Why Peace Processes Fail: Negotiating Insecurity After Civil War 9781626372610

Citation preview

Why Peace Processes Fail

Why Peace Processes Fail Negotiating Insecurity After Civil War Jasmine-Kim Westendorf

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2015 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2015 by Jasmine-Kim Westendorf. All rights reserved by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Westendorf, Jasmine-Kim. Why peace processes fail : negotiating insecurity after civil war / by Jasmine-Kim Westendorf. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62637-253-5 (alk. paper) 1. Peace-building. 2. Reconciliation. I. Title. JZ5538.W468 2015 303.6'4—dc23 2015020507 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

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To the peacemakers

Contents

Acknowledgments

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1 When Peace Fails

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2 What Is Success in Peace Processes?

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3 Negotiating Insecurity After Civil War

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4 Governance Building as Peace Building

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5 Transitional Justice and Reconciliation

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6 The Anatomy of Failure

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7 Why Peace Fails

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List of Acronyms Bibliography Index About the Book

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Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the support of many people. I am particularly grateful to Nick Bisley for guiding me on this academic journey, reading and commenting on many drafts of my manuscript, and helping me to develop the skills that I hope to use in many research projects to come. His generosity of time and advice has been invaluable to me over the past five years. I am thankful to Michael O’Keefe, Robin Jeffrey, Ruby Murray, Conny Lenneberg, and Jem Atahan for reading and commenting on various stages of the manuscript, and for their unfailing confidence in me and my project. I have also benefited immeasurably from discussions with Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Stephanie Lusby, Michael Connors, Tom Weber, Cameron Chisholm, and the vibrant community that revolves around the International Peace and Security Institute. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the many practitioners and policymakers who took time to be interviewed for this project and who very generously shared their experiences, knowledge, and networks with a young researcher. I am grateful to La Trobe University for the support I received while undertaking this project, including an office and financial support. My thanks also go to Jim Vale for his invaluable assistance in the final stages of preparing this manuscript for publication. My sincere thanks go also to William Zartman and Lynne Rienner for their belief in the value of this project and helpful advice during the publication process. Finally, I would not have made it to this point were it not for the love and support of my inspiring parents, Egon and Conny, who first got me thinking about war and peace as a teenager in Pakistan and who continue to inspire and challenge me over family dinners and Skype calls; my sisters, Teagan and Simone, who have been great companions along the way; my wonderful partner, Jem, for the love, friendship, support, and laughter; Lesley and Robin, who gave me a roof to live under and shared tea and advice; and my many fabulous friends. Thank you all.

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1 When Peace Fails

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. —Mark Twain Why, despite the best of intentions and often the investment of significant resources, do peace processes so often fail to lead to a consolidated peace after civil war? Even if there is not a full-scale resumption of war, violence, insecurity, and instability pervade many postwar societies. In this book I investigate this puzzle, focusing particularly on the way that the international community engages in resolving such wars and what it is about the dominant approach to peace processes that means they often lead to situations where the pressures for peace and those for war are locked in a stalemate, with neither fully able to capture the society at hand. The post–Cold War era has been characterized by increasing international involvement in the internal conflicts of states, which has been made possible by the growing normative regimes around human rights and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). As a result of these normative frameworks and the imperative to respond to massive humanitarian catastrophe due to intrastate conflict, the sovereignty norm is no longer a paramount obstacle to such intervention.1 This post–Cold War internationalism has meant that the international community, primarily through the United Nations (UN) but also through other institutions, has become heavily involved in resolving and building peace after civil wars. From Latin America and the Caribbean to the Balkans, from the Asia Pacific to Africa, peace processes have attempted to move societies out of often protracted civil warfare and toward a peaceful system of governance and social relations. Yet intrastate wars involve complex webs of motives, actors, and funding sources, and they are notoriously difficult to resolve. The World Bank’s World Develop-

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ment Report 2011 found that repeated cycles of violence and recurrent civil wars are the dominant form of armed conflict, with all civil wars that started after 2003 occurring in countries that have a history of civil war.2 Perhaps more striking than the fact that new civil wars usually start in countries that have already experienced such wars is that, even where peace processes successfully prevent a resumption of armed conflict, they are often unsuccessful in establishing durable peace, or even the basic hallmarks of security and stability. Instead, they have entrenched situations of “neither war, nor peace” in many postconflict states.3 As illustrated in the narratives of peace processes that I develop in the chapters that follow, many postwar societies remain characterized by widespread insecurity, violence, political instability, and ongoing cleavages between formerly warring groups, despite significant efforts to build peace. Why is this the case? What is happening in peace processes that means that while they can prevent a resurgence of war, they are unable to establish security and stability in the postwar society? Is there something in the international community’s approach to peace processes that perpetuates this phenomenon? This book is concerned with these questions.

Why This Investigation Matters There are a number of reasons why this investigation matters. First, peace is an essential condition for a flourishing society where people can live their lives in dignity. Civil war, however, has devastating effects on individuals, communities, and entire societies. It causes not only civilian deaths but massive ongoing suffering as a result of the long-term impacts of human rights violations and atrocities, displacement, epidemics, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), the breakup of families and communities, environmental degradation, the collapse of service provision (including medical and education systems) and food production structures, and the destruction of the social fabric that binds a peaceful society together. The economic costs of war are also high. Paul Collier’s analysis of civil wars shows that at the end of a typical war an economy is about 15 percent poorer, and though the average civil war lasts about seven years, it takes over a decade for a postwar country to recover economically. Significant costs also accrue for neighboring countries due to regional economic decline and the refugees, disease, and environmental degradation that cross borders.4 The World Development Report 2011 found violence to be the most significant contributing factor to underdevelopment.5 These high and long-term costs of civil war highlight the importance of resolving violent conflicts as quickly and sustainably as possible. Second, while the international community is deeply engaged in peace processes, and has been since the end of the Cold War, peace processes

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often do not establish peace or even basic levels of security and stability. Whether the international community is, as a result of its approach to peace making in civil wars, inadvertently contributing to the establishment of postwar systems and structures in which violence, insecurity, and instability are pervasive, warrants serious investigation. This is particularly pertinent as there are no signs that international involvement in the negotiated resolution of civil wars and subsequent peace consolidation processes will decrease in the foreseeable future. Given the challenges and complexities inherent in negotiating peace settlements, some analysts have suggested that the future will see a return to victory as the dominant strategy in terminating intrastate wars, including through decisive external interventions biased toward one conflict party.6 For instance, Charles King argues that the emergence of the norm of negotiated settlements was largely due to the changed international context post–Cold War, with the end of superpower competition and the reinvigoration of multilateralism through the UN, and that such multilateralism will not maintain its influence as a norm given the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the trend toward US unilateralism in international relations. He thus predicts a return to a policy of supporting the victory of one side in civil conflicts.7 Although victories have been found to be the most stable way to end civil wars,8 they are an increasingly rare outcome due to the difficulty for any one side in a civil war to militarily defeat its opponents and to the rise of international peacekeeping, which makes it possible for belligerents to agree to stop fighting.9 Other research has suggested that negotiated settlements do not occur where victory is possible, but rather “stop those conflicts that are stalemated and unlikely to be resolved by any other means.”10 It is unlikely that the international community will stop attempting to peacefully resolve conflicts between warring intrastate groups given the rise of norms around human rights and the R2P, as well as the long-term crossborder implications of violent conflicts that can destabilize whole regions and affect international peace, security, and prosperity. In fact, with the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) in 2006, the international community committed itself to improving peace-building efforts in civil wars. Avoiding the entrenchment of more “neither war, nor peace” situations in postagreement contexts demands ongoing reflection on the merits and shortcomings of current approaches to peace building. This book contributes to developing a deeper understanding of why so many peace processes over the past two decades have failed to establish durable peace, and develops scholarly and policy-relevant conclusions about how peace processes can become more effective. A third reason that this investigation is important is that I attempt to explore the challenges to peace-building success by using a novel approach that fills some of the gaps in the existing understanding of why peace

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processes fail. By taking a broad, qualitative approach to the three core functional areas of peace processes and exploring how peace building occurred in these three areas across a wide range of cases, I develop a complex and nuanced account of why peace processes fail. This account not only illuminates the major challenges to peace process success but also grounds those conclusions in an analysis of how the international community’s approach to peace making and peace building contributes to the endemic violence and insecurity of many post–civil war societies. My findings are relevant to both scholars in this field and the policymakers and practitioners who animate the arena of peace building.

The Argument in Brief My central finding is that, while a set of practical challenges undermined the effectiveness of the peace processes I examined, a more fundamental challenge was that security building, governance building, and transitional justice initiatives were primarily technocratic exercises that attempted to “fix” the infrastructure and systems of states emerging from civil war. The tendency toward technocratic peace processes is underpinned by the assumption that intrastate violence is an irrational phenomenon that occurs in the context of the breakdown of state institutions and that reestablishing, or in some cases simply establishing, those institutions through a number of mechanisms across the security, governance, and transitional justice sphere will help build peace. The result of this technocratic approach was that the peace processes I studied were effectively depoliticized, in that they did not respond to the political and social contexts that defined how individuals and communities engaged with peace consolidation, or worked against it. In other words, they overlooked the relationship between the society and the state and did not engage with the politics of conflict and peace in the postwar society, particularly in terms of how power and authority are organized and contested, and how competing interests intersect with either peace building or the continuation of conflict. As a consequence, the peace processes were often manipulated and captured by elite interests, and inadvertently contributed to perpetuating the very conditions of insecurity and conflict that they were attempting to alleviate. My core argument is straightforward. Civil wars are, at heart, political processes. Peace processes fail when they do not respond to this central characteristic. However, international structures, organizational incentives, bureaucratic imperatives, and the global peace-building culture all contribute to the perpetuation of the technocratic model of peace building, which

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leaves little room for local responsiveness despite the increasingly sophisticated knowledge about how to respond to the complexities of civil war. In order to become more effective, peace processes need to be reframed away from the dominant technocratic approach to one that is more bespoke, in which the form of each process is custom-designed to suit the specific functions of the process, the context in which it operates, and the needs of the local population, and where the interaction of these factors and the constituent elements are regularly assessed and approaches are shifted as necessary to respond to changing conditions, outcomes, and challenges. A genuine engagement with the politics of each society and a sensitivity to the local political, social, and economic dynamics that shape individuals’ and groups’ interactions with the peace process need to be the background to the implementation of governance, security, and transitional justice efforts in the context of peace building. Recognizing that civil war–affected societies are not simply broken states that require fixing by the international community is crucial to this engagement. Rather, they are societies in the midst of complex and contested processes of social change and political negotiation. The international community can play an important support role in these processes, but only if it breaks away from the technocratic and template-based approaches that have characterized the post–Cold War period and finds ways to bring politics back into peace building.

Civil Wars and Peace Processes Since the Cold War The increased prevalence of armed conflict within states in the aftermath of the Cold War saw the international community move quickly into the arena of facilitating negotiated peace processes between warring groups within fractured states. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 112 of the total 119 armed conflicts between 1989 and 2004 were intrastate conflicts. During that time, a total of 139 peace agreements were signed in 46 conflicts, of which only two were interstate conflicts (Eritrea-Ethiopia and Ecuador-Peru). In other words, peace agreements were signed in 39 percent of civil wars.11 Many civil wars do not culminate in a negotiated peace settlement, which may be because one side militarily defeats the other, because the violent conflict peters out for a time for whatever reason, because the warring parties are not willing to negotiate, or because peace negotiators are unable to reach an agreement. However, negotiated peace processes have fast become the preferred way that the international community supports conflict resolution in civil wars, and the form they take has crystallized around a few fundamental pillars, namely, security, governance, and transitional justice. These pillars remain central even though peace

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processes have grown to encompass a much wider range of issues, which range from security sector reform (SSR) and refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs) to human rights, HIV/AIDS policy, gender policy, children’s policy, disability policy, economic development, transitional justice, local conflict resolution, and broad institutional capacity building. The core goal of peace negotiations is to stop violent conflict and, despite the trend toward broad and inclusive settlements, security and the political settlement needed to establish it remain the most central issue. The most comprehensive study of the provisions in post–Cold War peace agreements found that between 1989 and 2005 only 26 percent of the peace agreements in civil wars did not include any military provisions, but in all but one of those cases the agreements were partial, rather than full agreements, and security issues had been dealt with in earlier agreements.12 The San Andrés Accord in Mexico was the only full peace agreement that did not include military provisions, but it did commit the parties to discuss military issues in subsequent talks. The major issues addressed in military provisions were cease-fires, disarmament, integration of rebels into the army, amnesties, deployment of a peacekeeping operation, and (to a lesser extent) withdrawal of foreign forces. Political provisions were included in all full peace agreements in intrastate conflicts over territory, and in 93 percent of full peace agreements in conflicts over government.13 Provisions covered the issues of local government, autonomy, cultural freedoms, regional development, referendums on future status, federalism, and local power sharing, although no agreement granted independence to a secessionist region or group. In intrastate conflicts fought over government, the only settlements that did not include political provisions were either peace process agreements or those that reaffirmed earlier agreements. Political provisions in settlements in conflicts over government covered elections, interim governance arrangements, integration of rebels into government or civil service structures, the right for rebel groups to become formal political parties, and power sharing.14 That security and governance are the most common themes included in peace agreements is confirmed by a 2007 study by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), which found that, of the twenty-seven cases of civil war termination through a negotiated peace agreement between 1990 and 2006, the most common provisions centered around SSR; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR); and elections.15 When the analysis was broken down into peace agreements signed between 1990 and 1998 and those signed between 1999 and 2006, the incidence of SSR and DDR provisions increased from 70 percent in both cases for peace agreements between 1990 and 1998 and to 100 percent and 94 percent, respectively, in peace agreements after 1998. While electoral provisions were already included in more than 90 percent of

