International Statebuilding Research Articles

Identity Politics and Statebuilding in Post-Bonn Afghanistan: The 2009 Presidential Election

International statebuilding in Afghanistan must be considered in terms of identity politics as they have emerged since the Bonn Agreement of 2001. In light of this, Afghanistan's 2009 presidential election serves as a window on the broader post-Bonn statebuilding process in which factionalized elite networks have constituted an internationally supported regime that masquerades as a state. Comparing political cultural and political economic explanations for the factionalism that was widespread during the elections, the paper demonstrates that the identity politics were contingent on the business of vote-rigging. In this light, the internationally assisted state is shown to be a site for inter-factional and inter-elite competition. This is a fundamentally unstable outcome that highlights the role of Western-led statebuilding in consolidating the ethno-regional and factional divisions in Afghanistan's state.

International Statebuilding and Contentious Universities in Kosovo

This article discusses the politics of international administration and ownership in Kosovo, examining the case of the rebuilding of the higher education system in the period 1999–2007. It looks at the practice of international administration, analysing both the efforts of international actors to rebuild the Kosovar university system and the responses of local actors resisting and deeply influencing this process. A fine-grained reconstruction of the role of the UN administration in the process of building a new inter-ethnic university system in Kosovo reveals that local and international actors negotiated and dealt with each other, creating in the process an institutional structure that reflects the fundamental tensions and lack of consensus between the different stakeholders. The paper also argues that a mechanical view of the concept of ownership is not helpful, and that even in cases of international administration local actors are ‘co-owners’, who have a great influence on international plans and projects. It concludes that although the UN played an intrusive role in the process, the mission did not manage to achieve its goals.

Creating ‘Partners for Peace’: The Palestinian Authority and the International Statebuilding Agenda

The Palestinian Authority (PA) offers an interesting case study of statebuilding in a conflict-country context. Created as an interim administration in the West Bank and Gaza in 1994, the PA has been hampered by the statebuilding framework enshrined in the Oslo Accords, its lack of sovereignty, the lack of final status negotiations, and the ‘partners for peace’ paradigm which is an attempt by donors and international organisations to support who they regard as the ‘right’ type of elite—that is, those willing to ‘make peace’ with Israel (as defined by Israel). This article explores the impacts of this paradigm and argues that it has paralysed the formal political process in Palestine and has securitised democracy.

International Norms in Statebuilding: Finding a Pragmatic Approach

STATEBUILDING IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED AS A CENTRAL CHALLENGE FOR THE international order today and the main response to a range of global problems from poverty to terrorism and international crime. However, there is no agreement about why and how international actors should engage in statebuilding processes. Donor governments and international agencies often justify and legitimize their statebuilding support by referring to international norms, such as human rights. Others, especially in the academic community but also some development professionals, question the relevance of these norms, in particular, in fragile that are unable or unwilling to live up to them and have only limited means of exercising their sovereignty. They argue that statebuilding is essentially a local process that only works if it is based on local norms and values and led by national actors. For instance, an aid worker said in an interview on Deutsche Welle recently about the situation in Darfur: should listen to the local actors more. They know much better how to solve their own conflicts than anyone else. We must also accept the fact that we deal with very different societies who don't always want to develop in the direction we want them to or think they should. (1) By looking at this problem from a pragmatic perspective that emphasizes progress through practical engagement, it becomes clear that the two positions are not as different and irreconcilable as they first appear. On one hand, there is a growing body of evidence of the possible harm that excessive or untimely insistence on international norms may cause. This evidence demands a stronger realism and a clearer balance between the respect for international norms and an understanding and appreciation of the national context. However, the evidence does not contradict the fundamental relevance and importance of international norms. On the contrary, it shows how international actors can strengthen progress toward international norms on a pragmatic basis by being less principled and rigid. On the other hand, a pragmatic approach also makes it clear that international norms are already known and accepted by many national statebuilding actors and people in fragile situations. They are increasingly included as the basis for peace agreements and represent hope and opportunities. International interventions in fragile situations often run the risk of doing harm by causing tensions and fragmentation of societies if they are not sensitive enough to the political, historical, and cultural context. However, it can be questioned if international actors fully recognize the motivation that international norms provide for national statebuilding actors in fragile situations, and the opportunities for progress that they create. A pragmatic approach to statebuilding demands a discussion and a rethinking of current concepts and practices. We need to understand better what the sources of international norms are, what dilemmas and trade-offs are involved in their application, and how mechanisms for engaging national statebuilding actors work. This discussion should lead international statebuilding actors to clarify their own role in promoting normative standards in fragile situations in a number of ways that would help to strengthen progress. Are International Norms Relevant for Statebuilding? International norms are as old as the sovereign state itself, going back to the Peace of Westphalia, which contained provisions that must respect religious freedom and remove barriers to trade as part of the settlement after the Thirty Years' War. Charles Tilly famously said that makes states through internal processes of concentration of power and wealth in preparation for warfare. However, he also described how mutual recognition among that are able to effectively challenge each other in war is an important source of state legitimacy, and how external compacts among gradually led to stronger constraints on the form of states. …

