Dominik Zaum

The sovereignty paradox : the norms and politics of international statebuilding

Introduction PART I: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES 1. Sovereignty in International Society 2. International Administrations in International Society PART II: CASE STUDIES 3. Statebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina 4. Statebuilding in Kosovo 5. Statebuilding in East Timor 6. The Sovereignty Paradox Bibliography

Legitimating international organizations

PART I: CONCEPTUAL QUESTIONS 1. International Organisations, Legitimacy, and Legitimation 2. Legitimacy and International Organisation: The Changing Ethical Context 3. Regional and Global Legitimacy Dynamics: The United Nations and Regional Arrangements PART II: CASE STUDIES 4. Legitimation and the UN Security Council 5. ECOWAS and the Legitimacy Question: A Normative and Institutional Approach 6. The African Union 7. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Between Internal and External Legitimacy 8. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 9. A European Re-invention of Indirect Legitimacy? 10. Legitimacy and International Organisations: the Case of the OSCE 11. Conclusion

The authority of international administrations in international society

This article analyses the way in which international administrations exercising governmental power in post-conflict territories justify their political authority in the absence of democratic legitimacy. Looking at the administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, the article focuses on their establishment, their mandates, and their government practices and identifies five different sources of authority: consent, delegation, the maintenance of peace and security, the promotion of human rights and democracy, and the provision of government. However, all of these sources are contested. In particular the practices of international administrations, their lack of accountability and their limited effectiveness in providing government, undermine their authority. The article concludes by highlighting some possible avenues for enhancing the authority of international administrations.

Corruption and post-conflict peacebuilding: selling the peace?

Corruption and post-conflict peacebuilding: Selling the peace? is a veritable gold mine. Its organisation is intelligent and coherent, and its range and coverage are appropriately encyclopaedic. This volume deals with the theoretical issues around the concepts of corruption and post-conflict peacebuilding. It analyses the effect of corruption in post-conflict times and peacebuilding on the basis of a particular conceptual framework. Although this conceptual framework serves as the basis of this book, it presents many other theories and empirical evidence to illuminate these complex topics and also draws from every relevant discipline related to the issue of corruption and post-conflict peacebuilding. In this regard, the volume provides numerous examples by citing cases from different countries.

Introduction – Key Themes in Peacebuilding and Corruption

Since the end of the cold war, interventions to stabilize post-conflict societies have grown in number, length and scope, no longer just interposing troops between combatants and negotiating a peace agreement, but engaging in far-reaching efforts of institutional and societal transformation to prevent a relapse into war and to encourage a sustainable peace. On the one hand, this expansion of peacebuilding reflects the recognition that functioning institutions are central to post-conflict stability, as they can help to manage conflicts over power, resources and identity in divided societies. For most of the international organizations and donors involved in post-conflict peacebuilding, these institutions are liberal-democratic ones by necessity because they are considered to give all conflict parties a stake in the new, post-war order, they are concomitant with the protection of human rights and the rule of law, and they encourage economic growth. On the other hand, the expansion of peacebuilding activities reflects a growing understanding of how war economies have perpetuated conflict and how economic power structures and dynamics can persist well into peacetime. As well as causing war and sustaining it, the political economy of conflict also shapes the possibilities and the nature of the peace that follows. This emphasis on the role of political institutions and political economy in post-conflict peacebuilding has increasingly shifted the attention of peacebuilders towards the issue of corruption. Closely associated with the distortion of the market and the malfunction of political institutions, corruption is considered a key challenge to consolidating peace because it hinders economic development, perpetuates the unjust distribution of public resources, and undermines the legitimacy and effectiveness of government. In recent years, there has been a growing literature on the impact of corruption after conflict. This collection of papers aims to contribute to this debate by examining the specific conceptual and political challenges that corruption poses to post-conflict peacebuilding. Across the different papers in this special issue, a complex set of issues emerges to shape our understanding of postconflict corruption, its impact on stability and development, and the consequences of anti-corruption measures in the context of peacebuilding efforts. In this introduction, the implications for peacebuilding will be discussed in greater detail.

