United Nations peace process as a peacemaking and human rights exercise. Lessons from conflict resolution in Sierra Leone

The United Nations peace process in Sierra Leone is one of the most successful initiatives in conflict resolution in the history of the UN. The peace building process has led to sustainable peace in a country located in a highly conflict ridden region in the world. This paper analyzes the peacemaking process to understand the process and its underlying unique features. Placing the events in the context of peacemaking criminology and human rights, it is argued that the UN peacemaking greatly reflects the values advocated by peacemaking criminology, while the goals of the process reflect universal human rights, recognized and promoted by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).     

Negotiating constitutions for political unions

This paper provides a cradle-to-grave model of political merger between two states and highlights the role of cross-border disparities in material and technological endowments in state formation. This issue has not received adequate theoretical attention in the existing scholarship that has largely focussed on factors like defence, trade, and public goods provision. In this paper, merger negotiations are modelled using a bilateral bargaining model with inside options and contest as an outside option. It is shown that the threat of contest constrains the set of mutually acceptable taxes and, more importantly, it provides stability to the federal constitution by making the punishment strategy in the secession rule credible. The existence of negotiated and contested constitutional merger agreements that are path dependent but time-consistent is shown. Also, the rent extracted by the advanced province in the union for transferring technology to the backward province is shown to be increasing in the complexity of technology but bounded from above. Finally, the impact of demographic heterogeneity on the feasibility of inter-state mergers is discussed.