Intergovernmental Organizations (e.g., United Nations, International Criminal Court)
Séverine Autesserre. Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University. Contact
International Peace Building Failures in Civil Wars (Case Study of the Democratic Republic of Congo)
My research seeks to explain international peace building failures in civil wars through an analysis of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s transition from war to peace and democracy (2003 – 2007). In the Congo, why did international peace builders succeed in imposing a settlement only at the international and national levels and not at the subnational level? Why couldn’t a lasting peace and security be achieved despite intense peace building efforts? More generally, why are peace builders often unsuccessful in addressing the local failures of peace processes? Based on over 300 interviews, field observations in the Congo, and document analysis, I argue that, in the Congo like in many other post-conflict environments, international actors erroneously perceive the presence of local violence as unrelated to the success or failure of peace processes.
Research finding #1: Political and military interventions should address tensions not only at the national and international level, but also at the local level – the level of the family, the clan, the village, or the district.
International peace builders involved in the Congolese transition should have addressed local violence for two main reasons. First, the humanitarian cost of local antagonisms that turned violent was staggering. Second, the neglect of local issues could lead only to incomplete and unsustainable peace settlements. Local manifestations of violence, although often related to national or international struggles, were also precipitated by distinctively local problems. These included conflict over land, mineral resources, traditional power, local taxes, and the relative social status of specific groups and individuals. Even issues usually presented as international questions (such as the problem with Rwandan Hutu militias) or national ones (such as ethnic tensions with Congolese Rwandophones) had significant local components, which fueled and reinforced the regional and international dimensions.
Local, national, and international dimensions of violence remained closely interlinked in most of the eastern Congo. Local agendas provided national and regional actors with local allies, who were crucial in maintaining military control, continuing resource exploitation, and persecuting political or ethnic enemies. Local tensions could also jeopardize the national and international reconciliation: for example, by motivating violence against the Rwandophone ethnic minority or allowing a strong presence of Rwandan Hutu militias in the Kivus. In addition, during the transition, some local conflicts became autonomous from the national and international tracks, most notably in the provinces of South Kivu and North Katanga. There local disputes over political power, economic resources (especially land and mining sites), and social status led to clashes that no national or international actors could stop.
Research finding #2 – The international peace builders’ representations of the conflict, the peace process, and their role in a peace process, combined with the way diplomats and high ranking UN staff members are trained and socialized, explain why international actors failed to design an appropriate strategy to address local tensions.
During the Congolese transition, international peace builders constructed their role as pertaining exclusively to the national and international tracks. They perceived local violence in Hobbesian terms: it was due to the lack of state presence; it was irrational, barbaric, criminal; and it was a humanitarian problem, not a political one. Diplomats and United Nations staff saw elections as the most appropriate tools for state building (and therefore for peace building); national representatives as the only legitimate partners (as opposed to local militias and other warring parties); and humanitarian actors as the best counterparts for local armed groups. This conflict-resolution strategy was not successful: massacres and massive human rights violations continued throughout the transition.
I suggest an alternate analysis of violence, which accounts for this peace building failure. As detailed in research finding #1, during the Congolese transition, just as during the war, violence was motivated not only by top-down causes (international or national) but also by bottom-up, micro-local agendas. International peace builders under-estimated the consequences of continued local conflict and the need for intervention for several reasons: they perceived the conflict from the Congolese capital Kinshasa; they were trained to work on super-structures, such as state and international negotiations; and they were socialized in focusing on predefined tasks and performance guidelines that fail to take local violence into account. The usual explanations for international inaction on the face of violence, that international actors faced massive constraints, that no major power had any national interest in the Congo, and that United Nations staff had an organizational interest in overlooking local conflict, accounts for the peace builders’ reluctance to update their strategy even in the face of obvious failure. As a result, only the occurrence of particularly shocking events managed to overcome the habituation to violence, the apathy, and the feeling of powerlessness, and to determine intervention.