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agreements before 1998, nearly all of the peace agreements since then have included them. Provisions for transitional governance arrangements and institutional power-sharing arrangements have doubled to more than 40 percent and nearly 80 percent, respectively, in recent peace agreements, while provisions related to decentralization and the devolution of powers have increased from 40 percent to 65 percent.16 There has also been a marked increase in the inclusion of provisions relating to public administration and governance issues, including civil service reforms.17 In recent years, transitional justice has joined security and governance as a central pillar of peace processes, with transitional justice mechanisms becoming more common in peace agreements signed since 1999. The UNDPCMI study found that provisions for transitional justice were included in 40 percent of peace agreements between 1990 and 1998, and in 60 percent of peace agreements signed between 1999 and 2006, which suggests that transitional justice is increasingly understood as being central to peace making.18 Since the end of the Cold War, peace processes have gone from being fairly narrowly focused instruments about ending armed conflict to much broader-ranging negotiations of key aspects of a postwar society. There has been a convergence around issues of security building, governance building, and transitional justice, each of which has been increasingly broadly conceived to set the foundations for how the postwar society is organized. In this book, I investigate the way that these three central arenas of peace building have been pursued in a range of post–peace agreement societies. One of the most striking trends in post–Cold War peace processes is the high recidivism rates for civil wars, which are the backdrop to this book. Although statistical analyses of failure rates vary in terms of coding, time frames, and parameters, they all demonstrate this high failure rate. Barbara F. Walter’s work on the relapse rates for civil wars shows that they have always been difficult to resolve. In a 1999 study, she found that between 1940 and 1990, of all the civil wars settled through peace agreements, 53 percent experienced resumed violence at some point in the future.19 Although the geopolitical context in which these peace processes happened was fundamentally different from the post–Cold War context, the failure rates for agreements between 1989 and 2004 are surprisingly similar: recent UCDP statistics show a failure rate of about 45 percent within five years,20 and the Human Security Report 2012 notes that 32 percent of peace agreements signed between 1950 and 2004 were followed by recurring violence in comparison with 38 percent of cease-fires. 21 This analysis distinguishes between cease-fires, which just halt violence, and peace agreements, which attempt to resolve the issues over which the war is being fought. Similarly, Collier shows that countries have a 40 percent chance of renewed violent conflict immediately after the end of armed hostilities, and this risk falls by around 1 percent per year of peace.22 Other research has shown that states

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relapse into civil wars within five years of a negotiated peace settlement in about 50 percent of cases.23 To give some perspective, conflicts ending through negotiated settlement have been shown to be about three times as likely to relapse into violence as those ending through victory; however, victory is an increasingly rare outcome in contemporary civil wars.24 Further analysis of the UCDP statistics show that when the analysis is limited to final agreements in a peace process or single acts, as in the case of Macedonia, violence restarted in only 30 percent of cases, which would seem to suggest that peace agreements are increasingly effective in terminating armed conflicts as the Human Security Report 2012 argues.25 While this is heartening, it might be part of a broader trend in which the international community is getting better at making agreements last through the initial two to five years after they are signed. But we are still seeing either a relapse into civil war or widespread insecurity later due to structural weaknesses in the peace, which remain after the international community pulls out or reduces its involvement in the situation. This might be linked to the increasing awareness of the importance of peacekeepers in preventing relapse into war in the immediate aftermath of a peace agreement. Virginia Page Fortna’s research shows that “peace lasts significantly longer, all else equal, when international personnel deploy to maintain peace than when they do not.”26 Research has not yet shown whether, in such situations, relapse rates in the longer term remain high after the peacekeepers leave, largely because the recent settlement of these conflicts means that time frames for analysis are limited. However, the violence, insecurity, and political conflict and instability that remain characteristic of many postwar societies indicate a deeper problem with the peace being established after civil wars. While the international community may be getting better at holding peace together in the short term, the fact that peace often remains unstable in the longer term raises questions about the approach to peace making and whether it establishes simply a holding pattern until the peacekeepers leave or international attention and peace-building support is refocused elsewhere. Further, the high criminality rates that plague many postwar states and threaten to destabilize them even decades after the end of violent conflict suggest that there are some issues that are not being addressed in the years immediately following peace agreements.27 For instance, criminal violence in El Salvador increased threefold in the immediate aftermath of the 1993 peace settlement, and the number of killings in Guatemala was far higher in the decade after the 1996 peace settlement than at any time during the war.28 The root of this problem may be that political and criminal violence are often dealt with as separate issues in peace processes. What all of this suggests is that, far from signifying the establishment of a lasting peace, peace agreements are best seen as just one early step in the much

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broader and more complex process of ending violent hostilities and consolidating peace. To make sense of why they fail, we need to consider the broader peace-building process that revolves around them. According to a report by several former Northern Alliance leaders in Afghanistan, “peace cannot come through a deal, but rather it will have to be a process and a movement.”29

Why Peace Fails: What We Know So, what do we know about why peace sticks in some places, but fails in others, despite significant international involvement and investment in peace processes? Much attention has been given to answering this question, however, the highly contextual nature of peace and conflict means that something that contributes to success in one situation may have little impact in another and may even be detrimental to peace building. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, a large body of literature has developed that examines the success or failure of peace processes, and it has crystallized around four central explanations. These make sense of civil war resurgence variously in terms of grievances, rational actor explanations, the conflict context, or the nature of the peace negotiations and settlement. While all of these explanations contribute to our understanding, there is something missing about why peace processes tend to result in very similar weaknesses or failures across a range of different contexts, and how the international community’s approach to peace making and peace building contributes to these weaknesses. Many scholars have explained civil war onset and recurrence in terms of grievances based on either identity politics driven by religion or ethnicity30 or, more recently, in terms of economic underdevelopment and the unequal distribution of resources.31 The former explanation has been strongly contested, largely because it is unable to explain why ethnic differences and tensions have caused violent conflict in some societies but not in others, why communal violence flares up after years of peaceful coexistence, or how the manipulation of identity politics can serve political and economic ends.32 The latter holds more sway, with numerous studies linking poor economic development to the likelihood of war recurrence, albeit without consensus on how or why. Some have suggested that postwar peace building is more successful in contexts of higher economic development,33 while others show that poverty may motivate actors toward violent conflict because of the low opportunity costs of war and the potential for private gains from violence.34 Walter found that poor economic development contributes to war recurrence because rebel recruitment is easier in situations of individual hardship or severe dissatisfaction with the current situation,

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and when there are no nonviolent alternatives for effecting change because ordinary people have less to lose from war.35 In spite of these various findings, the causal links between economic underdevelopment or unequal wealth distribution remain opaque and, as with ethnic diversity, poverty or inequality alone cannot explain the reeruption of violent conflict in a postwar society. In contrast to the focus on poverty as a risk factor for war recurrence, other studies have found that potential wealth, particularly through natural resource sequestration, is a far more influential factor in increasing the likelihood of war, which suggests that greed, rather than grievance, may be the key driver of war and that war recurrence may be driven by rational economic and political agendas.36 These explanations of war onset and recurrence overlap with explanations that revolve around the opportunity costs of war for a population—or the balance of the incentives for war against incentives for peace. Studies have highlighted three main factors that can tip the balance toward renewed war: the recruitment potential for rebel forces, which is based on the benefits individuals receive from joining those forces;37 the availability of finances and resources necessary to fund a war, especially in terms of primary export commodities;38 and the coercive balance between the government and the rebel groups considering renewed warfare, which may be determined by geographical and political characteristics such as rough terrain, large populations, and weak political institutions.39 It is striking that one study found that “no peace agreement has been successfully implemented where there are valuable, easily marketable commodities such as gems or timber.”40 Civil war resurgence has also been explained on the basis of the conflict context—focusing either on the characteristics of a conflict or the warring parties involved. Perhaps the most prominent work in this area is I. William Zartman’s theory of the “ripeness for peace.” Zartman argues that violent conflicts are ripe for negotiated resolution when they reach a hurting stalemate—in other words, when conflicting groups realize that further violence is too costly and can no longer help them achieve their goals.41 In such situations, groups are willing participants in negotiations because they believe that they can benefit from peace, and are more likely to implement and honor peace agreements than in contexts where participants see further opportunities in the continuation of war. The ripeness idea goes a significant way toward explaining why some agreements are reached after years of inertia in a peace process, and more work is warranted regarding the particular ways some peace processes help to maintain ripeness and prevent relapse into war, while others do not. Other contextfocused explanations have identified specific factors that influence the likelihood or durability of peace, such as the internal characteristics of belligerent groups,42 the number of conflict dyads present,43 or the attributes of the previous war, including how it was fought and brought to an end.44

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Another prominent explanation for peace process failure centers on the process and structure of peace agreements as the key determinants of the durability of peace; however, there is significant contention over the factors that contribute to success or failure. Studies have found variously that a peace agreement is more likely to be signed and to hold if it includes all belligerents involved in the war than if it does not,45 and that even excluded groups’ engagement in violent conflict does not affect signatories’ commitment to peace, probably because the risk of such action was anticipated and factored into the signatories’ decisionmaking calculations before signing the agreement.46 Other studies have focused more broadly on the process of mediation and negotiations, arguing for instance that biased mediators are more likely than neutral mediators to produce agreements with elaborated institutional arrangements that are conducive to durable peace. 47 Some studies have looked more specifically at the presence of particular provisions in an agreement, showing, for example, that agreements including detailed political, military, and territorial arrangements were more likely to succeed, whereas those that failed contained only vague provisions for future political arrangements.48 Others have found that peace agreements are more likely to hold if they include provisions for power sharing and DDR.49 Again, certain elements of these pronouncements are contested, with Walter’s research suggesting that disarmament can have a negative effect on adversaries’ sense of security and thereby increase the risk that they will resume violent confrontation.50 Credible commitments have also been shown to be a deciding factor in the durability of peace, and research has demonstrated the importance of external intervention, particularly through the presence of peacekeepers, in holding a fragile peace together through the initial volatile period after a peace settlement. Walter’s seminal research on credible commitments found that the highly dangerous nature of the early implementation period of a settlement deterred combatants from committing to peace agreements and that third-party security guarantees were essential to addressing this security dilemma and ensuring the stability of the peace in the period of demilitarization following a peace settlement.51 The presence of peacekeepers has been shown to have a positive effect on post–civil war peace durability by numerous analysts.52 These findings are particularly important in light of the trend that fewer civil wars now end in victory, but become increasingly protracted and result in low-level conflict festering indefinitely.53 These various explanations for civil war recurrence shed light on different factors and actions that have contributed to peace process success and failure in the past. However, there is still something missing from our understanding of these issues, particularly in terms of the functional relationship between certain actions or factors and stable peace. Explanations based primarily on statistical analysis provide what are essentially flat con-

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clusions that may not adequately reflect the texture of postconflict environments. They cannot capture the micro-level dynamics of civil wars and peace processes and, while their conclusions usefully illuminate risk factors or susceptibilities, there is a need for research that looks beyond them to investigate why existing approaches to peace making and consolidation do not adequately address those factors to mitigate the risk that they pose, or why responses are not robust enough to withstand such pressures. By looking more broadly at the national, regional, and international processes that provide the background in which conflict or peace are made, this book builds on the existing literature to more effectively understand the range of factors, linkages, and processes that contribute to the failure of peace processes to establish lasting peace. There is a clear need to balance technical lessons with the distinct qualities of each particular case, and the broader lessons that can be drawn about why peace processes across a range of contexts fail to establish lasting peace.54 Further, many of the explanations put forward about peace process failure are based on civil war recidivism as the main indicator of failure. Given the growing evidence that full resurgence of civil war is not as common as it was in the past, in this book I consider the many peace processes where war has not resumed but peace has also not been durably established, and where violence and insecurity continue to characterize “postwar” societies. To my knowledge, none of the existing explanations about peace process failure can explain why the same types of weaknesses keep recurring across a range of different peace processes, and what it is about the international community’s approach to peace making and peace building that contributes to them. In this book, I attempt to fill some of these gaps.

The Approach and Scope of the Book I take a novel approach to answering the questions of why “neither war, nor peace” situations are entrenched in many postwar societies despite internationally supported peace processes, and how the international community’s approach to peace processes has perpetuated this phenomenon in the aftermath of the Cold War. I do so by qualitatively analyzing a wide variety of peace processes in terms of their functional elements, so as to determine what similarities exist across them and whether there is something about the international community’s approach to responding to civil wars that contributes to the failure of peace processes. My focus is on negotiated peace processes that have occurred since 1991, when the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of increased international involvement in the resolution of intrastate conflicts and created a fundamentally different geopolitical context in which those peace processes operated.

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My analysis focuses on the three central pillars of peace processes— security building, governance building, and transitional justice—in order to explore how the implementation of these provisions plays out, and what their relationship to peace consolidation is, in the aftermath of a peace agreement. By concentrating on the way that these spheres of action are approached and implemented by the international community, I determine trends in terms of success and failure that exist across a variety of civil war contexts, and develop an overarching analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the international community’s approach to peace building post– Cold War. I balance a detailed analysis of these three themes in a diverse set of peace processes with a broader analysis of the reasons why these processes have not successfully consolidated peace. In doing so, I offer a new way of making sense of the complex issues around peace process failure by determining the factors within the international community’s approach to peace building that undermine peace consolidation. In order to capture the variety of approaches to peace making that the international community has engaged in since 1991, I have grounded the book in a detailed analysis of the postagreement peace processes of six countries that experienced very different types of civil wars, and which are spread across the post–Cold War period. I do not take a classical approach to case studies, in that I am not developing comprehensive accounts of what happened in each case during the peace process. Instead, I take a functional approach, which draws out the core aspects of security building, governance building, and transitional justice processes that contributed to the failure of those processes to establish peace. The cases that I investigate are, in chronological order, Cambodia (1991), Mozambique (1992), Bougainville (2001), Liberia (2003), North and South Sudan (2005), and Aceh (2005). Within this set, there are three secessionist conflicts, or conflicts over territory (Bougainville, Sudan, Aceh), and three conflicts that were more broadly a fight about government (Cambodia, Mozambique, Liberia). This set covers conflicts in geographically confined areas with small populations (Bougainville and Aceh) as well as conflicts in much larger countries with diverse and disparate populations (Cambodia, Mozambique, Liberia, Sudan). The set includes wars that were directly linked to decolonization struggles (Mozambique), wars that were the result of regional or international conflicts (Cambodia), and wars that are linked directly to conflict over resources (Bougainville, Sudan, Aceh). The length and casualty rates of the wars varies greatly, as do the negotiated processes by which peace was reached. Similarly, these cases represent varying levels of international involvement in the postagreement implementation and peace consolidation processes. While large international peacekeeping forces were deployed in some of these countries (Cambodia, Mozambique, Liberia, Sudan), smaller regional forces were deployed in others (Bougainville,

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Aceh). These peace processes reflect a variety of ways that peace making and peace building have been pursued in the post–Cold War period. Despite the variety of contexts in which these peace processes happened, a key reason for choosing these six cases for this study is that they are representative of a growing trend in postwar states: while none of these countries has seen a full resurgence of civil war in the years since the final peace agreement was signed, none of them has yet reached the point where their peace can be considered sustainable. Rather, violence, insecurity, ongoing divisions between formerly warring groups, and a sense of political instability remain characteristic of nearly all of these contexts, as they hover between peace and war, particularly at election times. I also selected these as cases that represent very different conflict contexts and are spread out over the post–Cold War period, which allowed me to explore whether the international community’s approach to peace processes has shifted significantly over that period. Further, while they all enjoyed significant international involvement, they are not the cases that have received the most international support, such as the conflicts in the Balkans or Timor-Leste. The vast majority of peace processes do not result in international involvement that went as far as in Kosovo and Timor-Leste, where the international community assumed authority over state structures. Instead, the norm in peace processes is for significant international involvement in peace negotiations that frame the path to peace and in implementing the major aspects of that path—for instance, around security building, governance building, and, increasingly, transitional justice—and these cases illustrate this more common type of involvement. In departing from the more common analysis of peace process failure as a resurgence of violence, I investigate the more complex dynamics of cases where the pressures for peace and those for war are locked in a stalemate of sorts, neither able to fully capture the society at hand. Bougainville is, in some respects, the outlier of this set of cases, as the approach to both the negotiated peace process and its implementation process diverged significantly from what appears to be the dominant international approach to resolving violent civil conflicts. It provides an important counterpoint to the analysis derived from the other cases in terms of how peace processes have been approached, and to what effect. However, it does demonstrate characteristics similar to the other cases in terms of the perceived stability of the current peace. I include a second tier of case-based analysis when particular cases not in the primary list demonstrate interesting or relevant approaches and lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of international approaches to making and consolidating peace in civil wars. In these cases, I do not develop a full narrative of the peace process, but rather investigate a small element of it to further the analysis driven by the six central case studies and explore similarities across contexts.

