Local Ownership as Dependence Management: Inviting the Coloniser Back

This article challenges the tendency to understand local ownership of statebuilding processes chiefly as a product of how international donors plan and implement reforms rather than of how such efforts are appropriated by local actors. Local ownership is typically described as a quality which is ‘supported’, ‘fostered’, ‘granted’ or ‘stifled’ by foreigners rather than something which is simply taken by the hosts of such interventions. Drawing on the case of British-led police reform in Sierra Leone, the article argues that local authorities exercised ownership by actively drawing their former colonizer into the security sector, thus deepening and prolonging the intervention. This contradicts two common assumptions about local ownership: (i) it is aimed at reducing international influence and (ii) it will be scarcer and more difficult to achieve the weaker the host state. Rather than to control how the police reform was designed and implemented, the principal function of local ownership was to secure a powerful ally in the ongoing civil war and to achieve an outward reorientation of national security.     

Antipodean Statebuilding: The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands and Australian Intervention in the South Pacific

Abstract

This essay analyses Australian-led statebuilding efforts in Solomon Islands, through the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). RAMSI has often been offered as a successful example of statebuilding worthy of international consideration. Here, some of the limitations of the RAMSI mission and its progress in rebuilding the ‘failed’ South Pacific state will be carefully assessed. Despite significant short-term statebuilding successes in restoring security and stabilizing the economy, RAMSI faces long-term challenges centred on the complex politics of political community-building. As an example of ‘best practice’ statebuilding, RAMSI highlights the complexities involved with the two-level game of international intervention: the (conflicting) challenge of reconciling the need to respect sovereign sensitivities with the need to undertake robust political engagement.     

Fragile States: A Donor-serving Concept? Issues with Interpretations of Fragile Statehood in Afghanistan

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.     

Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations – in order to take problems seriously – begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.     

Kosovo: Statebuilding Utopia and Reality

ABSTRACT

Twenty years of international statebuilding have made little impact on the ‘stateness’ of Kosovo. This article puts this failure in the broader context of the shift from the liberal internationalist assumptions of the late 1990s to the pragmatic realism of today. It does this through the lenses of E H Carr’s classic work The Twenty Years’ Crisis, UN policy thinking on the problematic assumptions of international statebuilding and the diagnoses in David Lake’s 2016 book The Statebuilder’s Dilemma, which sets out three pragmatic alternatives. The article concludes that all three of these alternatives can be seen in practice in Kosovo.     

International Constructions of National Memories: The Aims and Effects of Foreign Donors' Support for Genocide Remembrance in Rwanda

Abstract

Commemoration of the victims of conflict is a characteristic national act of post-conflict statebuilding in which the significance and ownership of memorials is typically contested. In the case of post-genocide Rwanda, such contestation is overlain with international agendas and influences. Certain international donors supported memorialization as part of programmes to aid societal reconstruction and reconciliation and to prevent conflict. Studies of international contributions to genocide memorials, especially the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, reveal tensions in this agenda, which seeks to construct both national identity and an imagined ‘international community’ and serves to extend the remit of international actors.     

Minustah’s Legitimacy and the ‘Security-first’ Approach: Reassessing Statebuilding and its Violent Features in the Case of Haiti

ABSTRACT

The article aims to reassess the statebuilding endeavour of international interveners in the case of Haiti, from an interpretative and socio-historical perspective. First, the article analyses the existing critical literature on statebuilding and the growing literature on peacebuilding and legitimacy. Second, it introduces the case of Haiti, analysing the process of state formation and the production of the present conditions in the country. It then presents an assessment of Minustah, arguing that the lack of a local source of legitimacy, connected to a ‘security-first’ statebuilding approach, led the intervention to reinforce the predatory and undemocratic logics of Haitian politics.     