Naazneen H. Barma. Doctoral candidate, Political
Science Department at UC Berkeley. Contact
Crafting the State: Transitional Governance and the International Role in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
State-building as part of a post-conflict peace process and as a response to state failure has become one of the most important and distinctive undertakings of the United Nations. For countries to successfully put violent civil conflict behind them, successful transitional state-building is critical in the journey to stability. Tremendous international investment has been poured into peacebuilding through transitional governance over the past fifteen years. In each country in which it is applied, the approach has resulted in new administrative structures and constitutional arrangements tailored to local contexts and aspiring to the highest international standards of democratic governance. But in many cases, initial euphoria at the successful holding of elections and design of the formal institutions for democratic governance has eventually turned into dismay at the poor governance outcomes that result. My dissertation examines the processes and outcomes of the transitional governance peacebuilding efforts undertaken by the international community in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan. Relying on over one hundred elite interviews carried out through fieldwork, the United Nations’ own records, and country case studies, I examine the institutional solutions and governance outcomes of the state-building exercises implemented in each country by the United Nations transitional authorities in collaboration with their domestic counterparts. I use a causal narrative research design that combines structured, focused comparison across cases and process tracing within cases to explain the similarities and differences across the resulting democratic governance outcomes in the three countries.
I argue that international and national factors interact dynamically in producing the outcomes of peacebuilding through transitional governance.An international model of statehood delimits a process and a universe of possible institutional choices in state-building efforts, but does not determine the outcomes. It is domestic political actors who make specific choices about the constitutional arrangements and administrative structures within the parameters the model sets for possible forms of democratic governance. I explicitly emphasize the hyper-political and contested nature of the transitional governance process by focusing on the agency of political elites in making institutional choices. I argue that organizationally powerful domestic political elites maneuver within formal institutions to entrench themselves in power, affecting the consolidated democratic governance outcomes.Furthermore, I demonstrate how the democracy-building and state-strengthening dimensions of peacebuilding efforts act at cross-purposes to each other, creating tensions in implementation of the transitional governance process and contributing to the entrenchment of powerful elites. In short, my dissertation explores the application of the international model and technocratic processes of post-conflict reconstruction in the necessarily hyper-political domestic context of any state-building process.
Dejan Guzina. Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University. Contact
Dilemmas of Nation-building and Citizenship in Bosnia
Ten years after Dayton, Bosnia remains an experimental ground for all kinds of techniques of dealing with interethnic conflict: from efforts at partition, hegemonic control and assimilation to methods of (non)territorial autonomy and multicultural integration. The contradictory nature of these methods seems to push Bosnia in two opposing directions. On the one hand, through the means of territorial autonomy, liberal pluralism and multicultural integration, the IC tries to implement liberal solutions in Bosnia. On the other, even though the politics of ethnic cleansing ended, other illiberal methods of dealing with national differences continue: imposition of majority customs and lifestyles, denial of basic civic and political rights to minorities, use of territorial autonomy as a pathway to partition or secession, and so on. Consequently, despite the persistent international emphasis on the protection of human and minority rights, rather typical nineteenth and twentieth century homogenizing policies are being strategically pursued by political and state officials at various levels of the Bosnian state (federation, entities and cantons). Overall, my analysis suggests that Bosnia remains a fragile, territorially divided multination state in which the principle of ethnic identification holds sway over the internationally sponsored, normative concepts of liberal pluralism and ethno-cultural justice. Bosnia is characterized by exclusive, rather than inclusive, definitions of national community; a ‘thick’, rather than ‘thin’, conception of national identity; loyalty to one’s nation and distrust of ethnic others; lack of tolerance of dual nationality, and an almost non-existent public space shared with members of different national groups (as the result of ethnic homogenization of major Bosnian cities).
All of this has serious consequences for Bosnian citizenship practices. The Dayton Accord constitutionally sanctifies basic civil, political and social rights in Bosnia; hence, Bosnians are supposed to enjoy the privileges of the citizenship-as-rights model irrespective of their national identification as a Bosnian Serb, Croat or Bosniak. However, as a result of the local policies of ethnic identification with the state, the rights discourse is perceived primarily through the prism of whether individuals in each area of Bosnia belong to the 'correct' majority national group. If they are fortunate enough to share the majority status, their citizenship rights are secured; but if they find themselves in the minority position, their citizenship rights are not guaranteed. Either way, Bosnian citizens’ rights are reduced to passive entitlements, without any incentive for more active participation in public life. Formal civil, political and social citizenship rights do not provide sufficient protection from abuses of these rights, nor do they lead to substantive equality for Bosnian citizens in the entire territory of the Bosnian state.
