated components of these statebuilding contracts with IOs. These incomplete arrangements, as opposed to complete takeovers, which are the other type of statebuilding contracts, provide procedural “weapons of the weak state” that enable the post-conflict state to influence what the IO mandate contains, where it intervenes, whom it hires, and when it exits. Using in-depth case studies of Burundi, Guatemala, and Timor-Leste, as well as analysis of 36 U.N. interventions in post-conflict states from 2000–2020, this article demonstrates the potential of incomplete arrangement statebuilding contracts to give post-conflict states institutional power over IO statebuilders, with important implications for scholarship on statebuilding and global governance.

Towards Emancipatory Statebuilding in Kosovo? Spatial and Aesthetic Community Building After war

ABSTRACT This article explores the emancipatory potential of spatial and aesthetic statebuilding in Kosovo. Focusing on ‘Manifesta’, an international arts biennale, we offer three contributions. First we theorise what is meant by emancipatory statebuilding through the lens of spatial and aesthetic approaches, highlighting the importance of critique, the everyday and materiality. Second, we offer an account of Manifesta as statebuilding project. Third, we explore Manifesta’s ability, as a large-scale international intervention, to engage in emancipatory work through its reliance on aesthetic and spatial approaches. We find that Manifesta’s reproduced the troubling dynamics of the international statebuilding project from the 2000s.

Constitution-making and statebuilding in Kosovo: we (you) the people

ABSTRACT How is ‘the people’ constituted in post-war, internationally administered Kosovo? As an internationalised territory and with an unresolved political status, the post-war interim constitution-making process was mainly shaped by a non-consensual idea of statehood regarding whether Kosovo was entitled to sovereign statehood. This article traces the antagonistic goals between Albanian and Serb ethnic groups within the country, on the one hand, and the international statebuilders, on the other hand, during the constitution-making process. Kosovo’s post-war constitution-making became the main instrument of an incremental international statebuilding. Although international statebuilders pursued neither a deliberative nor a consultative approach throughout the constitution-making process, they engineered a liberal constitutional content which imposed the highest standards of minority rights in post-war Kosovo.

Human rights and current discriminatory manifestations (on the example of age discrimination in the social and communicative sphere)

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of counteracting human rights violations due to age discrimination in the social and communicative sphere to identify problematic aspects of this discrimination; to study current changes in connection with the pandemic threat and generalize a set of legal guarantees to prevent and counteract inappropriate legal policy in this area. The research is based on a humanistic approach, which determines the individual value criterion of the research methodology and is manifested through the ideology of anthropocentrism; a complementary approach to scientific research and a balanced combination of national and international state-building and law-making principles. A comparative legal method was used, which made it possible to summarize the legal requirements of various states, including the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Colombia, on measures to counteract the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Statistical and information reports of the European Union countries, monitoring of the Equality Representatives of individual countries (Serbia, Lithuania), analytical data, government decisions and practical cases were used.

International Statebuilding and the Domestic Politics of State Development

Managing the threat of violence remains a central concern in international security and development. International actors seek to terminate civil wars and prevent conflict recurrence by building peace and strengthening state institutions. In this article, I review the scholarship on international statebuilding, defined broadly as external efforts to create, strengthen, reform, and transform the authority structures of the state. Much of this literature models international statebuilding as provision, in which external actors provide a solution to the enforcement problem that plagues postconflict bargains. However, in many cases, the assumptions about domestic politics underpinning the provision model do not hold. When the central problem of domestic politics concerns bargaining over the distributional consequences of the peace rather than the parties’ ability to credibly commit to the peace, international statebuilding is more fruitfully modeled as imposition, in which terms are imposed on recalcitrant domestic actors. The imposition model allows the preferences of external actors over the postwar order to diverge from the preferences of domestic actors. Divergence arises because statebuilding interventions have distributional consequences that threaten the interests of domestic elites. To unpack why this is the case, I turn to the literature on the domestic politics of statebuilding, which shows that governance arrangements that appear to outsiders as weak statehood can help manage violence by facilitating the distribution of sovereignty rents. Insights from these literatures suggest exciting new avenues for future scholarship.

Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power: The elusive materiality of international statebuilding

This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.

