How can legitimate, effective institutions best be built to help create peaceful states? This paper from the Research Partnership on Postwar Statebuilding suggests that statebuilding has become a central focus of multidimensional peace operations in war-torn societies. Efforts to construct legitimate, effective state institutions are full of tensions and contradictions. Understanding these tensions and contradictions is essential for anticipating many of the practical problems that international agencies face and for devising more nuanced and effective statebuilding strategies.
Statebuilding is the construction of legitimate, effective governmental institutions. It is a crucial element in any larger effort to create the conditions for a durable peace and human development in countries that are emerging from war. Without functioning and legitimate state institutions, post-conflict societies are less likely to escape violence and poverty. But the record of postwar statebuilding operations has been disappointing.
Institutional reform is a complex and arduous task even in the most favorable settings—and even more so in countries that are just emerging from civil wars, where social cohesion is shattered and existing governmental structures tend to be weak, factionalised or non-existent. Statebuilding actors cannot rely on any universally applicable formulas for creating the conditions for lasting peace in postwar societies, because there are none.
There is a deeper problem that may have contributed to the excessive expectations and the disappointing results of recent statebuilding efforts: insufficient knowledge and analysis of the intrinsic tensions and contradictions of externally-assisted statebuilding. The contradictions and policy dilemmas that confront statebuilding actors include the following:
- Universal values are promoted as a remedy for local problems. Foreigners are involved in defining legitimate local leaders.
- Statebuilding requires both a clean break with the past and a reaffirmation of history.
- A dominant international presence may be needed to maintain security, but a less intrusive international presence would allow local political, social and economic life to achieve a post-conflict equilibrium.
- Statebuilding is a long-term exercise but there are countervailing pressures against an open-ended international presence.
- Factional leaders may not represent the populations of their countries yet they are typically most involved in peace negotiations and become central political actors in the period immediately following conflict.
- Large-scale outside assistance can lead to dependency. It is difficult to co-ordinate outside actors.
Conceiving of postwar statebuilding as an inherently contradiction-filled enterprise, rather than a linear sequence of cumulative or mutually reinforcing steps, allows us to think more carefully about the characteristics of the tensions and contradictions themselves. Statebuilding is extremely complex and there is a need to understand the nature of these complexities, from the unanticipated consequences of promoting political and economic liberalisation in deeply divided societies to the disjuncture between international guidance and local control.
- Statebuilding actors should conduct dilemma analyses prior and during their operations and be aware that the many dilemmas of statebuilding can only be managed, not controlled. Expectations of what external actors can achieve should be more realistic.
- The underlying drivers of anticipated dilemmas should be assessed. It is important to understand the features of the local environment that make it likely that particular dilemmas will become problematic.
- It should be assumed that many elements of statebuilding will not fit easily together.
- Effective statebuilding should focus on sustainability. Once initial transitional tasks are completed, the international role should gradually shift towards a more ‘ordinary’ international development and monitoring presence.
- A key challenge for international statebuilders is to incorporate planning for subsequent phases into the initial design of the mission, reducing some of the contradictions between short-term and long-term statebuilding needs.