Selling the peace? Corruption and post-conflict peacebuilding

Corruption has become an increasingly salient issue in war to peace transitions, both for the populations of wartorn countries and for the donor governments, NGOs, and international and regional organisations involved in peacebuilding efforts. Conflictaffected countries feature prominently in corruption surveys as having the most serious corruption problems (Transparency International 2010; World Bank 2010). They offer an ideal environment for pervasive corruption: with their weak administrative institutions and often broken legal and judicial systems, they lack the capacity to effectively investigate and enforce prohibitions of corrupt behaviour. Moreover, the social norms that are expected to contain corruption tend to be weak or nonexistent; and divisions within societies affected by conflict weaken shared conceptions of the public good (Sandholtz and Koetzle 2000: 36; Philp in this volume). Further, the sudden inflow of donor aid and the desire of external actors to disburse it quickly create ample incentives and opportunities for corruption (Wilder and Gordon 2009). That countries with weak institutions and weak shared conceptions of the public good are more prone to corruption is not a new insight (see for example Nye 1967: 418). The fact that it has become a major preoccupation for peacebuilding actors and analysts in recent years is a consequence of the broad scope of peacebuilding (Barnett et al. 2007), defined in Boutros BoutrosGhali’s Agenda for Peace as ‘actions to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’ (UN 1992). In particular, peacebuilding’s focus on socioeconomic development and the reform and strengthening of political and administrative structures are strongly affected by corruption. This focus reflects two intellectual developments in particular. The first is the recognition of the importance of war economies in perpetuating conflict, and of the persistence of power structures rooted in war economies well into peacetime, where they become entrenched and consolidated through corruption (Berdal and Malone 2000; Berdal and Zaum 2011; Cheng 2011; Cramer 2006; Pugh et al. 2004). In addition to contributing to the outbreak of war and sustaining it, the political

Economic reform and the transformation of the payment bureaux

Economic reform has been central to the international state-building efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This essay discusses one of the key economic reforms pursued by the international community: the transformation of the payment bureaux. By analysing the initiation, drafting, and implementation of the reform, it identifies two different motivations behind the reform: the promotion of a free market economy, and the weakening of parallel structures challenging the authority of legitimate state institutions. It highlights the way in which this and other crucially important reforms have been seen by international administrators as technical requirements, to be overseen and implemented by experts, rather than as political decisions, requiring popular consultation and local input. The essay concludes by identifying how this approach of external governance has contributed to the successful elimination of the payment bureaux but also raises problems resulting from the downplaying of the importance of the political process and the implications this has for the success of the state-building project in Bosnia today.

International Transitional Administrations and the Politics of Authority Building

ABSTRACT This article critically examines authority-building practices of international transitional administrations (ITAs) engaged in statebuilding, and evaluates authority building as a framework for understanding the practices of statebuilding operations. It argues that war-torn states rarely lack actors claiming authority, but that these claims are often competing and mutually exclusive, and frequently not widely recognized. Building authority, therefore, requires ITAs to choose between different actors, recognizing the authority claims of some and withholding recognition from others, seeking ways to strengthen their ability to justify their authority claims vis-à-vis domestic and international audiences. Through authority-building practices, external actors directly become part of the political competition and dynamics of war-affected societies. The discussion of authority building by ITAs proceeds in three steps. The first section outlines the concept of political authority, in particular in the context of fragile states and of ITAs, and discusses relevant methodological issues. The second section then examines three distinct aspects of authority building by ITAs: claiming and justifying their own authority, recognizing and validating the authority claims of local actors, and strengthening the capacity of local actors to justify their authority claims. The final section concludes the paper with some reflections on political authority and authority building.

Muddling Through in Kosovo

has made visible the deep divisions between the United States and its European allies on the one hand, and Russia on the other; divisions that shaped the political dynamics of the Kosovo crisis nine years ago as they do today. The failure to seCle the status question through diplomacy has thrown the UN into crisis, leaving the Security Council deadlocked and the international community in Kosovo without direction and momen‐ tum. It has led to the de facto partition of Kosovo and control by Belgrade of the Serb‐inhabited northern municipalities, and left the international community struggling to define the nature of its engagement. The politi‐ cal divisions that have heightened the problem in Kosovo over the last nine years are unlikely to be resolved soon and, if anything, recent developments have accentuated them. New and creative approaches to stabilising Kosovo and promoting its economic and institutional devel‐ opment are necessary. Current European Union projects in support of the peace process in Northern Ireland might offer a model for such engagement. Muddling Through in Kosovo

International Non-Governmental Organisations and Civil Wars

The article examines the role of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in civil wars and the consequences of their presence for the dynamics of these conflicts. It argues that although NGOs can affect the dynamics of civil wars, their influence only partly derives from their non-state character. More important for their influence is the financial resources that they can command, which to a large extent derive from their close association with donor governments, as their implementing partners. This complex relationship between donor governments and NGOs has contributed to an increasingly political role of NGOs, and has undermined some of the benefits resulting from their non-state character.