The failure of the International Community to implement its model of integrative citizenship has significant consequences not only for Bosnia but also for other ‘failed states’. International hegemonic control and third-party intervention cannot remain true to the IC’s liberal agenda in the long run. Eventually, the requirements of mundane day-to-day politics in the internationally-run countries will exert their price on the very principles that are being used to justify international intervention in the first place. Bosnia is the perfect example of the basic paradox of democratization by third party intervention: if the first period of the international intervention was characterized by normative Puritanism (the years of Wolfgang Petritsch), the prolonged direct international involvement inevitably requires cooperation with local leaders with different political agendas than those of the IC representatives (Paddy Ashdown’s tenure). Hence, the more the international community opens itself to ‘pragmatic’ considerations in the region, the more it legitimizes the exclusivist nation-building projects against which it has fought all these years.
Dejan Guzina. Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University. Contact
International engagement and state building in post-Milosevic’s Serbia
The aim of my research is to map the Serbian transformation processes in the post-Milosevic’s period. For the purposes of this research, I approach the state as a dynamic field of power (Bourdieu, Brueabaker, Mogdal and Schlutze) in which one can differentiate between images and practices of various agents. I argue that state building practices in Serbia represent convoluted and mutually contradictory practices that quite often work against each other. In other words, I argue that the Serbian “state” is best understood as a contested political field in which different international players (the EU, the USA, and Russia), Serbian parties, movements, political and civic entrepreneurs compete to advance and legitimize their own political agenda. The ultimate result is not a finished, consolidated/built state, but a “work in progress,” a structure whose foundation are constantly being shifted by differing expectations, images and practices of major state-building players in Serbia.
Sarah Nouwen. PhD candidate, Cambridge University. Contact
Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The ICC’s Complementarity as a Catalyst for Domestic Proceedings: A Perspective from the Field
This study examines to what extent the ‘complementarity principle’ governing the admissibility of cases for the International Criminal Court (ICC/the Court) functions as a catalyst for domestic proceedings. Unlike most of the literature on complementarity, the perspective in this thesis is primarily ‘from the field’: it studies the domestic effects of complementarity in four countries that have been among the first under the Court’s scrutiny.
Complementarity resolves that the ICC can only exercise its jurisdiction over a case if there is no state genuinely investigating or prosecuting that case or that has done so. Its most evident function is thus to determine under which circumstances the Court can ‘backstop’ domestic justice systems, which have a primary right and responsibility to investigate and prosecute the crimes under the Court’s jurisdiction. It has been suggested that the relevance of the complementarity principle goes beyond that of an admissibility rule for the Court. It could function as a catalyst for domestic proceedings, contributing to the aim of ending impunity without the Court having to step in. The assumption is that the principle attempts to reconcile international justice with state sovereignty and that states, keen on protecting their sovereignty, will try to avoid ICC interference. Casting its shadow before it, complementarity as a rule on admissibility could encourage states to initiate domestic proceedings.
Against the background of the principle’s substantive rules, procedural framework, the theory of complementarity and its catalyst function, this thesis analyses whether and how complementarity has worked as a catalyst for proceedings in the countries where the Court’s jurisdiction has been triggered (Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan) or that are known to be under consideration for opening an investigation (Central African Republic). The situations in these four neighbouring countries show on some points remarkable similarities; on others there are important differences, for instance as regards the initiative for the Court’s involvement. It provides valuable testing ground for the way in which complementarity plays out domestically.
International Non-governmental Organizations
Anna Ohanyan. Assistant Professor, Stonehill College. Contact
Post-Conflict Global Governance: Network Effects on Microcredit NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Highly complex post-conflict environments have challenged the capacities of international organizations and non-governmental organizations, pushing them into networks of various durability and sustainability. Interestingly, these actors manage to function through these networks despite their at times conflicting goals for a given post-conflict environment. This study explains as to who controls the final policy outcomes in these networks, and to what effect to the social development and institutional sustainability of a post-conflict state. In the post-Cold War security environment microfinance has emerged as a favored instrument by practitioners
for community rehabilitation and economic development in post-conflict states , and the microfinance sector in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina is the backdrop of this work. The study illuminates how transnational networks embolden some NGOs and/or IGOs while diluting the power of others . As such, the study exposes the comparative advantage of each network type operating in the post-conflict microfinance environment of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The study produced specific attributes of “winning” networks, namely those which harness the transformative power of NGOs and enable balanced policies of peacebuilding/social rehabilitation and long-term statebuilding and institutional reconstruction. The study presents principles of network mobilization. For NGO sector “winning” networks tend to possess diverse sources of resource supply (financial, institutional and political) which are spread out among many donors. Such networks are also characterized by little policy coherence among network members. These two network characteristics allow the NGO to remain embedded in donor structures and draw from the resources they offer while also insulating and shielding the policy implementation from at times conflicting donor pressures.