(Post-)colonial state-building and state failure in East Timor: bringing social conflict back in

One potential explanation for the persistent gap between international state-builders' aspirations and achievements is their misguided understanding of states as institutional apparatuses abstracted and separated from society. State-society interpenetration is actually the historical norm, and a proper understanding of state forms requires close analysis of the conflicts between different social forces as they promote state projects that will advance particular interests over others. International state-builders are best conceptualised as merely one—albeit important—party to this ongoing struggle, which state-builders have no realistic hope of taming. The argument is illustrated by the case of East Timor. Both Indonesian and UN efforts to transplant state projects into Timorese society, even when backed by tremendous economic and coercive resources, failed to simply penetrate and dominate, or to create a technically efficient state insulated from, society. Rather, their state projects became interpenetrated with the society they sought to govern, and thus became shot through with social conflict. Neither more ‘capacity-building’ nor ‘participatory intervention’ can eliminate this conflict, nor evacuate it from the state.

The uncritical critique of ‘liberal peace’

AbstractFor many commentators the lack of success in international statebuilding efforts has been explained through the critical discourse of ‘liberal peace’, where it is assumed that ‘liberal’ Western interests and assumptions have influenced policymaking leading to counterproductive results. At the core of the critique is the assumption that the liberal peace approach has sought to reproduce and impose Western models: the reconstruction of ‘Westphalian’ frameworks of state sovereignty; the liberal framework of individual rights and winner-takes-all elections; and neo-liberal free market economic programmes. This article challenges this view of Western policymaking and suggests that post-Cold War post-conflict intervention and statebuilding can be better understood as a critique of classical liberal assumptions about the autonomous subject – framed in terms of sovereignty, law, democracy and the market. The conflating of discursive forms with their former liberal content creates the danger that critiques of liberal peace can rewrite post-Cold War intervention in ways that exaggerate the liberal nature of the policy frameworks and act as apologia, excusing policy failure on the basis of the self-flattering view of Western policy elites: that non-Western subjects were not ready for ‘Western’ freedoms.

Book Review: David B. MacDonald, Robert G. Patman, and Betty Mason-Parker (eds), The Ethics of Foreign Policy (Aldershot: Asghate Publishing Limited, 2007, 249 pp., £60.00 hbk). Dominik Zaum, The Sovereignty Paradox, The Norms and Politics of International Statebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 282 pp., $85.00 hbk). David Chandler and Volker Heins (eds), Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy, Pitfalls, Possibilities and

This review discusses three volumes published in 2007 on ethics and norms in foreign policy. Informed by a relatively Realist understanding of international relations, MacDonald et al. cover in The Ethics of Foreign Policy a vast amount of topics and positions on morality in foreign policy – both with regard to behaviour and goals. The Zaum monograph, The Sovereignty Paradox, focuses on one specific aspect of ethical behaviour in foreign policy, namely the concept of sovereignty. In Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy editors David Chandler and Volker Heins gather several authors to highlight different aspects of their more critical and reflexive approach to the perceived ‘ethical turn’ in contemporary foreign policy discourses and practices. The idea is that the ethical turn is much more an indicator of a political malaise in the West, than an expression of either a heightened sense of common humanity or a simple cover-up in the pursuit of traditional material interests.Details:David B. MacDonald, Robert G. Patman, and Betty Mason-Parker (eds), The Ethics of Foreign Policy. Routledge. ISBN: 9780754643777 (hbk), 266 pp.Dominik Zaum, The Sovereignty Paradox: The Norms and Politics of International Statebuilding. Oxford UP. ISBN: 9780199207435 (hbk), 298 pp.David Chandler and Volker Heins (eds), Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes. Routledge. ISBN: 9780415400190 (hbk), 256 pp.

What You See is What You Get: Analytical Lenses and the Limitations of Post-Conflict Statebuilding in Sierra Leone

This article juxtaposes donors' analyses of state failure and strategies of post-conflict statebuilding in Sierra Leone with actual processes of state-formation. It argues that international state-builders' analytical and policy frameworks are built on stylized assumptions about how states form and operate influenced by ideas derived from neoclassical economics. They focus on individual decision-making and functionalist formal institutions and provide a-historical analyses that fail to comprehend long-term state-formation. Interveners need to broaden their conceptual toolbox by paying more attention to local power structures, informal institutions and historical path dependency. Such a deeper analysis would encourage reflection on whether and how social change can be influenced by external intervention and allow donors to evaluate their statebuilding activities more honestly. This would raise important questions about the mismatch between interveners' ambitious goals and modest tools.

