What role does the legislature play in conflict management in fragile states? How can its role be strengthened? This study from Princeton University, UNDP and USAID assesses the situation in Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Uganda. It argues that the legislature can use its representative and deliberative capacities to become an effective institution for conflict management. Legislative strengthening should focus on three areas: building compromises within the legislature; overcoming executive-legislature imbalance; and strengthening linkages between constituents and the legislature through effective communication and representation.
Enabling legislatures to manage conflict is one of the most critical steps for achieving stability in fragile states. Peacebuilding may require adjustment or complete redesign of the state’s institutional architecture in order to address structural deficiencies that contributed to conflict. Legislatures are the guarantors of pluralism and can help to ensure the proper workings of government, while protecting the interests of disenfranchised groups. Stakeholders can transfer their grievances from the battlefield to the political sphere and power-sharing mechanisms can be adopted to bring all segments of society into the political framework. In addition, stakeholders can pursue compromises and participate in making decisions on contentious issues through the legislature. An effective legislature can exercise oversight over the executive, acting as a check on an authority that, if unfettered, could abuse minority interests.
Legislatures operate in a broader system of political incentives and disincentives, however. Attaining the right political incentive system is crucial to ensuring legislators perform their key roles in constituency outreach and balancing local and national concerns:
- A system that skews political incentives can descend into extreme clientelism or a patrimonial structure that overrides the independence of individual legislators.
- Legislatures do not automatically take on the role of conflict management. They can become instruments of majority oppression of the minority by passing legislation to marginalise the opposition.
- Legislatures, because they are representative of plural societies, can embody the social cleavages that drive a conflict.
- They can exacerbate social divisions and become part of the underlying causes of conflict, particularly in situations of extreme subservience to the executive.
There are three key, inter-related areas in which strengthening a country’s legislature can increase its ability to manage conflictual issues. International assistance should therefore focus on these areas to:
- Establish sub-structures within the legislature, such as legislative committees and cross-party caucuses, that strengthen the legislature’s ability to build compromises to resolve conflict issues.
- Build the capacity of legislators and the legislative secretariat to address conflict effectively, independent of the executive, as well as to provide oversight of executive peacebuilding and conflict management efforts.
- Improve communication between the legislature, legislators and their constituencies to ensure that interests underlying current or future conflicts are represented.