Bosnian voices from the bottom of the well: Genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and victims’ right to remedies

Human rights advocates call for reparation as an important step to acknowledge and repair historical injustice and mass harms. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims of war continue to seek monetary reparation for non-pecuniary damages caused by genocide: murder, injury to human body and dignity, and harms inflicted upon a close family member. They seek legal remedies using national, foreign, and international human rights judicial venues. Drawing from qualitative, ethnographic research data and archival documents, the article examines legal claims and public discourse regarding reparation and makes a case for a reconceptualization of reparation by including victim voices. The article concludes that despite being absent from the post-conflict victims’ reparation programs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, monetary reparation has assumed a social valuation attribute. On the one hand, it is a victim’s call for retributive, legal conceptions of justice – that someone who escaped international and national criminal justice programs pays. On the other hand, it is a tool to draw attention to Bosnian victims’ present civil and political exclusions that came with the international post-conflict peace treaty. While the post-war reconstruction focused on international trials, democratization, restorative justice, and state building programs, it also restricted socio-economic and cultural rights by redefining the citizenship and dismantling the welfare state. Reparation is a debt owed to victims.

National identity policy of Central Asian countries

This study interprets the modern understanding of ethnic and national identity. It was noted that there is an important connection between ethnic and national identity, created on the basis of nation-building processes. Since the 1990s, nationalism that has been at the top of the international agenda, new nations and state building processes, problems of ethnic identity, which have become an important item on the agenda in relations between states and international organizations, a new quest for democracy that develops through the recognition of differences, growing cultural conflicts in many regions from Asia to the American continent, and social movements based on identity have raised identity politics to an important position in international relations. In this context, international relations theorists, who have increased their ties to political theory in a way that has accelerated especially in the 1990s, are rebuilding the discipline's relationship with identity politics.

Embodiments and frictions of statehood in transnational criminal justice

Outside of criminology, dominant conceptions of postcolonial statehood in the Global South as ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ have long been criticized. In criminology, however, the theoretical outcomes of this critique have been scarce. In this article we therefore ask how ideals and practices of transnational criminal justice are informed by and productive of specific (Global North) conceptions of statehood. Exploring encounters between transnational and local criminal justice in the context of international state-building in Mali and Liberia, we observe frictions in which statehood divergences and global hierarchies become apparent. Through penal aid, we argue, a particular kind of penal statehood is produced wherein the options of how to perform penality are increasingly limited by the embeddedness in global power asymmetries.

International Statebuilding and the Domestic Politics of State Development

Managing the threat of violence remains a central concern in international security and development. International actors seek to terminate civil wars and prevent conflict recurrence by building peace and strengthening state institutions. In this article, I review the scholarship on international statebuilding, defined broadly as external efforts to create, strengthen, reform, and transform the authority structures of the state. Much of this literature models international statebuilding as provision, in which external actors provide a solution to the enforcement problem that plagues post-conflict bargains. However, in many cases the assumptions about domestic politics underpinning the provision model do not hold. When the central problem of domestic politics concerns bargaining over the distributional consequences of the peace rather than the parties' ability to credibly commit to the peace, international statebuilding is more fruitfully modeled as imposition, in which terms are imposed on recalcitrant domestic actors. The imposition model allows the preferences of external actors over the post-war order to diverge from the preferences of domestic actors. Divergence arises because statebuilding interventions have distributional consequences that threaten the interests of domestic elites. To unpack why this is the case, I turn to the literature on the domestic politics of statebuilding, which shows that ``weak statehood'' can help manage violence by facilitating the distribution of sovereignty rents. Insights from these literatures suggest exciting new avenues for future scholarship.

Weapons of the Weak State: How Post-Conflict States Shape International Statebuilding

International Organizations (IOs), such as the United Nations (U.N.), engage in statebuilding in a range of post-conflict states. Statebuilding scholarship largely assumes these IO statebuilders are the dominant authority, at least temporarily, in seemingly ``weak states. We argue, in contrast, that the post-conflict state retains authority over the IO statebuilding effort via incomplete contracts that give the post-conflict state the residual rights of control over the unnegotiated components of their statebuilding contracts with IOs. Statebuilding contracts provide procedural ``weapons of the weak state, enabling the post-conflict state to shape the content of the IO's mandate, where it intervenes, whom it hires, and when it exits. Using quantitative text analysis of U.N. Security-Council speeches, analysis of 35 U.N. interventions, and in-depth case studies, this article demonstrates the potential of statebuilding contracts to give post-conflict states power over IO statebuilders, with important implications for scholarship on statebuilding and global governance.