The organised hypocrisy of international state-building

This paper uses the concept of ‘organised hypocrisy’ as a means of making sense of the inconsistencies and contradictions in contemporary theory and practice of international state-building. While organised hypocrisy in international politics allows states and organisations to maintain systemic stability and legitimacy by managing irreconcilable pressures that might otherwise render them unable to operate effectively, this paper argues that organised hypocrisy also has negative impacts on the operational effectiveness of state-building. It allows organisations to engage in operations without sufficient resources, thereby seriously undermining operational effectiveness and the credibility of international state-building as a legitimate political tool. Organised hypocrisy also creates false expectations among the local and global populations and thereby decreases the credibility of the strategic narrative that is supposed to explain and make sense of the transformation processes to the general public. The paper also explores a number of options for dealing with organised hypocrisy in a way that could improve the effectiveness of international state-building.

Capacity and its Fallacies: International State Building as State Transformation

Considerable effort in recent years has gone into rebuilding fragile states. However, the debates over the effectiveness of such state-building exercises have tended to neglect that capacity building and the associated good governance programmes which comprise contemporary state building are essentially about transforming the state — meaning the ways in which political power is produced and reproduced. State capacity is now often presented as the missing link required for generating positive development outcomes and security. However, rather than being an objective and technical measure, capacity building constitutes a political and ideological mechanism for operationalising projects of state transnationalisation. The need to question prevailing notions of state capacity has become apparent in light of the failure of many state-building programmes. Such programmes have proven difficult to implement, and implementation has rarely achieved the expected development turnarounds or alleviation of violent conflict in those countries. In this article it is argued that, to identify the potential trajectories of such interventions, we must understand the role state building currently plays in domestic politics, and in particular, the ways in which processes of state transformation affect the development of different and often conflicting power bases within the state. This argument is examined using examples from the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands.

The Case of Kosovo: From “International Statebuilding” to an “Internationally Supervised and Independent Country”

Résumé Cet article traitera du processus de construction étatique international au Kosovo. Il fournira une synthèse bibliographique sur la construction étatique et la démocratisation (incluant société civile, culture civique, élections libres et économie de marché) de manière à analyser les rôles de la communauté internationale dans ces sujets et, de temps en temps, souligner le rôle particulier de l’UE dans ce processus. Il sera divisé en deux parties : a) Une première partie qui analysera d’un côté le rôle et le pouvoir qu’a la communauté internationale sur ce processus et d’un autre coté, les succès et échecs de la communauté internationale dans le processus de construction étatique international jusqu’à la déclaration d’indépendance du Kosovo. b) une deuxième partie qui traitera et analysera brièvement les nouveaux développements dans le Kosovo indépendant. Enfin, nous tenterons de dresser des conclusions basées sur l’analyse générale, que ce nouvel état (la République du Kosovo) peut être un état viable et autosuffisant dans un futur proche.

The Solomon Islands intervention and the instabilities of the post-colonial state

Shortcomings in the prevailing discourse of ‘failed states’ and the practical challenges of international state-building are examined in this article through a detailed case study of the Solomon Islands, a small independent Pacific island country that since mid-2003 has been the subject of a substantial Australian-led regional state-building exercise. The Solomon Islands intervention and the difficulties it has encountered are examined in the larger context of that country's longer history of state-building and the particular challenges posed by its colonial legacies, the nature of its modern political development and the manner of its integration into the global economy.

Rethinking neo-liberal state building: building post-conflict development states

In attempting to rebuild post-conflict failed states, the international community has drawn heavily on neo-liberal development paradigms. However, neo-liberal state building has proved ineffectual in stimulating economic development in post-conflict states, thus undermining prospects for state consolidation. This article offers the developmental state as an alternative model for international state building, better suited to overcoming the developmental challenges that face post-conflict states. Drawing on the East Asian experience, developmental state building would seek to build state capacity to intervene in the economy to guide development, compensating for the failure of growth led by the private sector to materialise in many post-conflict states. The article concludes that such an approach would, in the first instance, require the international community to accept more honestly its developmental responsibilities when it decides to intervene to rebuild failed states.