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My analysis is highly narrative based, in recognition of the important role that local context plays in informing an understanding of why a peace process followed a particular path, and how and why it interacted with the imperatives for either peace or continued insecurity. In each thematic chapter addressing security building, governance building, and transitional justice, I take one case study as a starting point and begin by developing a narrative of what occurred in that particular sphere of peace building in that country. The chapters are then organized around the analytical themes that arise from the initial case study, and in drawing out those themes, I bring in the experiences of the other cases, creating a broader analysis from which conclusions about the weaknesses of the international approach to peace building can be drawn. Thus, over the course of the book, I build up the narratives of each case that encompass the three focus areas of security building, governance building, and transitional justice. In some chapters the analysis proceeds after the initial case study in a case-specific narrative, while in others the individual narratives are more intertwined and drawn out by themes or issues over the course of the chapter. This variation reflects the different analytical imperatives of each thematic chapter: the exploration of security building lends itself to a theme-based narrative that picks up specific processes occurring within the set of cases and draws out similarities on that basis (e.g., DDR and SSR), while the chapters on governance building and transitional justice are organized more closely around the particular experiences of each country, drawing out the overarching analysis through them. After developing the thematic analyses, my investigation turns to the question of why the weaknesses identified in earlier chapters persist and are perpetuated by international involvement in peace processes. I triangulate my case-based analysis and conclusions with the perspectives of sixty-two highlevel practitioners, policymakers, and academics engaged in the field of conflict resolution and peace building internationally, whom I interviewed over a three-month period from January to March 2011. These individuals worked for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), regional organizations, governments, the UN, and universities, and their personal experiences of working in the peace-building arena covered the full range of regions, conflict zones, and sectors. Although all cases of conflict and peace making are unique, and their success or failure is deeply linked to the particularities of each context, it is possible to compare cases to look for patterns and themes emerging from a variety of experiences and to draw wider lessons as to the effectiveness of existing approaches to peace. My intention in this book is not to develop an overarching theory or model of what must happen in order to successfully consolidate peace. Rather, I aim to investigate what broad conclusions can be drawn about the way the international community approaches, engages in, and carries out peace processes in the emergent post–Cold War context as

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well as the functionality of various actions with respect to the broader goal of establishing peace and the reasons why peace remains so fragile in so many postwar contexts. In fact, mapping an overarching theory onto the empirical analysis would undermine the core conclusion that emerged from the investigation of case studies, which was that the international community looks for overarching and abstract approaches to frame war-to-peace transitions. Such approaches have often prevented local responsiveness in peace processes and resulted in the replication of certain technocratic models of peace building into contexts in which they were ill-suited and had negative impacts on the establishment of stable peace. It would also undermine the need that emerged from this study to engage in peace processes in terms of the immediate context of both the society at hand and the international community, rather than through abstract frames and assumptions about how peace is built. These may not adequately capture the particularities of individual cases. Putting the question of an overarching theoretical framework aside, this project is an analytical exercise that makes a number of theoretical contributions to the academic and practitioner discourses on the success and failure of peace processes. Through the detailed empirical analysis of case studies, I draw generalizable conclusions about the role of the international community in the recurring phenomenon of peace process failure, which is of value beyond our understanding of the cases examined. This analysis contributes to the development of a critique of institutionalized power that has long been of concern to scholars. In this context, I contribute specifically to our understanding of how power is organized and distributed in the context of peace processes, both among local actors and between local and international actors and institutions, and the impact that this power dynamic has on the outcomes and sustainability of peace. I also develop and apply a conceptual framework for understanding success in peace processes that goes beyond either minimalist or maximalist approaches to “measuring” success and failure in peace making and peace building. This “minimalist+politics” framework provides a more dynamic lens that can make visible the extent to which the basic foundations for lasting peace have been (or are being) established in the spheres of security, governance, and transitional justice after civil wars while also identifying the factors that are contributing to or detracting from the consolidation of peace. Through the different lines of investigation pursued in this book, I combine description and analysis to draw conclusions about why it is that so many peace processes since the end of the Cold War have failed to establish lasting and stable peace in the long term. As Hugh Seton-Watson writes, “The attempt which I have made undoubtedly lacks neatness. This I believe is inevitable, because the subject itself is not neat.”55 The unwieldiness of conflicts and peace processes is apparent in the sometimes complex nature of the narratives developed as part of this analysis. But it is only by

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pursuing a broad, macro-level, qualitative analysis of a wide range of peace processes that a specific kind of conclusion can be drawn about the role that the international community’s approach to civil wars plays in establishing the “neither war, nor peace” situations that persist in many post–peace agreement states. There are many things that this book does not do, and does not attempt to do. It is by no means a definitive account of all peace processes since the end of the Cold War. There are many cases that I do not discuss, some of which play a major role in the narrative of international engagement in civil wars. The cases that I examine in detail were chosen on the basis of their utility to this study and representativeness of broad trends and international approaches, as outlined above. I also do not presume to offer an exhaustive analysis of all the factors that contribute to peace process failure. There are a number of themes that I do not address, the most prominent of which is the economic dimension of peace building. This issue has received significant attention in the literature,56 and the reinvigoration of postwar economies has become a central aspect of supporting the reconstruction and recovery of war-torn societies. Although related to the three areas of peace building identified earlier, the economic aspect is distinct in that it is often not pursued on the basis of a framework established as part of a peace settlement. While security, governance, and transitional justice provisions are prominent and common across peace agreements, provisions relating to economic reform and recovery are less consistently incorporated, appearing in less than half of the peace agreements considered by the UNDP-CMI study mentioned above.57 Additionally, such provisions are less specific than provisions related to the other three areas, particularly in terms of security and governance arrangements.58 Although economic recovery has been established in the literature as an important part of peace-building success, in this study I am primarily concerned with peace-building processes that are rooted in negotiated peace settlements, and so it is necessary to isolate variables insofar as is possible when dealing with highly interlinked processes. However, the study is sensitive to the role that economic imperatives play in influencing the commitment of various actors to either the consolidation of peace or the perpetuation of insecurity, and these issues are drawn out where relevant in the case studies. For similar reasons, I do not engage with the broad literature about the overlap of development and peace-building, nor the literature that deals with the merits of grassroots, civil society–driven peace building.59 My investigation is primarily concerned with the international community, which is defined below, and its approach to negotiated peace processes in civil wars. I focus on this particular aspect of the peace-building world because of the unique and influential role that the international community has during both peace negotiations and the implementation of peace settlements as well as

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the unparalleled role it has played in shaping the overarching approach to peace processes and the framework within which they are pursued. The international community’s involvement is primarily at the institutional level of peace building and, as peace agreements revolve around the themes of governance, security, and transitional justice, those areas have been my focus for research rather than the broad array of bottom-up approaches to peace. The one time that I do engage with bottom-up approaches is in Chapter 5, where I contrast formal transitional justice processes with the informal and largely community-driven transitional justice process in Bougainville, as a way of exploring how official resources have been used to support locally driven peace-building approaches.

Terminology A number of the terms that are central to any discussion of peace processes have broad and contested meanings, and it is worth outlining what I understand them to mean in the context of my investigation. As Mats Berdal notes, “A degree of terminological inexactitude is unavoidable in dealing with this subject,”60 and while these definitions may not be precise, they are sufficiently dynamic to reflect the shifting nature of the processes and groups being described. For much of the modern period, war has been defined primarily in terms of its political motivations—Carl von Clausewitz encapsulated this in his seminal statement that war is the continuation of politics by other means61— or by the number of battleground deaths.62 These definitions are less useful in the context of civil wars that often blend political with economic and criminal motivations, and where casualties are less easily quantified as a result of monitoring and reporting difficulties, exaggerations by armed groups of the casualties for which they are responsible, and the fact that the deaths caused by civil wars extend beyond the battleground.63 Further, in many postagreement societies violence between groups continues but not on the military stage, and thus it may not be considered an active war or conflict even though violence and conflict may continue to define how the society operates. For the purposes of this book, I use the term war to denote sustained violent militarized conflict, regardless of the number of deaths that result. Such militarization necessarily involves a level of organization, and so this definition precludes random acts of violence that are not part of a broader conflict process. I use conflict more broadly to denote all hostility, competition, or struggle that manifests violently in a society. I employ conflict particularly with respect to situations of insecurity where violence does not reach the heights of military confrontation, but where the absence of security is a defin-

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ing feature of everyday life. Both war and conflict result in casualties, but they are generally at much higher rates during wars. I use the term international community loosely to refer to those key states, organizations, and actors who are most involved in peace processes in civil wars. This includes individual states or groups of states, multinational organizations such as the UN, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the African Union (AU), as well as the myriad international and regional nonstate actors engaged in international peace building. Despite the obvious differences in scope, mission, and capacity of these actors, and their various levels of engagement in different contexts, they are similar in that they are broadly engaged in the promotion of peace in conflict-affected states and form the community of actors that drives the approaches to and thinking around peace making internationally. I also acknowledge the different constellations of actors in each context: in effect, those actors that make up the international community to which I refer are different in each context, even though they are from the same broad pool of actors. By looking at the various actors who played key roles in each particular context, this book builds up a comprehensive picture of the international community involved in negotiated peace processes, rather than just focusing on specific states or organizations or on the “community” involved in particular individual cases. When I speak of the international community’s involvement in particular processes, I mean to focus on those actions that broadly involve the range of actors described above, rather than specific actions taken by individual actors. This approach inevitably sacrifices a level of detail and sensitivity to the diversity both between and within these groups of actors but a level of generalization is necessary to pursue an overarching analysis of the dominant international approach to peace processes in civil wars. Echoing Séverine Autesserre, I believe that what this approach provides in terms of scholarly and policy insights is an acceptable trade-off for the loss of factual minutiae.64 Finally, I use the term peace process to describe the complex, long, and dynamic endeavor by which a society moves out of violent conflict and toward peaceful modes of social organization and the contestation of power. Negotiated peace processes are much more than just a peace settlement; they involve the implementation of agreements and the broader mechanisms of peace consolidation that stem from negotiated agreements. Peace agreements are, at base level, in-principle agreements and words on paper that need to be implemented; they are aspirational road maps for the path the peace process will continue along. Although negotiating a settlement is paramount to a peace process and the term is often conflated to such negotiations, it is important to see agreements as just one part of a longer process, given their high rates of collapse. An agreement is no more than a

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scrap of paper unless it is backed by ongoing efforts to support and consolidate peace. However, a negotiated peace process is fundamentally about a negotiated settlement to violent conflict and the processes by which that settlement is implemented and peace is consolidated. As such, in this investigation I consider a peace process to include those activities and mechanisms that stem from the negotiated settlement, that are related to the overarching objective of peace building, and that operate at both societal and institutional levels for the duration of the period when local and international actors consider themselves to be involved in a peace-building process. This loose definition of peace processes excludes grassroots peace building that may complement, but is not a part of, the overarching negotiated peace process as well as the myriad civil society actors who work within the broad context of peace building but are not involved directly in the implementation of a peace agreement. This is not to diminish the importance and influence of such actors and approaches on the overall goal of peace building, but to focus, for methodological and practical reasons, on an interlinked set of mechanisms and structures that operate at the core of peace processes and that stem from a negotiated settlement.

Organization of the Book In Chapter 2, I set out the analytical foundations for this investigation by developing a conceptual framework for understanding success as well as a complementary analytical framework for analyzing and “measuring” success in practice. In Chapter 3, I examine the experiences of security building in the case studies to explore why, despite significant international involvement in building security after civil wars, insecurity and violence remain pervasive in many postagreement societies. In Chapter 4, I describe the way that governance reforms have been pursued in the aftermath of civil wars and what impact these reforms have had on peace consolidation in the cases studied. In Chapter 5, I discuss the role of transitional justice in peace processes. In Chapter 6, I examine the anatomy of failure in the peace processes studied by reviewing the major findings in Chapters 3 through 5 and identifying both practical and systemic challenges to peace process effectiveness. In Chapter 7, I summarize my findings and identify their implications for practitioners and scholars in the field of peace building.

Notes 1. Anne Peters, “Humanity as the A and Ω of Sovereignty,” European Journal of International Law 20, no. 3 (2009): 522–527.

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2. World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011), 58. 3. Hugh Seton-Watson, Neither War Nor Peace (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960). 4. Paul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 210–211. 5. World Bank, World Development Report 2011, 60–65. 6. See, for example, Charles King, “Power, Social Violence and Civil Wars,” in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 126–128; Anne Hironaka, Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the Perpetuation of Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 154. 7. King, “Power, Social Violence and Civil Wars,” 126–128. 8. Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 681–690. 9. Virginia Page Fortna, “Where Have All the Victories Gone? Peacekeeping and War Outcomes,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, ON, September 2009, 1–40. 10. Human Security Report 2012 (Vancouver, BC: Human Security Report Project, Simon Fraser University, 2012), 184. 11. Stina Hoegbladh, “Patterns of Peace Agreements: Presenting New Data on Peace Processes and Peace Agreements,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Diego, September 2006, 10–12. 12. Lotta Harbom, Stina Högbladh, and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict and Peace Agreements,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 5 (2006): 623–624. 13. Ibid., 624–625. 14. Ibid., 624. 15. UN Development Programme and Crisis Management Initiative, Peace Processes and Statebuilding: Economic and Institutional Provisions of Peace Agreements (New York: United Nations, 2007), 20–23. 16. Ibid., 25–26. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Ibid., 25. 19. Barbara F. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War: Demobilization, Democratization, and Commitments to Peace,” International Security 24, no. 1 (1999): 127. 20. Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute Oslo, “Armed Conflict Dataset Version 4,” 2009, www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict /UCDP-PRIO. See also Barbara F. Walter, Conflict Relapse and the Sustainability of Post-conflict Peace (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010), 1; Hoegbladh, “Patterns of Peace Agreements,” 19. 21. Human Security Report 2012, 173–174. 22. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” 201–202. 23. Charles King, Ending Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997), 25. 24. Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” 685. 25. Hoegbladh, “Patterns of Peace Agreements,” 19.