Conjuring the Criminal State: The “State-Idea” in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and International Statebuilding

AbstractA central challenge of post-conflict recovery is the reconstruction of state institutions, which often emerge from war destroyed or otherwise unable to carry out core administrative activities. But scholarship on international peacebuilding and post-conflict politics tends to focus narrowly on the functional aspects of the state, the state-system, to the neglect of another critical dimension: the state-idea, or its symbolic and normative authority. How do internationally backed institution-building efforts shape the ideational foundations of the state following conflict? Drawing on original interviews and archival research from postwar Guatemala, this article illustrates how, paradoxically, postwar peacebuilding and rule of law initiatives that sought to strengthen the capacity of state institutions simultaneously contributed to the discursive construction of the state as a criminal organization. Specifically, the United Nations’ International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), in seeking to combat state-based criminal structures and bolster institutions, transformed long-held conceptions of Guatemala's “weak” or “failed” state into an alternative vision of the state as a powerful complex of clandestine, predatory networks, and practices. In conjuring the state as a criminal organization that appropriates the formal organs of political power for illicit ends, this international statebuilding initiative generated a coherent and durable state-idea that belies key advances in institutional capacity and the rule of law. Overall, this article contributes to growing debates about the unintended, deleterious effects of international statebuilding efforts by demonstrating how distinct ideas of state power come to fill the void between state capacity and legitimacy.

The Impact of Social Movements on Policy Outcomes in Partly Free Democracies: Evidence from the “Citizens for Macedonia” Struggles in a Captured Macedonian State

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. This article looks at the impact of one of the recent waves of mobilization in the Republic of Macedonia, the “Citizens for Macedonia” platform, over policy outcomes that originally derived from the movement actors. Furthermore, the text highlights the crucial role of the international community in shaping and implementing the policy outcomes, playing the role of international statebuilders in the process of reintroducing democracy in the captured Macedonian state. The theoretical framework and the literature review present an attempt to bridge contemporary works on social movement studies with those on democratization and international state building. A lot of emphasis is also put on the peculiar political opportunity structure, and the difficult and movement-unfriendly conditions in which the citizens’ platform operated. On the other hand, the article tries to show the gains and losses of a coalition between an established political party, and a loose horizontal network of citizens and citizens’ organizations that advocate for rule of law and protection of human rights. The central conclusions that can be extrapolated from this work are the strong and committed claims by the movement, articulated through various repertoires of action, but also the active role of the international community, which presented a conditio sine qua non, bringing down the regime led by former PM Nikola Gruevski and freeing the state institutions previously occupied by the political parties in power.

Introduction: Contentious Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes.

“Belgrade to Belgradians, Not Foreign Capitalists”: International Statebuilding, Contentious Politics, and New Forms of Political Representation in Serbia

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. One of the main criticisms concerning the process of post-conflict transition in Serbia has been the lack of context sensitivity and participation of the local population in the decision-making process, especially regarding the most important issues that were addressed during the political and economic transformation of the country that began in 2001. This criticism became especially pronounced from the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, when the negative characteristics of international statebuilding became even more apparent, causing increased dependency on international institutions and further economic marginalisation of the most vulnerable groups. By looking at the movement “Don’t Drown Belgrade” and the series of large-scale protests in Belgrade in 2016, the article seeks to explore the main reasons for social discontent with the international-led statebuilding agenda in post-conflict Serbian society and the local strategies employed to resist and subvert this form of statebuilding.