Putting the Cart before the Horse : Statebuilding,Early Warning and the Irrationality of Bureaucratic Rationalization

Abstract

Despite the transition of a government from authoritarian to democratic rule, the root causes of civil war persist and require monitoring in a post-conflict phase. The collapse of the Arusha peace accord in Rwanda is a prime example of both the importance of early warning in statebuilding and the severe consequences of its failure. This article demonstrates that such a crucial interaction between the detection of warning signals and peacebuilding has been obstructed by intervening mechanisms in international organization. These are, principally, those of bureaucratic rationalization – drawing on Max Weber's views of bureaucratic universalism and institutional rationality (Zweckrationalität) – and Western normalization – which moralises intervention scenarios to fit self-images of the pursuit of ‘noble causes’, often detaching policy from the complex realities on the ground.     

Asymmetrical rivalry between China and Japan in Africa: to what extent has Sino-Japan rivalry become a global phenomenon?

Abstract

To what extent is China–Japan rivalry a global phenomenon, and what is the nature of the rivalry they engage in outside their own region? Literature on Sino-Japanese rivalry abounds, but it pays scant attention to the relevance of the rivalry outside East Asia. This article argues that Sino-Japanese rivalry has indeed become a global phenomenon, that various forms of the rivalry are evident in Africa, and that they are mostly of an asymmetrical nature. Quantitatively, China’s contribution to Africa is far greater than that of Japan, with the exception of foreign direct investment (FDI). Qualitatively, though, Japan has a stronger sense of the rivalry than China has, revealing a psychological aspect to the asymmetry as well. Contextually, the types of activity that Chinese and Japanese actors carry out in Africa are not necessarily the same, which makes the rivalry all the more asymmetrical. The rivalry has become more apparent recently, not only because of the rise of China but also because of a change in the meaning of ‘Africa’ – from a region of ‘poverty’ and ‘hunger’ to a region of ‘economic opportunities’. That said, Africa – to a greater or lesser degree in each of its countries – still suffers from conflict and instability. As a result, the ability of Japan and China to exert power and influence throughout Africa is somewhat restricted.     

Institutionalized Intervention: The ‘Bunker Politics’ of International Aid in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

Afghanistan has come to be seen as emblematic of the security threats besetting peace and security operations, and in this article we consider the response to such threats via the ‘bunkering’ of international staff. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative survey with aid and peacebuilding officials in Kabul, we illustrate how seemingly mundane risk management procedures have negative consequences for intervening institutions; for the relation between interveners and national actors; and for the purpose of intervention itself. Bunkering, we argue, is deeply political – ‘imprisoning’ staff behind ramparts while generating an illusion of presence and control for ill-conceived modes of international intervention.     

‘I am an American’: protesting advertised ‘Americanness’

How are citizenships and nationalisms constructed, connected, and contested in the post-9/11 USA – performatively, affectively, and visually – and how do their relationships figure ‘Americanness’? This article takes up this question (1) by tracking how Americanness was advertised in the American Ad Council's ‘I am an American’ campaign and (2) by introducing the multimedia project ‘I am an American’: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens, which engages the Ad Council's campaign as a practice-based protest of the Ad Council's advertised ‘Americanness’. The article traces how the Ad Council's campaign advertises what Evelyn Alsultany calls ‘diversity patriotism’. It also constructs a complex, mobile system of differentiation that marks some citizens as ‘safe’ and others as ‘unsafe’, which runs counter to the idealized notion of a unified ‘Americanness’ that it advertises. The article then examines how the practice-based protest project ‘I am an American’ takes these ‘unsafe citizens’ – US citizens who either will not or cannot make their differences normatively conform to the national ideal of the ‘One’ composed of the ‘Many’ propagated by the Ad Council's campaign – as its point of departure to reflect upon how citizenship protests function for and against citizenship, nationalisms, and various figurations of Americanness.     

Issue ownership attack: how a political party can counteract a rival’s issue ownership

Abstract

A central part of representative democracy is that voters evaluate political parties based on how competently they handle issues, so-called ‘issue ownership’. Since issue ownership is a central ingredient in the vote choice, rival parties often try to influence how voters evaluate a competing party. This is an issue ownership attack. However, despite intense scholarly interest in issue ownership, the understanding of how parties shape issue ownership is very limited. Therefore a new theoretical model is tested here to understand issue ownership attack. Using several survey experiments, the analysis shows that a mainstream party can counteract another mainstream party’s issue ownership by reframing the issue and by blaming the party for its performance, but not by changing its own position on the issue. Hence, the study not only advances the understanding of issue ownership stability and change but also brings important insights on how parties influence voters.     

