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International Peace Building Failures in Civil Wars (Case Study of the Democratic Republic of Congo)
Séverine Autesserre. Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University.

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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.

Intergovernmental Organizations
Crafting the State: Transitional Governance and the International Role in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
Naazneen H. Barma. Doctoral candidate, Political Science, UC Berkeley.

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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.

Intergovernmental Organizations
Dilemmas of Nation-building and Citizenship in Bosnia
Dejan Guzina. Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University.

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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 International Community (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 IC 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.

Intergovernmental Organizations
International Engagement and State-building in Post-Milosevic's Serbia
Dejan Guzina. Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University.

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The aim of my research is to map the Serbian transformation processes in the post-Milosevic 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, and 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 is constantly being shifted by differing expectations, images, and practices of major state-building players in Serbia.

Intergovernmental Organizations
Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The ICC’s Complementarity as a Catalyst for Domestic Proceedings: A Perspective from the Field
Sarah Nouwen. PhD candidate, Cambridge University.

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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 no one that has done so in the past. 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 analyzes 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, and Sudan) or that are known to be under consideration for opening an investigation (the Central African Republic). The situations in these four neighbouring countries show  remarkable similarities on some points; while on others there are important differences, such as the initiative for the Court’s involvement. It provides a valuable testing ground for the way in which complementarity plays out domestically.

Intergovernmental Organizations