“Vrem o ţară ca afară!”: How Contention in Romania Redefines State-Building through a Pro-European Discourse

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. Massive protest waves, mainly led by younger citizens, appeared during the past years in Romania. Gubernat and Rammelt provide an analysis of the production of meaning by the “Romanian street” as a collective actor. They argue that “Vrem o ţară ca afară! (We want a country like abroad!)” became the leitmotif for important parts of the Romanian protests of the past eight years. For so doing, Gubernat and Rammelt analyze the discursive underpinnings and the constructed frames in recent protests in Romania. Their demonstration synthesizes a social phenomenon that appeared during the Roșia Montană protests of 2013, continued with the Colectiv protests of 2015 and was reconfirmed during the 2017–2018 anti-corruption protests: the dichotomy between the discursive appropriation of the West, as a benchmark of progress and social modernization and the “self-racism” manifested in these movements. The use of Frame Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis for the study of these waves of protests enables them to show how the Western hegemonic discourse on state-building provides the cultural conditions for social action as well as it enables mobilizing agents to frame national discontent. “‘Vrem o ţară ca afară!’ Redefining state-building through a pro-European discourse in Romania” concludes that recent protests in Romania reproduce Western ideals of modern state and politics through a value-based discourse around the idea of belonging to Europe.

Voice after Exit? Bulgarian Civic Activists between Protest and Emigration

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. Historically, civic activists who left their home countries in the wake of protests would either risk disappearing in anonymity or become engaged in political “exile networks.” However, since the outbreak of the “global wave” of protest, the ability of activists to take advantage of freedom of movement and technological advances in social media changed the framework and conditions of such “exile.” This article addresses the question of what happens when protest activists decide to go abroad to study, work, and build a life. We focus in particular on the case of Bulgaria, the fastest shrinking country in the world. On the basis of structured qualitative interviews with Bulgarian activists who have gone abroad in the aftermath of the 2013 Bulgarian protests, we trace how migration and intra-EU mobility affect the political participation of activists, the ways in which they participate, and their diagnoses of the present. In other words, we explore whether one can speak of “exit after voice,” leading in the long run to a decrease in activism. We argue instead that we are witnessing a transformation of the dichotomy “exit-voice” into a more complex scale of forms of protest organization and participation, facilitated by social media and the freedom of movement within the EU. Herein, the real risk might be not that migration leads to political passivity, but that the new “voice” found through the experience abroad remains rather marginal as activists’ networks are transformed and community building becomes a challenge in an increasingly precarious world.

Book review: Sabaratnam, Meera. 2017: Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique

Sabaratnam, Meera. 2017: Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. ix + 173 pp. £29.44 paperback. ISBN: 978-1-78348-274-0.

Kosovo: Statebuilding Utopia and Reality

ABSTRACTTwenty years of international statebuilding have made little impact on the ‘stateness’ of Kosovo. This article puts this failure in the broader context of the shift from the liberal internationalist assumptions of the late 1990s to the pragmatic realism of today. It does this through the lenses of E H Carr’s classic work The Twenty Years’ Crisis, UN policy thinking on the problematic assumptions of international statebuilding and the diagnoses in David Lake’s 2016 book The Statebuilder’s Dilemma, which sets out three pragmatic alternatives. The article concludes that all three of these alternatives can be seen in practice in Kosovo.

‘Cut and Paste’ Constitution-Making in Timor-Leste

Abstract When Timor-Leste (re)gained its independence in 2002, it appeared to be a triumph of international state building. In a relatively short period, a massive United Nations (UN)-run mission had purportedly built the institutions of a liberal democratic state. State building took place in a highly globalized context; there was a large UN presence as well as international non-governmental organizations, academics, journalists, and activists. In addition, many exiled Timorese leaders returned to play a role. While constitution making was central to state building, there are questions about the legitimacy, effectiveness, and stability of the Timor-Leste Constitution and the state institutions that it created. This article focuses on three aspects of the interplay between the global and local during the constitution-making process. First, it considers the relationship between the UN and Timorese elites, finding that the UN adopted a hands-off approach that created space for certain elites to dominate and politicize the process. These returning exiles engaged in ‘cut and paste’ constitution making, with much of the Timor-Leste Constitution based on the 1989 version of the Portuguese Constitution (modified to an extent by the 1990 Mozambican Constitution). Second, it analyses whether the constitution-making process was a true exercise of the constituent power of the Timorese people and concludes that the dominance of certain elites contributed to social division. Third, it discusses the significance of public participation, noting that minimal participation has meant that the Constitution does not reflect the views of most Timorese people. This is even though the principle of ‘popular sovereignty’ implies that, at least in states that aspire to be liberal democracies, people should be given the opportunity to participate in making their state’s Constitution. It concludes by arguing that the Timorese people missed the opportunity for their Constitution to define the political bond between them and embed state institutions in the local context.