Nicolas Lemay-Hébert

Statebuilding without Nation-building? Legitimacy, State Failure and the Limits of the Institutionalist Approach

Abstract The paradox of attempting to (re)construct state institutions without considering the socio-political cohesion of societies recurs throughout the world, most notably today in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. This essay tries to shed some light on the debate around the concepts of state and nation-building. Drawing on a sociological understanding of the modern nation-state, it contends that it is impossible to conceive of statebuilding as a process separate from nation-building. This essay identifies two different schools of thought in the discussion concerning the statebuilding process, each of which reflects different sociological understandings of the state. The first one, an ‘institutional approach’ closely related to the Weberian conception of the state, focuses on the importance of institutional reconstruction and postulates that statebuilding activities do not necessarily require a concomitant nation-building effort. The second, a ‘legitimacy approach’ influenced by Durkheimian sociology, recognizes the need to consolidate central state institutions, but puts more emphasis on the importance of socio-political cohesion in the process. Building on this second approach and demonstrating its relevance in contemporary statebuilding, this article concludes with a discussion of recent statebuilding attempts and the ways external actors can effectively contribute to statebuilding processes.

The Bifurcation of the Two Worlds: assessing the gap between internationals and locals in state-building processes

Abstract Studies increasingly highlight the limits of state building conducted ‘from the top-down’. Building on the literature and using a Rosenauian concept in a novel way, this article posits that international interventions create a ‘bifurcation of the two worlds’. Departing from a study of Kosovo and Timor-Leste, the article posits that the massive arrival of staff involved in international governance will create a social gap between the international and the local ‘worlds’, which will in turn become a target of narratives of resistance by local actors. This bifurcation is exemplified by the ‘white car syndrome’, a concept representing the horde of white UN vehicles accompanying major interventions and developed in this contribution. Thus, the article attempts to shed new light on the legitimacy crises that Kosovo and Timor-Leste experienced at the beginning of the current century, while demonstrating and increasing the linkages between development studies and peace studies.

‘Fragile States’: introducing a political concept

The special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the oecd, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept.

Everyday Legitimacy and International Administration: Global Governance and Local Legitimacy in Kosovo

Abstract International administrations are a very specific form of statebuilding. This article examines the limits illustrated by the experience in Kosovo. Here, the international administration faced the same requirements of any legitimate, liberal government, but without the checks and balances normally associated with liberal governance. Thus, the international administration was granted full authority and the power thereby associated, but without the legitimacy upon which the liberal social contract rests. The statebuilding agenda put forth came to be seen as more exogenous, reinforcing the delegitimization process. This article specifically addresses the influence of the Weberian approach to legitimacy on the statebuilding literature, as well as its limits. It then proposes other possible avenues for statebuilding, more in line with a wider understanding of legitimacy and intervention.

Resistance in the time of cholera : the limits of stabilization through securitization in Haiti

The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is the latest of seven UN missions in the country, stretching over 20 years of international involvement. If the UNs Security Sector Reform (SSR) mission has had a ‘stabilizing’ influence on the country following Aristides forced exile since 2004, a string of sexual scandals and the cholera scandal has progressively contributed to modify the local perception of the mission, seen as yet another foreign ‘occupation’ in Haiti. This article argues that while the resistance to the UN in Haiti is clearly contextual – linked to certain events and actions of certain individuals – it is also, and more fundamentally, structural in form. The article explores themes around the local resistance encountered by the UN in Haiti, using James Scotts multi-levelled approach of the landscape of resistance to highlight the complex nature of statebuilding in Haiti, while linking the more recent form of resistance to MINUSTAH to the specific securitization approach adopted by the mission and its restrictive mindset.

Coerced transitions in Timor-Leste and Kosovo: managing competing objectives of institution-building and local empowerment

Institution-building under the aegis of international administration has faced various hurdles and obstacles in Kosovo and Timor-Leste. One particular hurdle is related to the mandates of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor, which created a conflict of objectives for the external actors – specifically, between institution-building and local empowerment. This article analyses the strategies of international administrators and local elites in this context. After attempting to prioritize institution-building while paying lip-service to imperatives of empowerment, international officials were forced to readjust their strategy as a result of opposition and resistance from local partners. In light of the practical consequences of the conflict of objectives, international officials proceeded to prioritize local empowerment, reducing their institution-building role. The article concludes by identifying the implications of these experiences for the debate concerning democracy promotion, and highlights the attributes of the ‘participatory intervention’ framework put forward by Chopra and Hohe.