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26. Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents’ Choices After Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 16. 27. For a discussion of the high rates of postsettlement violence and criminality in civil wars, see Mats Berdal, Building Peace After War (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2009), 49–51. 28. Charles T. Call, “The Mugging of a Success Story: Justice and Security Sector Reform in El Salvador,” in Constructing Justice and Security After War, ed. Charles T. Call (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 39; JohnAndrew McNeish and Oscar López Rivera, “The Ugly Poetics of Violence in Postaccord Guatemala,” Forum for Development Studies 36, no. 1 (2009): 55. 29. Hamish Nixon, Achieving Durable Peace: Afghan Perspectives on a Peace Process (Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo, United States Institute of Peace, and Crisis Management Institute, 2011), 31. 30. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 7; Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples Versus States (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2000), xiv, 66. 31. Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003); James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 75–90; Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “On the Economic Causes of Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563–595; J. Michael Quinn, T. David Mason, and Mehmet Gurses, “Sustaining the Peace: Determinants of Civil War Recurrence,” International Interactions 33, no. 2 (2007): 167–193; Caroline A. Hartzell, “Settling Civil Wars: Armed Opponents’ Fates and the Duration of the Peace,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 26, no. 4 (2009): 359–361. 32. Jack S. Levy, “International Sources of Interstate and Intrastate War,” in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 21; John Darby and Roger Mac Ginty, “Introduction: What Peace? What Process?” in Contemporary Peacemaking: Conflict, Peace Processes and Post-war Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 8; Charles King, “Power, Social Violence and Civil Wars,” in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 118; Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” pp. 75–90; Herfried Münkler, The New Wars (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 208. 33. Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 4 (2000): 795. 34. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000). 35. Barbara F. Walter, “Does Conflict Beget Conflict? Explaining Recurring Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (2004): 771–788. 36. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, “Introduction,” in Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, ed. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 3–6; Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap, 17–52; Münkler, The New Wars, 7. 37. Walter, Conflict Relapse and the Sustainability of Post-conflict Peace, 6; Collier and Hoeffler, “On the Economic Causes of Civil War.” 38. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 232–273; Quinn, Mason, and Gurses, “Sustaining the Peace,” 179. 39. Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 232–273; Quinn, Mason, and Gurses, “Sustaining the Peace,” 179; Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” 75–90;

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Stephen John Stedman, Implementing Peace Agreements in Civil Wars: Lessons and Recommendations for Policymakers (New York: International Peace Academy and Center for International Security and Cooperation, 2001). 40. Stedman, Implementing Peace Agreements in Civil Wars, 2. 41. I. William Zartman, Elusive Peace (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), 18–19. 42. Julius Mutwol, Peace Agreement and Civil Wars in Africa (New York: Cambria Press, 2009), 325–329. 43. Lotta Harbom, Erik Melander, and Peter Wallensteen, “Dyadic Dimensions of Armed Conflict, 1946–2007,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 5 (2008): 697– 710; D. Lektzian and M. Souva, “A Comparative Theory Test of Democratic Peace Arguments, 1946–2000,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 1 (2009): 17–37; Stephen L. Quackenbush, “Territorial Issues and Recurrent Conflict,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 27, no. 3 (2010): 239–252. 44. Walter, “Does Conflict Beget Conflict?” 373; Alastair Smith and Allan C. Stam, “Bargaining and the Nature of War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (2004): 783–813; Michaela Mattes and Burcu Savun, “Information, Agreement Design, and the Durability of Civil War Settlements,” American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 2 (2010): 511–524. 45. Mutwol, Peace Agreement and Civil Wars in Africa, 328–329. 46. Desiree Nilsson, “Partial Peace: Rebel Groups Inside and Outside of Civil War Settlements,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 4 (2008): 479–495. 47. Isak Svensson, “Who Brings Which Peace? Neutral Versus Biased Mediation and Institutional Peace Arrangement in Civil Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 3 (2009): 446–469. 48. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War,” 151. 49. See, for instance, Mutwol, Peace Agreement and Civil Wars in Africa, 329– 331; Caroline A. Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, Crafting Peace: Power Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 50. Barbara F. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” International Organization 51, no. 3 (1997): 362. 51. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War,” 129–130. 52. Virginia Page Fortna, “Inside and Out: Peacekeeping and the Duration of Peace After Civil and Interstate Wars,” International Studies Review 5, no. 4 (2003): 97–114; Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?; Fortna, “Where Have All the Victories Gone?”; Doyle and Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding”; Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.” 53. For discussions of the trend away from decisive victories, see Fortna, “Where Have All the Victories Gone?”; T. David Mason, Mehmet Gurses, Patrick T. Brandt, and Jason Michael Quinn, “When Civil Wars Recur: Conditions for Durable Peace After Civil Wars,” International Studies Perspectives 12, no. 2 (2011): 178. 54. Some studies have exemplified this, most notably Charles T. Call, Why Peace Fails (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012); Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 55. Seton-Watson, Neither War Nor Peace, 13. 56. See, for instance, Tony Addison and Tilman Brück, eds., Making Peace Work: The Challenges of Social and Economic Reconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Mats Berdal and Achim Wennmann, Ending Wars, Consolidating Peace (Abingdon: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010); Paul Collier, “Post-conflict Recovery: How Should Strategies Be

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Distinctive?” Journal of African Economies 18, no. 1 (2009): 99–131; Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap; Jane Nelson, The Business of Peace: The Private Sector as a Partner in Conflict Prevention and Resolution (London: International Alert, Council on Economic Priorities, and Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum, 2000); John Ohiorhenuan and Chetan Kumar, Sustaining Post-conflict Economic Recovery: Lessons and Challenges (New York: Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, UN Development Programme, 2005); F. Stewart and J. F. E. Ohiorhenuan, Post-conflict Economic Recovery: Enabling Local Ingenuity (New York: Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, UN Development Programme, 2008). 57. UN Development Programme and Crisis Management Initiative, Peace Processes and Statebuilding, 72. 58. Ibid., 23–25. 59. King, “Power, Social Violence and Civil Wars,” 126–128. 60. Berdal, Building Peace After War, 27. 61. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 8th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87. 62. David Singer and Melvin Small, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980, 2nd ed. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), 214–215; David Singer and Melvin Small, Correlates of War Project: International and Civil War Data, 1816– 1992 (Ann Arbor: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1994). 63. For a discussion of the challenges to defining war by death rates, see Human Security Report 2005 (Vancouver: Human Security Report Project, Simon Fraser University, 2005), 19–20. 64. Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 35.

2 What Is Success in Peace Processes?

In the debate around the success or failure of peace processes, the question of what actually constitutes success, and how it can be measured, is paramount. To date, however, there is no consensus on this issue, and frameworks presented to measure success vary greatly.1 Answers to the central question of how success in peace processes is defined are inevitably tied to each analyst’s idea of what a peaceful postconflict state and society look like, and can be roughly divided into two camps: the minimalist approach, which focuses on the absence of outright violence and conflict, and the maximalist approach, which looks more broadly at the extent to which a positive peace has been established and reflects the liberal statebuilding approach to weak states. While the minimalist approach offers easily measurable objectives, for instance the absence of war or armed violence, it does not give adequate attention to the sustainability or depth of peace. On the other hand, the maximalist approach sets such high standards for success that it becomes largely divorced from the realities of peace making in postwar contexts, it puts too much emphasis on the need to address root causes of conflict, and it lends itself to prescriptions for the establishment of a very particular set of liberal democratic governance institutions. Essentially, the minimalist understanding is so much less than peace while the maximalist one is so much more than peace, based on a vision for a just, fair, and idealized society that is unrealistic in the years after violent civil conflict. The maximalist approach may also fail to reflect a postwar community’s own understanding of peace. Neither of these approaches considers what peace looks like for a society mired in violent conflict, or what peace is good enough in a particular case given the inevitable constraints. Many analysts do find a middle ground between these two extremes, but to my knowledge there is little in the literature that provides a clear basis for guiding an analysis of the suc-

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cess of peace processes in the medium term, without falling back on liberal democratic statements of what peace looks like and what the technical steps to achieve it are. In this chapter I develop a conceptual framework for understanding success as well as a complementary analytical framework for analyzing and “measuring” success in practice. To do this, I examine the two main approaches to understanding success, the minimalist and the maximalist, before using an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses as a basis for developing an alternative approach that will guide the case-based analysis of the rest of this investigation. When discussing success in peace processes, it is important to consider the relevance of various groups’ end goals to the understanding of what constitutes success in a given situation. Conflict actors and third parties can have different understandings of what constitutes success in a particular peace process, and these are closely tied to their ideal outcomes and key goals. For instance, a rebel group may be fighting for complete government control or regional secession, while the government may be aiming to regain authority or a monopoly on the use of force, the UN aiming to minimize the human suffering caused by the conflict, and a peace activist organization trying to transform the relationships underpinning the conflict entirely. Although all of these goals may have their own relative merits, measuring success according to the extent to which each group achieved its goals may not be the best way to determine the extent to which the agreement resulted in a sustainable peace.2 For example, if the central goals of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) are to gain independence from Indonesia and establish a state based on sharia law, and given that both of these outcomes have been rejected by the Indonesian government, measuring the success of this peace process on the basis of whether a compromise between these goals has been struck is not useful. Similarly, simply focusing on whether a peacekeeping mandate has been achieved is not an adequate basis for evaluating the success of a peace process, both because it represents only the goals of a particular organization and because it applies only to a discrete set of actions that fall within what must be seen as a much broader process of building and consolidating peace and that draw in a much wider range of actors.3 Thus, most analyses of success look further into the type and quality of peace that is established after a peace settlement, as the minimalist and maximalist approaches illustrate.

A Story of Two Extremes: The Minimalist and the Maximalist Approaches There are fundamental differences between the two main approaches to understanding success in peace processes, and both suffer from a number of

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conceptual and practical weaknesses that limit their usefulness in measuring success. However, an understanding of their various strengths and weaknesses can be used to inform the development of an alternative approach that is more compelling than the bare-bones minimalist framework while avoiding the normative assumptions of the maximalist one. The minimalist conceptualization of success focuses on physical security and the absence of war or, in other words, the establishment of a negative peace.4 The benefit of this approach is that it is an easy criterion to apply when assessing the success or failure of peace processes: it measures a tangible outcome, namely the absence of violent conflict, which is unarguably a key component of peace. While some studies measure this within specific time frames, for instance, whether violence had not recurred after two years of the peace agreement being signed,5 others have suggested that a more appropriate measure is whether peace prevails in a postconflict state when external peacemakers and peacebuilders leave.6 The minimalist approach is underpinned by the empirical approach to defining wars and conflicts in terms of the number of battle-related deaths, discussed in Chapter 1, and is not really employed by policymakers or practitioners in their approach to understanding and promoting peace after civil wars.7 It suffers from similar weaknesses to the empirical definitions of war and conflict— particularly the inability to see whether the conflict remains a reality for the affected population, even if the fatality rates are not high enough for it to be considered a war or armed conflict. Further, this analytical methodology does not consider the character and quality of peace, which are more diverse than just the presence or absence of violence. For instance, the minimalist approach does not allow the analyst to see whether there exist the political, security, social, or judicial infrastructure and conditions necessary to ensure the nonviolent resolution of conflicts as they arise in the future. In that it does not consider the existence of such infrastructure, the minimalist lens is essentially blind to the sustainability of peace. This is especially problematic given that practitioners generally identify the central objective of peace processes as the establishment of a “stable and lasting peace”8 or a “self-sustaining” peace.9 When the concept of peace revolves around belligerents’ conflict behavior, it misses the more complex, diverse, and dynamic realities of peace in a postconflict society.10 Fen Osler Hampson argues that measuring success in terms of the renunciation of violence is useful only insofar as it is understood to indicate a “partial peace,” given that it is obviously a precondition to lasting peace but not peace in and of itself.11 If this is not recognized, the analyst risks confusing abeyant conflicts for resolved ones, where violence is suspended without resolving the underlying political polarity and could be easily reignited.12 Further, by focusing so singularly on security and the need to stop violent interaction between groups, this approach suggests policy recommendations that revolve around the establishment of security—for instance, DDR, SSR,

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and the deployment of peacekeeping forces. While not necessarily bad programs to implement, the technocratic nature of such responses may not adequately respond to or address the more complex range of factors that led to and sustain violent conflict, which I discuss later in this chapter. Fundamentally different from this security-focused minimalist understanding of success in peace processes is the maximalist approach, which measures success against the extent to which a peace process establishes a positive peace. This approach entails addressing the root causes of conflict, thereby necessitating a much broader range of political, economic, social, and structural changes. It is informed by normative commitments to liberal democratic governance frameworks, and the ideal outcome of peace processes becomes the establishment of a society characterized by civil order, participatory political institutions, and a flourishing civil society.13 The UN has been one of the leaders of this approach ever since former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali argued in his 1992 report An Agenda for Peace that peacemaking and peace-keeping operations, to be truly successful, must come to include comprehensive efforts to identify and support structures which will tend to consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and well-being among people. Through agreements ending civil strife, these may include disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation.14

Similarly, the president of the UN Security Council in 2001 argued that in order for a peace process to result in sustainable peace, it required a range of long- and short-term actions focused on “fostering sustainable development, the eradication of poverty and inequalities, transparent and accountable governance, the promotion of democracy, respect for human rights and rule of law and the promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence.”15 This approach is reflected in many analyses and policy-oriented documents that, whether they explicitly attempt to or not, effectively identify sets of critical success factors or templates for sustainable peace that tend to reflect the thematic policy bent of the organization involved. The United States Institute of Peace’s Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction is a typical example of this. Intended as a guidance document for civilian decisionmakers, planners, or practitioners in stabilization and reconstruction operations, the book aims to outline “rules of the road” or principles drawn from previous experience. But while it explicitly states that it does not intend to prescribe priorities for missions, it does “[seek] to present strategic principles for all major activities in S&R [stabilization and reconstruction] missions in one place” and, in doing so, it