Statebuilding in Divided Societies: The Reform of Dayton in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Drawing from the literature on conflict regulation and other plural society theories, this paper provides a framework of analysis to explore the dynamics involved in the external statebuilding process in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The analysis is based on a three-level framework whereby patterns of conflict regulation are analyzed at the inter- and intra-ethnic levels, as well as what this article terms the ‘supra-national’ ethnic level, where interactions between domestic and external actors are considered. In order to explore these issues empirically, this paper examines the process of constitutional reform in BiH over the course of 2005–6, drawing from personal interviews. The paper concludes that, while the assistance provided by external actors has proven substantial, the neglect of intra-ethnic dynamics and other related considerations have often rendered external actors’ efforts at shaping the statebuilding process in BiH ineffective.     

Building a Repressive Peace: The Case of Post-Genocide Rwanda

Abstract

Security, economic recovery, democracy and statebuilding are seen as tenets of post-conflict peacebuilding in the academic literature. In Rwanda, 15 years of post-genocide peace were built through security, economic recovery and statebuilding, but without democratisation. The result was a repressive peace. The Rwandan case suggests that post-conflict peacebuilding does not require democracy; that elections can reinforce authoritarian tendencies; and that statebuilding can lead to a repressive peace. It also suggests that the repressive peace can be durable, at least in the short to medium term.     

Unintended consequences: social policy,state institutions and the ‘stalling’ of the Malaysian industrialization project

Abstract

This paper examines the relation of particular forms of social and labour market policy to economic development. Taking the history of Malaysian industrialization as its empirical case, the paper assesses the unintended consequences of redistribution policy, on the one hand, and migration policy, on the other, for the limited upgrading of the country's electronics industry. It argues that, while the former has been central to social harmony in Malaysia's multi-racial society, it has contributed to the underdevelopment of small and medium-sized firms capable of linking with the TNCs on the basis of knowledge-intensive and higher value-added operations. Migration policy, on the other hand, has allowed manufacturers to have continued access to supplies of low-cost, lower-skilled labour that have released the pressures that would otherwise have been there for technological and skill upgrading in the electronics industry. Only in Penang, where regional state institutions have intervened to encourage SME upgrading, has the national picture been moderated. Malaysia's industrialization project emerged at time when export competition in manufactured commodities was less intense than it is now. Largely as a result of federal government priorities and for other reasons explored in the paper, advantage was not taken of this ‘window of opportunity’. As a consequence, the country's industrialization project – exemplified by its electronics industry – is now ‘stalling’ in the sense that it remains locked into low- to medium-technology operations. With the rise of China as a manufacturing exporter, this is a dangerous situation for a country's principal industry to be in.     

Combating Domestic Abuse in Jordan from the Top-Down: Liberal and/or Democratic Statebuilding?

ABSTRACT

This article explores how liberal statebuilding can produce unexpected results by examining Jordan's campaign against domestic abuse. Jordan's Family Protection Initiative exemplifies the executive's implementation of externally-supported measures promoting women's empowerment. However, ambiguities over its central mission have resulted in the state pressuring victims to reconcile with abusive family members. I argue that the Initiative reflects regime survival strategies, designed to deflect international calls for democratic reform, co-opt the Jordanian women's movement, and circumvent Islamist and tribal opposition. Critics' accusations that the Initiative is ‘foreign’ are largely veiled criticisms of the executive for politically marginalising them and/or usurping their authority in family matters.     