The oecd’s discourse on fragile states: expertise and the normalisation of knowledge production

The concept of legitimacy has been highly influential in policy recommendations concerning state building in ‘fragile states’. Indeed, depending on how ‘legitimacy’ is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can differ substantially. This article discusses what is at stake in the conceptualisation of ‘legitimacy’ by comparing the academic literature with the normative production of the oecd. Looking at two approaches to legitimacy – the institutionalist or neo-Weberian approach focusing on institutional reconstruction, and the social legitimacy approach emphasising the importance of social cohesion for successful state building – the article shows that both these conceptions are present in most reports, but also that the neo-Weberian approach tends to prevail over the social legitimacy perspective. Through a series of interviews with oecd officials and scholar-practitioners who have participated in the writing process of oecd reports, we hint, finally, at future research avenues on the social conditions of knowledge production and its normalisation.

UNPOL and Police Reform in Timor-Leste: Accomplishments and Setbacks

Following the 2006 gang violence in Timor-Leste amid dissension between the two main security institutions in the country, the Timor-Leste Defence Force (F–FDTL) and the National Police of Timor-Leste (PNTL), the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1704, establishing a UN multidimensional, integrated mission, including UN police with an executive policing mandate, to ensure the restoration and maintenance of public security. With the mission winding down in 2009, this article offers an early assessment of its accomplishments and setbacks in the realm of security and public order, emphasizing the UNPOL leg of the mission. If the mission succeeded in restoring a modicum of security in Timor-Leste, it fell short of effectively assisting the PNTL reform process, implying that another security crisis erupting in the country cannot be ruled out.

What attachment to peace? Exploring the normative and material dimensions of local ownership in peacebuilding.

The peacebuilding and academic communities are divided over the issue of local ownership between problem-solvers who believe that local ownership can ‘save liberal peacebuilding’ and critical voices claiming that local ownership is purely a rhetorical device to hide the same dynamics of intervention used in more ‘assertive’ interventions. The article challenges these two sets of assumptions to suggest that one has to combine an analysis of the material and normative components of ownership to understand the complex ways in which societies relate to the peace that is being created. Building on the recent scholarship on ‘attachment’, we claim that different modalities of peacebuilding lead to different types of social ‘attachment’ – social-normative and social-material – to the peace being created on the part of its subjects.

Letter from the Editors: Taking the Hybridity Agenda Further

Research on the practical and theoretical failure of the liberal peace project has led to the emergence of a liberal–local hybrid form of peace—what Robert Belloni (2012) calls hybrid peace governance—which ‘intellectually enables an engagement with the lives of ordinary people, in their own everyday rather than in a static and distant state context’ (Richmond 2009, 333). The idea that in times of high-density communications the order of societies changes, adapts, and re-shapes following complex dynamics and narratives was developed in cultural studies earlier. As Stuart Hall describes in his excellent essay, hybrid interactions constitute the character of social relations where all ‘the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms [are] negotiated’ (Hall 1990: 234). Theoretically, this observation has been adapted to liberal intervention contexts and enables us to either apprehend the interplay between international and local practices, norms and institutions (Richmond and Mitchell 2012, 1; Mac Ginty 2010), or to transcend universalizing theories to include the plurality of social orders (Boege et al. 2009; see also Roberts 2008). In this context, studies about hybrid orders have revealed insights on spaces of interventions (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008, Charbonneau and Sears 2014), moving away from the unhelpful binaries of ‘local’ vs ‘international’, ‘bottom-up’ vs ‘top-down’, ‘modern’ vs ‘traditional’, ‘internal’ vs ‘external’, ‘Western’ vs ‘non-Western’ (see Bliesemann de Guevara 2010). While some see ‘hybrid forms of peace’ as a ‘possibility’—a theoretical alternative to currently limited international interventionist frameworks—others have started to investigate the emergence of specific ‘hybrid forms of peace’ and their implications. Rebecca Richards contributes to this new wave of scholarship with her article ‘Bringing the Outside In: Somaliland, Statebuilding and Dual Hybridity’. Departing from analyses of statebuilding failures, Richards explores the successful hybrid statebuilding case of Somaliland, where ‘state’ institutions meet some of the demands and expectations of the society, starkly contrasting with other neighbouring political communities. Looking at the inclusion of traditional structures of authority in the central democratic Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2015 Vol. 9, No. 1, 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015.991078