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effectively establishes a template for a truly maximalist vision of postwar peace-building efforts (or “stabilization and reconstruction,” as it calls it). 16 The document identifies five end states operations should aim for: 1. Safe and Secure Environment (Understood as the ability of the people to conduct their daily lives without fear of systematic or large-scale violence.) 2. Rule of Law (Understood as the ability of the people to have equal access to just laws and a trusted system of justice that holds all persons accountable, protects their human rights and ensures their safety and security.) 3. Stable Governance (Understood as the ability of the people to share, access or compete for power through nonviolent political processes and to enjoy the collective benefits and services of the state.) 4. Sustainable Economy (Understood as the ability of the people to pursue opportunities for livelihoods within a system of economic governance bound by law.) 5. Social Well-Being (Understood as the ability of the people to be free from want of basic needs and to coexist peacefully in communities with opportunities for advancement.)17

Each of these end states is considered in detail in the guidelines, and the necessary conditions for them are outlined, along with guidance on how to achieve these goals. For instance, in terms of establishing a safe and secure environment, the necessary conditions with their respective approaches are as follows: 1. Cessation of Large-Scale Violence • Separation of warring parties • Enduring cease-fire/peace agreement • Management of spoilers • Intelligence 2. Public Order • A comprehensive system • Interim law enforcement • Interim judiciary • Humane detention and imprisonment 3. Territorial Security • Freedom of movement • Border security 4. Legitimate State Monopoly over the Means of Violence • Disarmament and demobilization • Reintegration of ex-combatants • Security sector reform 5. Physical Security • Security of vulnerable populations • Protection of infrastructure • Protection of war crimes evidence.18

Each of these approaches is also outlined through a number of relevant guiding principles. So, inadvertently or not, this guide has established a

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detailed maximalist template for how postwar peace activities should be carried out in order to be successful, which reflects liberal democratic norms around the state’s relationship to society, the function of violence, human rights, and economic organization. It is a closed framework in that it leaves little, if any, room for creative responses to complex postwar situations. In a similar vein, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding in mid-2011 agreed on the Monrovia Roadmap, which identifies five international peace-building and state-building objectives for OECD states. These are: 1. Legitimate politics: Foster inclusive political settlements and conflict resolution 2. Security: Establish and strengthen people’s security 3. Justice: Address injustices and increase people’s access to justice 4. Economic foundations: Generate employment and improve livelihoods 5. Revenues and services: Manage revenues and build capacity for accountable and fair social service delivery.19

Each of these goals is outlined in detail and they illustrate the maximalist approach to postwar peace building. The Monrovia Roadmap specifically emphasizes the need for committed and able leadership; accountable and broadly participatory political institutions; an engaged public and civil society that monitors decisionmaking; improved capacities for reconciliation and conflict resolution at all levels; a focus on the particular needs of vulnerable groups (especially women and children); accessible, affordable, and fair formal justice mechanisms; strengthened traditional informal dispute resolution mechanisms that are aligned with international human rights standards; meaningful income generation opportunities (especially for previously marginalized groups and youth); labor-intensive public and community works, increased agricultural productivity, and domestic private sector development; increasingly fair access to services and revenues within a society; the state taking the lead in decisionmaking and coordination of service delivery, including of nonstate providers; the gradual building of a transparent and effective public financial management system (including a taxation system); and the management of resource revenues to transparently and significantly benefit the society.20 Further, to ensure that this process of state building and peace building is nationally owned, the Monrovia Roadmap outlines six cross-cutting issues that need to guide all action: (1) strengthening state-society relations; (2) addressing stress factors that drive conflict; (3) the importance of confidence and trust; (4) institutional transformation or building legitimate institutions; (5) addressing gender, youth, and vulnerable groups; and (6) a regional and global context.21 This is a broad vision for postconflict peace that establishes a highly prescriptive

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framework for a state that reflects liberal democratic principles of organization and operation. It is both an impractical guide to peace building in the aftermath of a peace settlement, and sets unrealistic expectations of what peace processes can achieve in the short to medium term. The 2009 Report of the Secretary-General on Peacebuilding in the Immediate Aftermath of Conflict offers a similar set of ingredients for peacemaking success. It acknowledges the need for national ownership, international political will, and inclusivity of women and other marginalized groups and then sets out a very similar set of objectives: “establishing security, building confidence in a political process, delivering initial peace dividends and expanding core national capacity.”22 While acknowledging that “there will always be additional country-specific priorities,” the report argues that seizing the window of opportunity in the immediate aftermath of conflict requires that international actors are, at a minimum, capable of responding coherently, rapidly and effectively in these areas, which relate directly to the core objectives mentioned above. They are: 1. Support to basic safety and security, including mine action, protection of civilians, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, strengthening the rule of law and initiation of security sector reform 2. Support to political processes, including electoral processes, promoting inclusive dialogue and reconciliation, and developing conflict-management capacity at national and subnational levels 3. Support to the provision of basic services, such as water and sanitation, health and primary education, and support to the safe and sustainable return and reintegration of internally displaced persons and refugees 4. Support to restoring core government functions, in particular basic public administration and public finance, at the national and subnational levels 5. Support to economic revitalization, including employment generation and livelihoods (in agriculture and public works) particularly for youth and demobilized former combatants, as well as rehabilitation of basic infrastructure.23

While none of these are necessarily bad objectives or principles, they reflect the assumption that there is a set of critical success factors that can be applied to postwar peace building across diverse contexts. However well intentioned the processes by which these guidelines are identified, the result of setting out technocratic objectives in this way is that peace-building processes are set on a particular path, which may not reflect the reality of what is actually possible or most necessary in the aftermath of a particular civil war to move a society away from the use of violence to resolve conflict. Although the importance of local responsiveness is asserted in most of these policy frameworks, as seen above, the frameworks set out lend themselves to a template-based approach to peacemaking, where peace building becomes a matter of putting in place the right technocratic “fixes” to make the state,

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society, and economy conform to the liberal democratic ideal, rather than a more dynamic process of responding to the needs of each postwar society. Roland Paris’s assessment of the eight major peace-building processes between 1989 and 1996 according to such a maximalist criteria exemplifies this problem. By measuring the extent to which the processes “[created] conditions that will allow peace to endure long after the departure of the peacebuilders—in other words, a self-sustaining peace,” he concludes that there was only one successful peace-building process, which was in Namibia.24 Importantly though, he argues that Namibia was a special case, given that it was the only conflict in the dataset in which a foreign party was one of the primary belligerents and its withdrawal from Namibia was part of the peace settlement, which created a postconflict dynamic that was fundamentally different from the conflicts in which all belligerent parties remained within a single-state framework after settlement.25 This would then suggest that no civil war peace process in Paris’ dataset had been successful. While aiming to achieve such long-term and wide-ranging goals is not inappropriate for a peace process, these goals themselves are not useful as the basis for evaluating the success of actions that generally take place in the short to medium term, and the full effects of which may take much longer to become apparent.26 What can be measured are certain benchmarks along the way; for instance, the extent to which political, security, and judicial infrastructure is established in order to shift violent conflicts into the nonviolent political arena. Another problem with the maximalist approach is the emphasis that it puts on addressing the root causes of violent conflict. Charles T. Call argues that the root causes of a conflict—for instance, poverty or unemployment— “are risk factors that shape outcomes, but not themselves indicators of peacebuilding success or failure.”27 Simply addressing unemployment will not ensure lasting conflict resolution and, furthermore, numerous peace processes that have not addressed the root causes of war have still managed to establish a lasting peace—for instance, in Guatemala, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and South Africa.28 However, it must be noted that these states all face high levels of criminality and political instability, which, although not threatening a resumption of war, may contribute to destabilization in the long run. Nevertheless, it can be argued this is not because root causes were left unaddressed, but rather because peace processes did not establish the necessary conditions to move the resolution of conflict into the nonviolent political sphere and assert the state’s monopoly over the use of force. Apart from the analytical challenges in identifying root causes, this suggests that addressing root causes is not always essential to building peace. Other studies have suggested that the root causes of a war may not be the same factors that affect the war’s trajectory and duration.29 Given these complex relationships between the various factors that

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cause and prolong violent conflict, a more appropriate focus might be on the institutions and processes that allow conflicts to be resolved in nonviolent ways and whose fragility or collapse gives way to violence. The political dimension of conflict and conflict resolution would then be the central analytical concern, and the success of peace processes would be measured according to the extent to which effective mechanisms are established whereby a society can resolve conflict nonviolently and within the framework of accepted processes and institutions.30 A final problem with the maximalist approach to defining success in peace processes is that it is underpinned by a set of assumptions about how a state ought to look—which reflects the principles of liberal market democracies. This is rooted in the liberal state- and nation-building projects, heralded by Francis Fukuyama as the only way to ensure international peace, stability, and prosperity in the twenty-first century.31 In this way, peace building becomes liberal state building, and its central goal becomes the establishment or restoration of legitimate, accountable, and effective governance institutions. Success is therefore understood primarily in terms of state structures. This approach tends to impose from the top down a particular version of peace, which has often had unforeseen negative consequences for peace consolidation,32 and also reflects the political agendas of international actors to the exclusion of local or traditional versions of peace.33 It consequently resists the development of creative peacemaking approaches that respond to the particularities of each context. Roger Mac Ginty’s analysis suggests that it not only encourages a template approach to peace building but that this template has “a sustained record of producing bad peace.”34 Apart from the challenges in basing analyses of success on measures of legitimacy and democracy, this approach may be fundamentally undermined by the absence of a clear causal relationship between democracy and peace on the intrastate level. An underlying assumption of the liberal statebuilding approach to peace is that, once the right institutions have been established, political culture will be transformed and actors will adapt their behavior to conform to the new institutional norms. 35 However, the structures and habits of a violent political culture will not dissolve immediately with a peace agreement or the establishment of new institutions, and experience has shown that even the most well-constructed new institutions will not be free from the residue of conflict behaviors. Institution building alone will not necessarily address these behaviors. There is no clear consensus in the literature about whether democracies are less likely to experience civil war because they are democracies and, as William R. Thompson demonstrates, the democratic peace thesis does not show that it is accurate to link “subsequent peaceful tendencies to antecedent types of political system.”36 While peace and democracy may be interlinked,

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focusing solely on regime type may overshadow other factors that influence the likeliness of conflict being resolved violently—for instance, the history of conflict or the availability of weapons and lack of authoritative security structures. There is also no consensus as to whether democracy and political liberalization reduce the likelihood of civil war resurgence—some studies have demonstrated such a trend while others have not been able to find causal links.37 Where links have been found between postconflict democracy and peace, they have shown that democracy reduces the likelihood of renewed violence because it “gives leaders of competing factions incentives to organise themselves differently from how they did during the civil war” and encourages them to assemble large coalitions and develop policies on a wide range of issues rather than focusing solely on their own group’s issues.38 However, this shift takes time, which indicates the need to put certain conditions and frameworks in place to ensure peace while democratic institutions develop. While stable democratic institutions may in the long term reduce the likelihood of intrastate violence, it does not necessarily follow that elections should be held in the immediate aftermath of a civil war nor that doing so would immediately establish a system less vulnerable to violence. Dawn Brancati and Jack L. Snyder have shown that the sooner elections are held in postconflict states where conditions for democracy are not yet “ripe,” the more likely that state is to experience a relapse into war, whereas elections that happen later in the transition to postconflict peace are more likely to consolidate stability.39 This suggests that while, in the much longer term, the development of such a system may be beneficial, in the short term attention should remain focused on preventing slipping backward into violence and taking small steps toward consolidating peace and establishing accepted and contextually relevant institutions of governance, security, and justice. Paul Collier’s research indicates that reducing the risk factors for civil war, especially in postconflict contexts, is a “necessary precondition for democracy, rather than the other way around.”40 There is evidence that the establishment of democratic institutions and processes in the immediate aftermath of civil war can actually undermine the stability of peace because the requisite trust in the capacity of a democratic system to protect a group’s basic interests may not yet have developed. Previously warring groups may feel threatened by the political dominance of former enemies and revert to the use of violence to protect their interests and needs. For instance, in Angola, Joseph Savimbi’s rebel group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), rearmed when Savimbi failed to win the 1991 presidential election that was part of the Bicesse Peace Accords.41 Similarly, the postelection violence in Timor-Leste in 2007 was sparked by the failure of any single party to gain enough support to claim victory and the consequent difficulties in forming a ruling coalition or government of national unity that

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would represent majority support. The insecurity of the situation and the fears by supporters of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETELIN) that their interests would not be adequately protected by the new government resulted in widespread violence and riots. Although this situation was eventually resolved through official negotiations and government channels, it does highlight the challenges inherent in establishing democratic institutions in divided postconflict contexts. As Paris argues, “democratization and marketization are inherently tumultuous transformations that have the potential to undermine a fragile peace,”42 and their sustainability is dependent on the buy-in of all key actors of the conflict—these actors have to accept that the use of violence to resolve political difference is counterproductive and recognize the potential for resolving those differences within the framework of political processes and institutions. Such commitment to political process is unlikely to be born with a peace agreement: it must be built up over time as the value of such a system becomes clear. This suggests the importance of reconciling the people with the state and its structures, and building their trust in the capacity and willingness of the state to protect and provide for their basic needs and rights. It also suggests that the people must see a positive benefit in cooperating with and buying into the state, in order for the state to develop some level of authority and legitimacy so it can maintain its monopoly on the use of violence and also provide effective alternative options for the resolution of political conflict outside of the violent arena. This lengthens the time frame of peace processes significantly. The maximalist approach to peace processes reflects an assumption that there is a formula for successful states, the constituent components of which can be identified and replicated across different contexts, albeit leaving some room for tailoring their implementation to respond to the particularities of each case. There are two fundamental problems with this way of thinking about state building and peace building. First, and as the analysis in the following chapters will show, state institutions are not always the solution to civil conflict, and, in fact, state structures and processes can be a central source of conflict. And second, this approach does not consider the relationship between the state and society, which is a fundamental aspect of the degeneration of conflict resolution into violence. Understanding and responding to this relationship is centrally important to reconstructing state frameworks in the aftermath of violent civil conflict.