Understanding varieties of populism in times of crises

Abstract

This introduction presents the conceptual and analytical framework which constitutes the background for the special issue entitled ‘Varieties of Populism in Europe in Times of Crises’. More specifically, this contribution investigates how different populist parties in the European Union have been affected by the recent economic crisis and the more long-lasting political and cultural crises. Analytically, the article disentangles the role of the Great Recession vis-à-vis other factors (such as political and party system factors, but also structural social changes or cultural opportunities) in the growing strength of populist parties in various European countries. It argues that although the economic crisis has without any doubt provided a specific ‘window of opportunity’ for the emergence of new political actors, which have capitalised on citizens’ discontent, long-lasting political factors – such as the increasing distrust toward political institutions and parties – and the more recent cultural crisis connected with migration issues have offered further fertile ground for the consolidation of populist parties in several European countries. Furthermore, as confirmed by the articles presented in the special issue, the various crises have offered differential opportunities for different types of populism – both inclusionary and exclusionary.     

The Practice and Theory of US Statebuilding

Abstract

The United States has employed three models of statebuilding over the last century, each animated by a different political theory. Statebuilding 1.0, developed and used from the late 1890s through the end of the Cold War, emphasized building loyal and politically stable subordinate states. Privileging American geopolitical and economic interests over those of local populations, the model was premised on the theory of realpolitik. Statebuilding 2.0 arose under and, in many ways, came to characterize attempts by the United States to construct a New World Order after 1990. The key shift was from seeking loyalty to building legitimate states. Under this model, the United States attempted to build broad-based popular support for nascent states by creating democratic institutions and spearheading economic reforms. In this ‘end of history’ moment, liberalism reigned triumphant in statebuilding practice and theory. Statebuilding 3.0 is now being ‘field-tested’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This new model seeks to build legitimacy for new states by providing security and essential public services to their populations. It rests on social contract theory, and its core tenet that legitimacy follows from providing effectively for the basic needs of citizens. Successive sections summarize the practice of statebuilding under each model and discuss its implicit political theory. A critique of each model then flows naturally into the practice and logic of the next. The conclusion outlines why a statebuilding 3.1 is necessary, and what such a strategy might entail.     

Kant and the critique of the ethics-first approach to politics

Abstract

Contemporary ‘realists’ attack the Kantian influence on political philosophy. A main charge is that Kantians fail to understand the specificity of politics and neglect to develop a ‘distinctively political thought’ that differs from moral philosophy. Instead, the critics say, Kantians are guilty of an ‘ethics-first approach to politics,’ in which political theory is a mere application of moral principles. But what does this ethics-first approach have to do with Kant himself? Very little. This article shows how Kant’s approach to political theory at a fundamental level includes political institutions, power, and coercion as well as disagreement, security, and coordination problems. In contrast to realists, Kant has a fundamental principle, which can explain why and guide how we ought to approach the political question, namely the norm of equal freedom. Yet, Kant’s theory does not take the form of a moralistic ought addressed to the isolated individual, but concerns a problem that we share as interdependent beings and that requires common institutions. The fruitfulness of the Kantian approach, then, is that it can take the political question seriously without being uncritical of actual politics and power, and that it can be normative without being moralistic.     

Introduction: The dynamics of ideas

Abstract

Participants in today's financial markets confront a sea of data. While the availability of market data has benefits it also creates problems, notably those relating to questions of meaning, judgement and intervention: how to make sense of these flows – how to see the ‘market’, its futures, and thus act pre-emptively. Over more recent years financial organizations have been turning to new technologies of representation, in particular the design and application of visualization software in an effort to enable better visual imagination of and interaction with markets as they unfold in real time. ‘What you see is what you risk’ in many respects captures the thinking or at least the desire underlying the employment of the latest visualization software. The more powerful one's vision the better able one is to participate in increasingly complex financial markets, at least in theory.

Based on recent interviews with those involved in developing and using the latest visualization software within some of the key markets of global finance, and developing the influential work of Daniel Beunza and David Stark, and Karin Knorr Cetina, in particular, this paper adopts a cultural-economy-of-finance perspective to examine the implications of these new techniques of representation. The paper argues that the latest visual turn within finance should be afforded a more central position in the study of contemporary financial market practices.