Back to the future? The limits of neo-Wilsonian ideals of exporting democracy

International state-building has become central to international policy concerns and has marked a clear neo-Wilsonian shift in international thinking, spurred by the leadership of the United States and the European Union. Today’s approaches insist on the regulatory role of international institutions and downplay the importance of locally-derived political solutions. This privileging of ‘governance’ over ‘government’ is based on the assumption that the political process can be externally influenced through the promotion of institutional changes introduced at the state level and pays less attention to how societal pressures and demands are constitutive of stable and legitimate institutional mechanisms. This article questions this approach and analyses the transformation in the assessment of the importance of the societal sphere. It considers how this shift has been shaped by current understandings of war and conflict, and how the prioritisation of governance has fitted with critical and post-positivist trends in academic thinking in international relations and security studies. The discussion is illustrated with examples drawn largely from the Balkans and the international regime in Bosnia–Herzegovina in particular.

International statebuilding – Time to reconsider

Um aktuelle Ansatze international induzierter Staatsbildung besser zu verstehen, sollten die zentralen Konzepte, auf welchen sich diese Praktiken grunden, erneut untersucht werden. Zerlegt man Staatsbildung in ihre Einzelkomponenten, so zeigt sich die enorme Weite des Feldes, und schlieslich die Notwendigkeit, gangige Praktiken der Internationalen Gemeinschaft zu hinterfragen. Staatsbildung bedeutet im Grunde Institutionen zu entwickeln, welche die Beziehungen zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft regeln. Institutionen bestehen nicht nur aus formalen Regelsystemen, sondern ebenso aus informellen Normen und wie beide angewandt und durchgesetzt werden. Dies wirkt sich auf die Transferierbarkeit von Institutionen aus. Der vorliegende Beitrag schliest, dass dem Ziel der Staatsbildung mehr durch eine Betonung der Prozesse institutioneller Entwicklung gedient ist, als durch die Auferlegung vorgefertigter ‚Losungen‘. Der Prozess der lokalen Problemlosung durch neue Staatsstrukturen, wie fehlerhaft und ineffektiv er auch erscheint, ist Grundvoraussetzung fur dauerhaften Wandel.

International Authority and State Building: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

State building refers to efforts to reconstruct, or in some cases to establish for the first time, an effective indigenous government in a state or territory where no such capacity exists or where the capacity has been seriously eroded. How effective the government needs to be for this purpose is a matter of some debate. In practical, if not tautological terms, it depends on the criteria that are employed to measure effectiveness, and analysts will differ as to the precise requirements. (1) There may be other objectives associated with state building distinct from effectiveness, and often today this is the case. Among these further aims are, notably, the establishment of the rule of law, democratic norms and institutions, and a free-market economy. Third-party state building, as opposed to indigenous state building, is a relatively recent practice in international relations. It has its earliest contemporary expression in efforts by colonial powers to strengthen the capacity of territories under their jurisdiction in anticipation of the eventual transfer of sovereignty to local authorities. (2) It also has parallels in the U.S.-led Allied occupation and reconstruction of postwar Germany and Japan. (3) Today third-party state building is undertaken as well in response to weak or so-called failed states and, more recently, as part of the international administration of war-torn or strife-ridden territories. Since 1995, there have been four such administrations: the United Nations' interim administrations of Eastern Slavonia (UNTAES), Kosovo (UNMIK), and East Timor (UNTAET), and the ad hoc Peace Implementation Council's administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (By contrast, the current UN operation in Afghanistan [UNAMA] is an assistance mission, although state building is a significant aspect of that mission.) The distinctive feature of an international territorial administration is both the scope of its interest in the governmental functions of the relevant state or territory and its authority over these functions. Third parties have been active before in areas of governance thought historically to be the exclusive domain of domestic jurisdiction--for instance, as part of complex peacekeeping or peacebuilding arrangements that have granted the UN and its representatives intrusive powers, ranging from human rights monitoring and the supervision of elections to the demobilization of armed forces and the reorganization of police forces. (4) Donor states and international financial institutions (IFIs), too, have encroached on traditional sovereign competences through their use of conditioned aid in support of good governance. (5) Yet, arguably, not since the League of Nations' administration of the Saarland (1920-1935) have third parties, qua international agents, had the power and responsibility of today's international administrations in local executive, legislative, and judicial affairs. (6) By virtue of its broad scope and authority, international administration is also more political in character than many other field operations. Whether to hold elections, and on what basis; which currency to adopt; whether to consult with local interlocutors, and how widely; whether to promote the reintegration of ethnic communities or to accept de facto division; what role to give women in the reconstructed polity; which curriculum to teach in the schools; whether to allow public ownership of enterprises; what limits, if any, to place on the content of party manifestos--these are all fundamentally political issues. Historically, peace support and other field operations have eschewed overt political engagement; in the context of international administration, such engagement is unavoidable. International Authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina One can distinguish the various types of international administration on the basis of the degree of authority that international agents assume in each case. …