Understanding Peace: Practitioner Perspectives Practitioners and policymakers seem increasingly aware of the shortcomings of the maximalist approach to peace processes and many articulate the

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need for quite basic and realistic aspirations in peace processes, despite the fact that many high-level approaches and policy documents aspire to the maximalist version of peace. However, although these voices highlight a shift away from the maximalist thinking about the goals of peace processes, they do not pare their expectations back entirely to the basic security focus of the minimalist approach to peace. In addition to the establishment of basic security, practitioners and policymakers highlight the need to address a range of issues across the spheres of justice, governance, and social order, although their expectations are relatively minimal and rooted in the question of what is actually necessary to consolidate peace in each particular context and to move the resolution of conflict out of the violent sphere. Their standards vary greatly though, ranging from those who lean toward minimal expectations of what sort of institutions can be established in the ten years after a peace agreement to those whose expectations are tied to an institution-centric model of peace building and essential service delivery. Many policymakers and practitioners emphasize the need for relatively minimal expectations of what a peace process can and should be expected to achieve in the ten to fifteen years after a peace settlement. For instance, a senior official in the UN Department of Political Affairs (DPA) argued that ten years is not enough time to ensure a society is on the path to durable peace, but that within that time frame the process could be expected to be broadly coherent, to be supporting an emerging middle class, and to be following a generally positive peace trajectory.43 Robert Templer, director of Asia Programs at the International Crisis Group (ICG), similarly avoided state-centric goals in his analysis, arguing that success involves reducing levels of violence and channeling political tensions into peaceful mechanisms for their resolution. He did not define what sort of mechanisms these might be and argued that, despite the international community’s hopes, peace processes do not produce better governance and that the basic power structures in a society always remain.44 Fabienne Hara, director of the ICG’s New York office reiterated this call for minimal expectations of peace processes, arguing that the goal of peace processes should be to “stop the war and make sure it does not come back again,” and cautioning that this involves building public confidence in the peace process, which derives from a basic sense of security and justice and some degree of demilitarization. She also emphasized that ten years is too short to talk of institution building, except in terms of some basic security institutions.45 These approaches highlight the need to question what is actually necessary to consolidate peace in each postwar society, in contrast to the maximalist template approach to peace processes. But they also lead to the question of how success can actually be measured if the goals are left so open and context specific. Tom Crick of the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program highlighted the need for creative ways of measuring success to reflect these

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moderate expectations of what peace processes can achieve. He suggested that factors such as freedom of expression could be useful when analyzing success, as it is a good indicator of how comfortable and secure people feel in the new arrangements. He also suggested that the self-perceived sense of security is important to consider because, even in cases where there is no outright violence, people may still feel insecure due to criminality, the presence of ex-combatants, and SGBV rates.46 This indicates the need to find creative ways of measuring the depth of peace in any analysis of a postconflict society. The approach taken by the US State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to evaluating peace demonstrates this way of thinking about success. Rather than focusing on specific benchmarks, it considers instead the balance between the drivers of conflict and the sources of resilience in a postconflict society, with success defined as the state when the sources of resilience are greater than those of conflict.47 This is based on the USIP-developed framework for Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments (MPCE), which defines viable peace as a situation in which the drivers of violent conflict (both means and motivations) are less powerful than the institutional alternatives for addressing conflict and pursuing power and wealth.48 MPCE considers not only the capacity of formal governance institutions to resolve conflicts peacefully, but also the capacities of informal institutions adhered to by a society. While this USIP framework does focus on the development of institutions of state, it does so in the context of a broader investigation of the sources of resilience and those of conflict in a state, which distinguishes it somewhat from those practitioners who conceptualize success in terms of the institutions of state, albeit stopping well short of the maximalist understanding of success. For instance, Kishore Mandhyan, deputy director of political affairs (peace-keeping and humanitarian affairs) in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, understands success in terms of the establishment of minimal institutional frameworks such as an impartial electoral commission, ongoing discourse in the press, and the basic institutions of life including water, sanitation, utilities, and housing.49 Although far less than the maximalist peace standard, this still reflects a state-centric focus and identifies key components of peace-building success. Interestingly, given the overarching framework of the US State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, an official there applied a framework similar to this when discussing what success might look like in South Sudan, showing how the more and less minimal approaches bleed into one another. He argued that the best outcome that can be hoped for in the next twenty to thirty years is that a “somewhat functioning government is established, which is delivering some, but not all, services, and an environment that is somewhat conducive to foreign investment.”50

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Some practitioners and policymakers focus less on broad institutional development as the goal of peace processes, emphasizing more narrowly the importance of establishing conflict resolution mechanisms and frameworks in the postconflict society. For instance, the permanent observer of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance to the UN argued that the aim of peace processes should be the establishment of functioning institutions capable of mediating conflict through democratic means, even if there is some level of conflict going on in the early years. 51 In a similar vein, a high-level UN diplomat, Ian Martin, argued that it is important to consider whether the causes of the initial conflict have been addressed, not in terms of fully resolving them, but rather in terms of ensuring the tensions that gave rise to violent conflict in the first place have been channeled into peaceful, and ideally democratic, mechanisms. 52 Essentially, this means that a peace process should aim to establish a framework of institutions that can handle tensions in a society, although the normative preference for democratic institutions is clear. John Marks, president of Search for Common Ground, one of the largest international peace-building NGOs, takes a similar approach, arguing that success means that violence has been removed from the political possibilities, that some mechanisms have been established to address grievances, and that the situation is not so unfair and unjust that people want to take up violence again. However, he adds the requirement of a strong and vibrant civil society, which nods toward the more maximalist conceptualization of success without going so far as to expect the establishment of a fully functioning liberal democratic state.53 The more moderate thinking of policymakers and practitioners about what peace processes can and should be expected to achieve in the medium term is reflected in the UN’s 2010 handbook Monitoring Peace Consolidation: United Nations Practitioners’ Guide to Benchmarking. The handbook, driven by the DPA, Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), Development Operations Coordination Office (DOCO), and PBSO, is intended to guide UN actors in peace operations. It emphasizes the need for realistic time frames and expectations in planning and measuring the success of peace processes, arguing that a review of UN benchmarking “revealed a tendency to be unrealistic when defining benchmarks.” 54 For instance, it highlights the example of the Monitoring and Tracking Mechanism of the Strategic Framework for Peacebuilding in Burundi, which included the goal that within eight years of the Arusha Accords being signed, “a political environment conducive to the peaceful resolution of political conflict [would exist] through the institutionalization of a culture and practice of dialogue on major issues and national strategies.” 55 This was highly unrealistic, especially as the state’s first democratic national elections were held only five years after the Arusha Accords. The handbook strongly cautions against focusing on “fundamen-

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tal social change and addressing root causes of conflict” because these “are normally long-term processes that cannot easily be measured during the time frame of most peace operations.”56 Importantly, the handbook also emphasizes the need to complement quantitative and objective data (e.g., the number of police officers in the national police force) with qualitative and subjective data (e.g., public opinion on the performance of the police, or public perceptions of security). It frames the discussion of measuring peace consolidation in terms of the principle of normality, which reflects “the assumption that the core purpose of peace consolidation is to help a country return to a ‘development path’ [and] uses ‘normal’ rates of criminality, mortality, participation in elections, etc., as benchmarks for peace consolidation in a given post-conflict country.”57 This is important so that expectations are rooted in the realities of the context and an understanding of the extent of change that is possible. Further, the handbook cautions against comparisons of discrete benchmarks between different postconflict societies, arguing that “it is the unique interaction of different factors in a given country or culture that is important to peace.”58 This suggests that, despite the UN’s high-level statements aspiring to achieve maximalist peace through peace processes, there is a growing awareness at the operational level of the need to reconsider the organization’s approach to conceptualizing success in peace processes.

Toward an Alternative Approach It is tempting to consider the minimalist and maximalist approaches to peace processes as the two ends of a spectrum, but doing so overlooks the fundamental difference between them. On the one hand, the minimalist approach is concerned with an objective, albeit somewhat flawed, conceptualization of how peace can be understood, namely the absence of direct violent conflict. While useful analytically, this is not enough to really understand whether the society at hand is experiencing peace—the simple absence of violence may be much less than peace is understood to be for those experiencing it. Something more needs to be included in order to fully capture the character and depth of peace in a postconflict context. On the other hand, the maximalist approach is imbued with normative assumptions about how a postconflict society ought to be organized, and reflects the liberal state-building project. It promotes a vision for an idealized liberal democratic society, which may be so much more than what peace actually is for those experiencing it in the aftermath of violent civil conflict. As the practitioners and policymakers I interviewed highlighted, the maximalist approach also sets out a particularly unrealistic set of expectations about what can be achieved in terms of peace building and state

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building in the aftermath of a peace settlement, which does not engage with the question of what is necessary and possible in each particular context to consolidate peace. What is missing from both of these approaches is a discussion of politics, not in terms of institutional prescriptions, but as a real consideration of the power dynamics, social forces, and contestation of interests within a society, which reach beyond the institutional sphere into the much broader sphere of social relations and everyday collective human life. Thinking of politics in terms of Harold D. Laswell’s classic dictum “who gets what, when, how”59 is useful when considering success in peace processes as it lays bare the realities of the contestation of power and influence within a society in a way that simply focusing on the development and function of formal institutions of politics does not. In integrating this conceptualization of politics into an understanding of success in peace processes, it is clear that the four themes that come strongly out of practitioners’ and policymakers’ analyses of success are, in effect, the constituent components of politics—namely, governance, justice, security, and social order. The maximalist approach seems largely unable to incorporate an understanding of local context and dynamics into the peace-building processes it gives rise to, given its normative commitment to, and advocacy of, a particular type of institutional framework. In contrast, there is scope to build on the minimalist approach to understanding success by integrating a consideration of politics, understood broadly, into its analytical framework. This builds on the need emphasized by practitioners and policymakers to question what is necessary and possible within a particular context while also considering whether and how the resolution of political conflict is being moved into a nonviolent sphere. In doing so, it renders the minimalist approach more useful and compelling than it currently is while avoiding the normatively driven maximalist approach and its associated weaknesses in their entirety. In order to refocus the approach, and remaining mindful of the need to avoid normative baggage, it may be more useful to focus on building up over time the conditions for a sustainable peace, which will involve a different set of institutions, processes, and infrastructure in each context, in order to transform violent conflict into nonviolent political conflict. As Roy Licklider argues, this inherently entails a security dilemma, as one or more parties have to surrender their ability to defend themselves and put themselves and their families in the hands of a government that either includes or is dominated by their former enemies.60 This highlights the need to balance security and governance in postsettlement contexts, and allow for trust in institutions to develop over time. It also highlights the importance of starting from a basic understanding of what is necessary in terms of security to

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establish the conditions for peace, and then building on this as necessary in the spheres of governance and justice in order to consolidate peace.

“Minimalist+Politics” I suggest a move away from broad liberal state-building approaches to understanding postconflict peace toward a conceptualization of peace as the condition in which politics, or the contestation of power, can and does happen nonviolently in a society. As a working concept, rather than lending itself to a template approach to postagreement peace consolidation, this approach requires real engagement with questions of what is actually necessary to consolidate peace in each particular context, and it may lead to a more abstracted focus on establishing security and some basic governance parameters within which institutions can be constituted and shaped by the community itself. This approach differs substantially from the maximalist approach in that it does not prescribe the establishment of a particular type of political framework, and may actually facilitate the development of more locally suitable and locally driven forms of consent-based governance than top-down impositions of Western democratic institutions and systems. Improving on the minimalist approach, which focuses simply on the absence of violence, this more nuanced approach recognizes that there is often no clear distinction between war and peace in societies that have experienced violent civil conflict—instead, there is a continuum between war and peace along which a society moves or wavers as the peace process continues. This is particularly relevant given the increasing prevalence, discussed in Chapter 1, of “neither war, nor peace” situations in post–peace agreement countries, where armed hostilities have not resumed but neither has peace been successfully consolidated, and violence, instability, and mistrust continue to characterize the postwar society. Consequently, it is not particularly useful to think about success in peace processes as something that is either achieved or not: the simple dichotomy between failed and successful peace processes does not capture the dynamic nature of peace nor the diversity of results in peace processes.61 It also fails to see the interaction of various factors that affect peace. I suggest that the success of negotiated peace processes be understood and analyzed in terms of the extent to which they establish stable social, political, and security conditions in which political conflicts are no longer settled by means of violence. It is vitally important that these conditions are not understood as being defined by specific characteristics: they will necessarily look different in each particular postwar context and will be based on a different set of existing social and political norms, structures, and processes.

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It is also important that the expectations of what can be achieved in the aftermath of complex conflict processes are realistic and nuanced, as emphasized by the practitioners and policymakers above, and are informed by the particular historical, social, and political realities of each context. The issue of security is an interesting example of this need for nuance, and it highlights the importance of considering the cultural and political aspects of security as part of analyses of success in peace processes. The question of what a peaceful postconflict security environment looks like, and how to establish it, will generally lead to answers that focus on the absence of violence, the demilitarization of the conflict zone, the demobilization of rebel forces, and the constitution of effective state security forces. In fact, the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change argues that “the demobilization and disarmament of combatants . . . is a priority for successful peace implementation.” 62 However, complete disarmament is highly unlikely in a range of historically tribal and militant societies, such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and Mindanao, where some element of violence is deeply entrenched in tribal codes and traditions. For instance, Yemen’s tribal society is guided by the principle of “one man of theirs for ours,” which entitles the tribe of someone killed to kill someone from the perpetrator’s tribe in revenge if blood money is not paid.63 While this code has led, in some areas, to cycles of violence spanning generations, it is part of a complex set of rules that binds the members of the tribal society together and maintains a level of stability through mechanisms that make upholding that stability the obligation of each individual.64 These mechanisms are strengthened by the tradition of compromise between social, religious, and political groups in Yemen and the state’s willingness to co-opt former enemies.65 Given the traditionally high level of armament in Yemen—the fact that the tribal code relies on the capacity of tribes to retaliate for harms done to them, and the fact that groups are mobilized along tribal lines—it would be unrealistic to expect disarmament and demobilization to be carried out in the same way it was in, for instance, Bosnia. In Mindanao, a similar reality informed the implementation of the peace agreement between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). Negotiators of the treaty recognized that the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of the MNLF would necessarily have to happen without their disarmament or demobilization because of the extremely volatile security situation, which involved ongoing conflict between the government and other rebel armies including the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the communist New People’s Army, and the al-Qaeda-associated Abu Sayyaf.66 As such, attention was placed on the reintegration of former combatants into civilian life through supporting most of them to become farmers, integrating thousands of others into the army and