Kristin M. Bakke. PhD Candidate,Political Science, University of Washington. Contact
On Divisions, Diversity, and Disparity: Federal States and the Societies They Govern
Why have relations between the central government and ethnic or regional groups been mired in violence in some states but not in others? My dissertation tackles this key question, explaining federal states’ diverse capacity to contain intrastate conflicts, particularly conflicts between central governments and subnational groups in pursuit of greater autonomy or independence. Increasingly, both scholars and policy-makers have turned to federalism or some form of decentralized governance as a promising means for managing such separatist struggles. Yet, while some scholars argue that federalism reduces the chances of intrastate struggles, others have suggested that it does just the opposite. Moreover, the empirical record of conflict in existing federal states demonstrates that while some federations have been free from internal conflicts, others have gone through prolonged periods of significant violence, while yet others have experienced episodic uprisings. To explain this theoretical conflict and empirical diversity, it is critical to ask not only whether, but also under which conditions, federalism can help preserve intrastate peace.
Acknowledging that there is no “one-size-fits-all” federal solution to conflicts in divided states, I argue that the degree to which federal institutions can help contain conflicts depends on how these institutions respond to certain characteristics of the societies they govern. Based on newly collected subnational data across 22 federal states from 1978 to 2000, I demonstrate that the “peace-preserving” effects of specific federal traits, such as fiscal decentralization and political party ties between tiers of government, are conditional on regional levels of wealth and ethnic composition. In order to capture the causal processes of the argument, the study includes in-depth case studies of separatist mobilization in three federations: Chechnya in Russia, Punjab in India, and Québec in Canada. The data for the case studies were collected through secondary sources and meetings and interviews with federal and regional policy-makers in the three countries. While the statistical analysis establishes that institutions cannot be seen as isolated from the societies they are meant to govern, the case studies allow me to explore how societal traits and regional politics affect the workings of institutions governing relations between central and regional governments.
The key policy implication of this research is that successful institutional design requires in-depth knowledge of the societies the institutions are meant to govern.
Alan J. Kuperman. Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, University of Texas. Contact
Power-Sharing or Partition? History’s Lessons for Keeping the Peace in Bosnia
(in Michael Innes, ed., Bosnian Security after Dayton: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2006).
The ambiguity of the Dayton accords may have been essential to ending Bosnia’s war, but that uncertainty has now become a liability. Final status must be addressed, and it is a decision that could have great consequence for the welfare and security of Bosnia and the wider Balkans. The optimal answer rests in part on the particularities of the region, such as its recent history of warfare, the unresolved status of Kosovo, a still fragile peace in Macedonia, and nascent secessionist movements in parts of Serbia including Vojvodina, the Presevo Valley, and the Sandzak (shared with Montenegro). But insight also can be gained by looking at the worldwide track record since World War II of attempts to share power following ethnic civil war. Such an analysis reveals how rarely and under what special conditions these efforts have succeeded, which suggests that current international efforts in Bosnia are flawed and should be adjusted.
Sam Whitt. Assistant Professor, University of Tenessee. Contact
Beyond Keeping the Peace: Can Institutions Promote Trust and Cooperation after Violent Conflict?