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police forces, and organizing others into village defense militias.67 Although there are some very problematic elements to such a strategy—for instance, the risk of small militias undermining the security situation in the longer run—this strategy was remarkably effective in diminishing violent conflict, which suggests that in certain cases a well-planned and implemented reintegration program may make disarmament and demobilization effectively unnecessary. This indicates that, in some conflict contexts, the international community must recognize that local realities make DDR minus the disarmament and demobilization the only realistic option. Effectively, disarming places like Mindanao, Yemen, and Afghanistan would be like disarming Texas: they are such highly militarized societies that it would be impossible to actually disarm them. Further, while you can demobilize a military unit, you cannot demobilize a tribe or a clan. This highlights the need to question what is actually possible and necessary to consolidate peace in a given context—and to match the goals and expected outcomes in a peace process with the realities of what peace is likely to look like in that context. This then reinforces the importance of understanding the goals and success of peace processes in terms of the extent to which the resolution of conflict is moved into the political arena through the establishment of stable social, political, and security conditions. *** Taking these concerns into consideration, this alternative conceptualization of success in peace processes in civil wars—which builds a consideration of politics into the minimalist approach and is based on reasonable and nontechnocratic expectations of what a peace process can and should be expected to achieve in terms of establishing the foundations for stable peace—might offer a more useful analytical framework for understanding success in peace processes than those that follow from either the minimalist or maximalist conceptualizations of peace as they now stand. Rather than prescribing how the implementation phase of a peace process should be carried out, this approach considers progress across a range of interlinked and important spheres in order to paint a more dynamic picture of the situation and the factors inhibiting and supporting peace consolidation, with the overarching goal being the creation of a space for politics to happen nonviolently. Measuring the success of a peace process according to this new conceptualization of success involves identifying where the strengths and weaknesses of a peace process have been in relation to a number of subgoals, allowing that, while some elements may be successful, others may not be. It is the balance of these successes and failures, and their impact on progress toward the overall goal, that is important during an analysis of the success of a peace process. As Mac Ginty argues

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in his development of a critical peace assessment framework, which is similar to the approach presented here, conflict causation is complex and depends on the interaction of numerous factors that alone would not cause violent conflict.68 As discussed earlier, root causes are not easily identified, nor particularly useful analytically, in that the factors that spark violent conflict may not be the same as those that prolong it, and identifying root causes may undermine a more complex understanding of the relationship between various factors. For instance, the uneven distribution of wealth is commonly considered a key causal factor of conflict, but inequality alone cannot explain the eruption of violent conflict in a society given that many unequal societies live in relative peace, albeit a negative peace. Collier’s research found that inequality of income or assets was not a conflict risk factor, although conflicts in unequal societies last longer, suggesting that inequality is best understood as an enabling factor for conflict when combined with other factors such as the subjective grievances, the economic viability of conflict, and the country’s history of conflict.69 Similarly, Herfried Münkler argues that potential wealth is a far more influential factor than chronic poverty as a cause of war, although he suggests that large inequalities within a society increase the risk of social conflicts developing into violent civil war and that such wars are more likely where they involve the prospect of natural resource sequestration.70 The viability of armed rebellion also affects the likelihood of violent conflict—with conflict more likely where the geographical terrain is more difficult for a central government to control. 71 Similarly, it is difficult to attribute conflict causation to singular factors such as unemployment, group disenfranchisement, ethnic or religious diversity, subjugation of women, or other risk factors—rather, it is the complex interaction of a range of these factors that will either spark civil conflict or not. It is important to understand the relationships between these various factors not only to understand conflict causation, but also to identify those factors that constrain peace consolidation and those that encourage it. This is a useful analytical tool in that it makes visible those elements of a peace process that have contributed to or obstructed the development of sustainable peace in a particular context, given that the relative importance of specific factors will vary between cases. On a practical level, an analysis that is attuned to the dynamic nature of peace and the complex interplay of factors affecting it is useful in reviewing and reorienting peace processes to maximize their impact as time passes. A proper description of the character and quality of peace in a postwar society is critical for understanding the prospects consolidating peace, and a dynamic perspective of the factors militating for or against peace is essential to this. Measuring success therefore requires a lens that can be applied across negotiated peace processes and that is broadly related to the goal of creat-

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ing a secure, stable, and sustainable peace—or, in other words, a consolidated peace that goes beyond the simple absence of violence, but does not require the establishment of a full positive peace. Success, then, should establish the foundational infrastructure that provides the context for peace in the longer term, the specifics of which will vary between contexts.72 This approach allows the analyst to see the interaction of various factors that work in the interest of peace building and balance them against the factors that work against those interests. Essentially, this means building up from the minimalist focus on negative peace to a focus that considers whether the contestation of power is being moved into the nonviolent sphere, which requires different sets of actions in different contexts. Hence, the need for a flexible analytical framework. This is important in order to avoid putting unreasonably high expectations on peace agreements and to recognize the potential for a myriad of external factors to put pressure on and potentially derail peace in the long run—for instance, a natural disaster such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti may undermine much of the progress that the peace process has made over the past few years. However, a useful analysis will not focus on the failure of the peace to withstand the destabilizing and unpredictable effects of the disaster but will focus on the extent to which the necessary infrastructure and institutions had been established to move the resolution of conflict into the nonviolent political sphere, as well as on the potential to reestablish the infrastructure and institutions as necessary in the disaster’s aftermath. While it is difficult to quantitatively measure progress toward the end goal of sustainable peace, it is possible to qualitatively analyze the character and quality of peace in a particular situation by looking broadly at what has happened in the spheres of security, governance, and justice—these being the constituent components of politics when politics is understood as who gets what, when, and how. As outlined earlier, these spheres are important, first, because they feature most prominently in almost all negotiated peace processes and all are the key arenas of action identified by practitioners and policymakers, and, second, because they provide the framework for how individuals engage with each other and the state. By looking at this range of factors, we can identify points of tension and complementarity in a peace process—for instance, whether the demands of security and justice are being balanced, and whether robust and broadly accepted processes and institutional foundations are being established. Looking at what has happened in these spheres also gives the analytical framework the flexibility to factor local circumstances and dynamics into the analysis. As Mac Ginty argues, existing analyses mirror the maximalist approach and generally focus on the establishment or reform of state institutions, and this “near fetishisation of the state in western analyses” means that adequate attention is not paid to the political behavior or culture

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and how local political customs interact with political institutions.73 Being able to recognize local power structures, political dynamics, and the negotiation of interests that do not conform to the perceived norm in the international sphere gives a much more accurate understanding of the situation than simply focusing on state institutions and high-level power dynamics. Again, as Mac Ginty shows, “The presence of alternative sources of power and legitimacy, such as kinship or religious groups, associations of former combatants or international organisations, may mean that the state is relegated to a lowly position among the networks and institutions most relevant to people’s lives.”74 Consequently, analyses must look beyond just formal institutions and processes to see the overall progress in a society moving away from violence as the preferred conflict resolution mechanism, or as the dominant characteristic of political culture. It is also important that analyses of peace process success look beyond just the implementation of peace agreements. As discussed in Chapter 1, peace agreements are simply the first steps of peace processes and, if peace is to be effectively consolidated in their aftermath, actions will have to go beyond the words of peace settlements to respond to changed dynamics and needs of the affected population. As a senior UN DPA official argued, peace agreements are essentially “pledges of undertaking that identify areas that now need further negotiation. They are heads of agreement, and after they have been signed, the body of the agreement still needs to be built.” 75 Another senior UN official in the Secretary-General’s office argued that peace agreements “get what is possible for the moment” and need to shift and develop with time.76 Peace agreements reflect a particular moment in time, which is steeped in the dynamics of violent civil conflict, and become less relevant as time goes on and peace is consolidated. New problems and challenges are generated as the conflict or peace process progresses. Compounding this, a peace agreement may have been “limited in its ambitions, ministered to conflict manifestations while overlooking conflict causes and excluded key conflict actors or sections of the population,” 77 which underscores the need for any assessments of peace processes to look beyond an agreement’s implementation to the broader actions and processes that have contributed to the consolidation of peace, or undermined it. Such a dynamic and broad assessment would counter the tendency toward a standardized peace-building template and facilitate the identification of points of both weakness and strength, which is particularly useful for reviewing and reorienting peace processes partway through in response to changing dynamics. Research by Collier has shown that countries have a 40 percent chance of renewed conflict immediately after the end of armed hostilities, and this risk falls by around 1 percent per year of peace.78 As discussed in Chapter 1, other research has shown that states relapse into civil wars within five years

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of a negotiated peace settlement in 30–50 percent of cases.79 This highlights the importance of establishing the foundations for lasting peace in the period directly after a peace agreement is reached, but also of allowing a reasonable analytical time frame for assessing the success in establishing those foundations. Consequently, this investigation uses a long and ongoing time frame for analyzing the overall success of a peace process. Conflict processes are dynamic and constantly shifting, and so are peace processes. This means that while capturing the state of the peace process at a particular time is useful in understanding what its points of strength and weakness are, then the relevance of that analysis will decrease rapidly as the situation continues to change. Thus, setting an upper limit to the analytical time frame limits and undermines the development of an understanding of the long-term effects of certain peace-building policies and approaches on the ongoing dynamics of conflict and peace processes. However, the preliminary analysis of peace process durability in Chapter 1 showed the high risk of civil war recidivism immediately following a peace agreement. This suggests that, if the foundations for lasting peace are not laid in the immediate postsettlement years, it is unlikely that the underlying structures of the conflict have been addressed and the probability of sustained peace may therefore be quite low even if the cracks have not already started to show. For that reason, as well as the temporal limits of the post–Cold War period, my analysis focuses on what happens in the ten to fifteen years after a peace agreement in order to get a picture of the character and quality of the peace. The time frames that I take into account are unique to each case: I consider relevant events and issues in each country up until 2014. From a purely security-focused perspective, the use of this longer time frame for analysis is useful in determining whether a civil war has in fact ended, or whether it has just declined in intensity and is lying dormant but could be quickly reignited given the right triggers. This is in line with Licklider’s analysis of negotiated settlements in civil wars between 1945 and 1993, which suggests that a time frame longer than five years is necessary to establish whether a civil war has truly ended. 80 The Mozambique case clearly demonstrates that, even where there is an absence of organized violence for a significant amount of time (in this case, twenty-four years), the failure to establish effective and legitimate security and justice systems can undermine political stability and threaten a return to violent civil war.81 This again underscores the importance of analyzing broadly what has been achieved or not in the spheres of security, governance, and transitional justice to garner an accurate idea of the status of the peace process and the quality of the peace it has generated. It is also important to be able to make a distinction between political instability in postwar contexts and a resurgence of civil war. Licklider sug-

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gests that this distinction can be made by looking at whether group divisions are the same as they were during the civil war, or whether they have shifted to reflect new patterns of conflict.82 This highlights the importance of including in any analysis of peace-process success an assessment of the extent to which previously warring groups have been reconciled, both with each other and to the postwar governance arrangements, as well as the importance of looking more broadly at the development of political processes that can move the resolution of political conflict out of the arena of violence. In my analysis, this means that I consider political instability if it reflects civil war era patterns of violence and conflict and if the patterns of political competition and contestation have been shaped or incentivized by the peace process.

Practical Implications for This Investigation The practical implications of this alternative approach to understanding and analyzing success in peace processes is that I consider a broad range of issues across the spheres of security building, governance building, and transitional justice in the peace processes examined. The analysis needs to be both sensitive to the particular context at hand, and flexible enough to investigate the broad interplay of factors and interventions and their relationship to peace building. As such, it is possible to outline some general issues that I analyze across the countries studied and that capture the main actions undertaken in peace processes, in order to understand the relationship between peace-retarding and peace-building factors, although they are not exhaustive. Essentially, I use them as lenses through which to interrogate the strengths and weaknesses of the peace processes studied and identify the indicators of success and failure in each case. My analysis of the security sphere considers issues such as the incidence of major outbreaks of organized violence immediately postsettlement, and whether such outbreaks decrease in number in the years following settlement, as well as the prevalence of other violence and insecurity in the postwar society more generally. I survey the effectiveness of SSR and DDR programs and the establishment of rule of law in the postconflict society. A central question is whether political conflicts continue to be resolved through the use of violence, as this is a key indicator of the quality and character of the peace established. In terms of the governance sphere, this analysis not only considers whether governance reforms are implemented in accordance with the terms of the negotiated agreement (given the centrality of such provisions in peace agreements), but also looks at the effectiveness and perceived legitimacy of such institutions in the postconflict society. I explore three main

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components of governance—systems of representation, institutional development, and institutional capacity—and the extent to which they contributed to peace consolidation. In analyzing the sphere of transitional justice, I consider the various mechanisms for transitional justice established either in a peace agreement or in the aftermath of a settlement, and the contributions such mechanisms made to dealing with crimes committed during the war and to peace building more broadly. This is a deliberately open set of issues to consider when assessing the relative successes or failures of a peace process, understanding the overarching benchmark of peace to be the establishment of a space where politics can and does happen nonviolently. This analytical framework is flexible enough to capture the issues and dynamics relevant to an assessment of peace building in each context, without reducing the analysis to a standardized form or set of criteria applied across diverse contexts. It is a way to “measure” success without limiting the analysis to a set of measurable indicators that may or may not capture the most salient issues, challenges, and tensions in each particular context. It is important to emphasize the lack of definite time frames in this analysis: the focus is not on whether a particular milestone has been reached by a certain point, but what the quality of the peace is at that point and whether the postconflict society appears to be on a positive trajectory to sustainably moving the resolution of political conflict out of the violent arena and into the political one. As such, I take a long-term and ongoing approach to dealing with the cases studied and do not impose artificial cutoff points for the inclusion of issues in the discussion. Instead, I cover the longest period possible, including events and developments in 2014.

Conclusion The minimalist+politics approach to understanding and measuring the success of peace processes after civil wars is by no means an attempt to define what has to happen in each context in order to create a self-sustaining peace. Rather, it is an attempt to create a framework for analyzing the causes of success and failure of negotiated peace processes post–Cold War that is more compelling than the security-focused minimalist approach while avoiding the normative baggage of the maximalist approach. It allows me to identify where the peace process is having effects in terms of security building, governance building, and the pursuit of transitional justice and where the core weaknesses of peace building lie in the countries that I studied. The approach attempts to make visible the extent to which the basic foundations for lasting peace have been or are being established in the three

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spheres of security, governance, and transitional justice while identifying the factors that undermine peace consolidation. Given the broad qualitative nature of this study, these conclusions about peace-building weakness in specific cases can be used to determine whether there exist commonalities across different peace processes in terms of the factors that work against the establishment of lasting peace. In turn, identifying the weaknesses in terms of the dominant approaches to peace building will lay the foundation for an overarching analysis of why these weaknesses persist in an international community that is, by and large, committed to ending violent civil wars and supporting peace building in postwar countries. In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I apply this minimalist+politics approach to the spheres of security building, governance building, and transitional justice, taking in each chapter one illustrative peace process as the opening case study and then developing the investigation of other cases on the basis of that initial analysis.