My dissertation work consisted of a survey of 681 subjects from sixteen locations across Bosnia in 2003-2004 using a stratified random sampling method. In addition to the survey, subjects participated in 5 experiments adapted from laboratory experiments in behavioral economics (mainly variations on the "dictator game"). The survey focuses on institutional and social trust. The experiments focus on norms of fairness in postwar Bosnian society. The findings from the survey and experiments indicate that cooperative social norms are re-emerging in the postwar period. While ethnicity still has a tangible impact on trust and cooperation, outgroups are not automatically distrusted nor ingroups universally trusted. Institutional trust seems to be a strong predictor of social trust in general and inter-ethnic trust in particular and especially at the local level. Norms of fairness across ethnicity also appear surprisingly strong in the experimental data. Most subjects do not treat outgroups remarkably different from their own coethnics in the experiments. They also have remarkably high expectations of reciprocity from non-coethnics.
Policy recommendations? Most scholars reject explanations of the Bosnian conflict based on enduring hatreds and point to institutional and entrepreneurial explanations instead. This research suggests an emerging social basis for cooperation in postwar Bosnia. It also suggests that some key institutional actors are playing a positive role in the process of reconciliation.
Ingrid Samset. PhD candidate, University of Bergen. Contact
A Promising Experience: Building Peace Through Community Development. Available here.
Mainstream peacebuilding approaches tend to assume that a conflict settlement must be in place before the process of social and economic development can begin. Humanitarian rather than development aid is therefore the norm for countries emerging from conflict, even after the violence has receded. Yet a recent evaluation of a UNDP project in the Democratic Republic of Congo concludes that development can be an effective tool to build peace, even in the midst of violence. In the war-torn district of Ituri, local initiatives for community development effectively enabled a shift from violence to relative peace. This article presents findings of the evaluation, and focuses on those most relevant to policy-makers. It concludes that locally driven community development processes constitute a tool for peacebuilding that is likely to work also in other post-war contexts where poverty and marginalisation are central issues in the conflicts in question.
Anna Jarstad. Assistant Professor, Uppsala University. Contact
From War to Democracy,
Dilemmas of Peacebuilding and Democratisation
Jarstad has over the last three years been co-directing, with Professor Timothy D. Sisk of University of Denver, a project on Dilemmas of Peacebuilding and Democratisation . The project will result in the volume From War to Democracy (Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming 2008). It investigates the dilemmas of democratization in war-torn societies in the following research areas: new forms of violence and conflict management, peacekeeping, rebel-to-political party transformation, power sharing, electoral processes, civil society, and international responses to democratization crises. The most significant challenges to peace resulting from dilemmas that arise in post-war democratization are investigated from a theoretical and empirical viewpoint. The policy implications of this research include recommendations on the design of transitions from war to democracy, management of political violence, engagement of civil society, and improvement on international stewardship.
Artur Zimerman. Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Sao Paulo. Contact
Land tenure as a Determinant of Civil Wars: Why Not in Brazil?
Although civil wars occur largely in rural regions where peasants are the main actors, scholars have not given agrarian issues the empirical and quantitative attention they deserve in comparison with other determinants of civil war. This research approaches agrarian themes quantitatively with the aim of including agrarian indicators with other determinants of civil wars. The relevant questions dealt with in this work are: which kind of peasants participate in civil wars? What role do the concentration of land, rural demography, and level of agricultural productivity play in the onset of civil wars?
The statistical results of the study confirm that agrarian indicators are important to the onset of civil wars. However, the concentration of land did not achieve the expected outcome, due primarily to data problems. The other determinants were pertinent and significant. The author’s new research topic, as part of his post-doctorate, is the determinants of agrarian violence in Brazil, which has caused many injuries and deaths among Brazilian peasants in the countryside.
Connecting Academic Research and Policy
Ingrid Samset. PhD candidate, University of Bergen. Contact
What´s in a Figure? Estimating Recurrence of Civil War (with
Astri Suhrke) Available here.
It is often said that a country that has experienced civil war has nearly a 50 per cent risk of sliding back into war within five years. This has been widely cited in the academic literature and in policy debates, including in UN documents and preparatory work for the establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission. A closer examination of the origins, circulation and establishment of this figure gives a glimpse into the process whereby academic findings are converted into conventional wisdom and effectively inserted into the policy debate, even though the findings themselves are unstable. In this case, the authors of the original figure revised their initial 50 per cent estimate down to around 20 per cent only four years after their first study, but the change was barely noted. This article examines the process whereby the findings were made, and offers a note of caution about the wholesale adoption of such figures by policymakers and academics.