Notes 1. See Marc Howard Ross and Jay Rothman, “Issues of Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict Management,” in Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict Management (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1–23; I. William Zartman, “Conflict Management: The Long and Short of It,” SAIS Review 20, no. 1 (2000): 233. 2. George Downs and Stephen John Stedman also note that measuring success by mandate achievement encourages organizations to “inflate their success rate by purposely minimizing performance goals, [while] agencies with little autonomy with respect to goal setting suffer from precisely the opposite problem.” George Downs and Stephen John Stedman, “Evaluation Issues in Peace Implementation,” in Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements, ed. Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 45. 3. For a more detailed discussion of the uses and limitations of mandate achievement as a basis for measuring success, see ibid., 45–47. 4. For a discussion of this standard, see Charles T. Call, “Knowing Peace When You See It: Setting Standards for Peacebuilding Success,” Civil Wars 10, no. 2 (2008): 176–181; Charles T. Call and Elizabeth M. Cousens, Ending Wars and Building Peace (New York: International Peace Academy, March 2007), 5; For an example of this standard being used to assess peace processes, see Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 4 (2000): 779–801. 5. See, for instance, Doyle and Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding,” 783. 6. Downs and Stedman, “Evaluation Issues in Peace Implementation,” 48–51. 7. I found one significant exception to this during my interviews, when Andrew Wilder argued that any understanding of success should focus primarily on security, specifically on how many people are dying. Andrew Wilder, director of Pakistan and Afghanistan programs at the United States Institute of Peace, interviewed by the author, Washington, DC, February 15, 2011.

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8. Kofi Annan, “Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Address to the UN Security Council,” UN Doc. SG/SM/8023 (November 13, 2001), www.unis.unvienna.org /unis/pressrels/2001/sgsm8023.html. 9. For instance, the Brahimi Report identified the key task of peace builders as supporting “the political, social and economic changes that create a secure environment that is self-sustaining.” Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (Brahimi Report) (New York: United Nations, August 2000), par. 28, www.un.org /peace/reports/peace_operations. 10. For a detailed discussion of the problems with focusing on the absence of violence in understanding peace, see Kristine Höglund and Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs, “Beyond the Absence of War: The Diversity of Peace in Post-settlement Societies,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 367–390. 11. Fen Osler Hampson, Nurturing Peace: Why Peace Settlements Succeed or Fail (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1996), 9. 12. For a discussion of this, see Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal, “Mapping the Nettle Field,” in Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2005), 11. 13. Hampson, Nurturing Peace, 10. 14. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, UN Doc. A/47/277-S/24111 (New York: United Nations, June 1992), par. 55, www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html. 15. “Statement by the President of the Security Council,” UN Doc. S/PRST/2001/5 (February 20, 2001), http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N01/256/24/PDF /N0125624.pdf?OpenElement. 16. United States Institute of Peace, Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009). 17. Ibid., 4. 18. Ibid., 38–61. 19. International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, “The Monrovia Roadmap on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding” (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, July 2011), www.oecd.org/dataoecd/23/24/48345560.pdf. 20. Ibid., 3–4. 21. Ibid., 4. 22. UN Secretary-General, Report of the Secretary-General on Peacebuilding in the Immediate Aftermath of Conflict (New York: United Nations, June 11, 2009), 6, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N09/367/70/PDF/N0936770 .pdf?OpenElement. 23. Ibid. 24. Roland Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” International Security 22, no. 2 (1997): 57. 25. Ibid., 64. 26. For a discussion of this, see Downs and Stedman, “Evaluation Issues in Peace Implementation,” 49. 27. Call, “Knowing Peace When You See It,” 174. 28. Ibid., 183, 190. 29. Roy Licklider, “Comparative Studies of Long Wars,” in Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2005), 41. 30. Elizabeth M. Cousens, “Introduction,” in Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, ed. Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 4–13.

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31. Francis Fukuyama, State-building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 32. Höglund and Söderberg Kovacs, “Beyond the Absence of War,” 371. For broader critiques of the impact of the top-down imposition of the liberal democratic peace model, see Simon Chesterman, You, The People: The UN, Transitional Administration and State-building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Michael Pugh, “The Political Economy of Peacebuilding: A Critical Theory Perspective,” International Journal of Peace Studies 10, no. 2 (2009): 23–42; Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 33. For a detailed discussion of the weaknesses of the liberal democratic peace as an approach to building peace after civil wars, see Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 33–57. 34. Ibid., 33–35. 35. Höglund and Söderberg Kovacs, “Beyond the Absence of War,” 388. 36. William R. Thompson, “Democracy and Peace: Putting the Cart Before the Horse?” International Organization 50, no. 1 (1996): 142 (emphasis in original). 37. Licklider, “Comparative Studies of Long Wars,” 40–41. 38. Roy Licklider, “Democracy and the Renewal of Civil War,” in Approaches, Levels, and Methods of Analysis in International Politics, ed. Harvey Starr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 99, 112–115. 39. Dawn Brancati and Jack L. Snyder, “Time to Kill: The Impact of Election Timing on Post-conflict Stability,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 57, no. 5 (2013): 822–853. 40. Paul Collier, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank 2003), 163. 41. Lotta Harbom, Stina Högbladh, and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict and Peace Agreements,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 5 (2006): 617–631. 42. Paris, At War’s End, 7. 43. Senior official in the UN Department of Political Affairs, interviewed by the author, New York, February 11, 2011. 44. Robert Templer, director, Asia Program, International Crisis Group, interviewed by the author, New York, February 8, 2011. 45. Fabienne Hara, director, New York office, International Crisis Group, interviewed by the author, New York, February 8, 2011. 46. Tom Crick, associate director, Carter Center Conflict Resolution Program, interviewed by the author, Atlanta, February 23, 2011. 47. John McNamara, principle deputy coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, US Department of State, Washington, DC, February 16, 2011. 48. Jock Covey, Michael Dziedzic, and Leonard Hawley, The Quest for Viable Peace: International Intervention and Strategies for Conflict Transformation (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2005). 49. Kishore Mandhyan, deputy director of political affairs (peace-keeping and humanitarian affairs) in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, interviewed by the author, New York, March 3, 2011. 50. Senior official, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, US State Department, interviewed by the author, Washington, DC, February 16, 2011.

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51. Massimo Tommasoli, permanent observer of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance to the UN, interviewed by the author, New York, February 11, 2011. 52. Ian Martin, senior UN diplomat, interviewed by the author, New York, March 1, 2011. 53. John Marks, president, Search for Common Ground, interviewed by the author, Washington, DC, February 18, 2011. 54. United Nations, Monitoring Peace Consolidation: United Nations Practitioners’ Guide to Benchmarking (New York: United Nations, 2010), 24. 55. Ibid., 25. 56. Ibid., 7. 57. Ibid., 24. 58. Ibid. 59. Harold D. Laswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: Peter Smith, 1950). 60. Licklider, “Comparative Studies of Long Wars,” 35; Roy Licklider, “Obstacles to Peace Settlements,” in Turbulent Peace, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001), 702–703. 61. For a detailed discussion of this, see Höglund and Söderberg Kovacs, “Beyond the Absence of War,” 367–390. 62. UN Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (New York: United Nations, 2004), 72. 63. Paul Dresch, Tribes, Government and History in Yemen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 150; see also 38–74 for a discussion of the Yemeni system and language of honor. 64. Sarah Phillips, What Comes Next in Yemen? Al Qaeda, the Tribes, and Statebuilding (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010), 9. 65. International Crisis Group, Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb (Sanaa: International Crisis Group, May 27, 2009), ii. 66. William A. Stuebner and Richard Hirsch, “Mindanao: A Community-based Approach to Counterinsurgency,” PRISM 1, no. 3 (2010): 135. 67. “Mindanao Final Peace Agreement,” September 2, 1996, pars. 17–18, www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/peace/Phi%2019960902.pdf. See also Stuebner and Hirsch, “Mindanao,” 135. 68. Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace, 86–87. 69. Paul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aal (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 203. 70. Herfried Münkler, The New Wars (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 7. 71. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” 201. 72. Some authors argue that the development of international normative and legal regimes around human rights, self-determination, and democratic participation mean that the success of conflict resolution must be measured against improvements in these areas of the affected populations’ lives. Paul C. Stern and Daniel Druckman, “Evaluating Interventions in History: The Case of International Conflict Resolution,” in International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War, ed. Paul C. Stern and Daniel Druckman (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000), 45.

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73. Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace, 88. 74. Ibid. 75. Senior official, UN Department of Political Affairs, interview. 76. Mandhyan interview. 77. Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace, 90. 78. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” 201–202. 79. Charles King, Ending Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997), 25. 80. Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 684. 81. Alexander Costy, “The Peace Dividend in Mozambique, 1987–1997,” in Durable Peace: Challenges for Peacebuilding in Africa, ed. Ali M. Taisier and Robert O. Matthews (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 142–182. 82. Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” 682.

3 Negotiating Insecurity After Civil War

Ending armed violence and establishing security is perhaps the most central goal of negotiated peace processes. In this chapter, I examine the experiences of security building in the six case study states to explore why, despite significant international involvement in building security after civil wars, insecurity and violence remain defining characteristics of many postwar societies. When looking at what happens in the security sphere in the aftermath of peace agreements, a number of themes emerge that shed some light on the phenomenon of fundamentally insecure postwar states. One theme is the remarkable similarity of the security building that occurred across the range of cases that I studied and the ubiquity of the weaknesses in the various processes, despite very different contexts. My analysis suggests that the anatomy of weakness in postwar security-building processes revolves around two issues. First, such processes are plagued by technical problems, particularly in terms of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and security sector reform processes, including the delayed deployment of international peacekeepers or other international support, a lack of funds, and the establishment of weak security institutions. This leads to the second main weakness: the depoliticization of security in peace processes, which stems from the separation of those processes that are considered political from those that are seen as fundamentally technical. As a result of the depoliticization of security in postwar states, both the incentives for ongoing violence and the broader dynamics of conflict were often left unaddressed in security-building processes. In the case studies, this meant that the everyday drivers of insecurity in the postagreement society were overlooked while technocratic security-building processes were implemented. Consequently, these processes were not responsive to either the violent political cultures that define many postwar societies or the underlying

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social and economic circumstances of individuals that provided the incentives for ongoing violence and insecurity. These two broad weaknesses in the international community’s approach to postwar security building combined, in the case studies, to contribute to the entrenchment of generalized insecurity and violence in the postwar society, even though the resumption of full-scale civil war is unlikely in many of the cases, including Liberia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Aceh, and Bougainville. In this chapter, I use the approach to analyzing peace process success and failure developed in the previous chapter to study the contributions made by various security-building processes to the consolidation of peace in order to identify whether there exist common problems in the way that security building is approached in peace processes. I begin the chapter with a detailed narrative analysis of the DDR and SSR processes in Liberia after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed in Accra in August 2003. The Liberian peace process is an appropriate case on which to base this chapter as it received large amounts of international attention and support, including through the deployment of a peacekeeping force to oversee the postagreement security situation. Also, it represents some of the most common approaches to the various elements of DDR and SSR processes undertaken in recent years. Further, Liberia illustrates the “neither war, nor peace” phenomenon, in that armed hostilities have not resumed since the peace agreement, but insecurity and violence remain pervasive. Why is this the case, given the large international involvement in security building? In the second part of this chapter, I use the conclusions drawn from the Liberian case as the framework for an analysis of security-building processes in Mozambique, Cambodia, Aceh, Bougainville, and South Sudan. The analysis is divided broadly into two sections: the technical issues that undermined the contribution of DDR and SSR to peace consolidation, and the deeper issue of security building being undertaken as though isolated from the political context of the postwar states. In the final section of the chapter, I explore how the weaknesses of postwar security-building processes have contributed to the institutionalization of insecurity in postwar societies and states, and I link the analysis back to the question of how the international approach to peace building perpetuates these weaknesses.

Building Security in Postwar Liberia The Liberian civil war began in December 1989 when former government official Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) invaded Liberia in response to the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Samuel Doe. The NPFL overthrew the government in late 1990, but by then the country had descended into civil war with fighting both within and

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between different rebel groups as well as with the Liberian army and West African peacekeepers. The first civil war came to an end in 1995 with the signing of the Abuja Accords, which brought all rebel factions together under a transitional government ahead of elections in 1997 that saw Taylor’s ascension to the presidency. However, antigovernment fighting broke out again in 1999 and continued until 2003 when Taylor’s troops faced imminent military defeat. He bowed to international pressure to stand down and went into exile in Nigeria.1 Eight days after Taylor announced his resignation, the CPA was reached in Accra between the Government of Liberia (GOL), the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). This agreement came after fifteen failed peace agreements, most recently the Abuja Accords. Most analyses of the failure of the Abuja Accords focus on the warring groups’ weak commitment to a negotiated solution to the conflict and the various agreements’ failure to address the armed groups’ vested interests in preserving the anarchic status quo.2 The pivotal role that Taylor played in perpetuating the violent conflict, despite participating in peace negotiations, was also a central reason for the repeated failure of the peace agreements. The Accra CPA was signed in a fundamentally different context because Taylor had gone into exile, satisfying the key political demands of both MODEL and LURD, and in many ways unlocking the conflict to resolution. The long and brutal civil war destroyed much of Liberia’s infrastructure, and both demilitarization and security sector reform featured prominently in the CPA. To explore the impact of security-building programs on the consolidation of peace and security in postwar Liberia, I discuss the DDR programs in Liberia before turning to the way that SSR was implemented. Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration In the lead-up to the peace settlement, there were three main armed groups in Liberia—MODEL, LURD, and the Taylor government’s forces and paramilitary groups—all of which committed in the Accra CPA to a disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration (DDRR) program. The program was overseen by a National Commission for DDRR made up of representatives from relevant National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL) agencies, as well as the GOL, LURD, MODEL, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), UN, African Union, and International Contact Group on Liberia.3 The CPA called for the disarmament of all groups, but did not specify the exact number of soldiers to be disarmed. It called for the three conflicting groups to provide information on their forces, but the large discrepancy between the estimated and actual number of armed combatants led to significant challenges in the implementation of the DDRR program, an issue that I return to below.

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While DynCorp, a US-funded private security company, was responsible for the demobilization of the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL), the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) was the primary actor responsible for demobilizing rebel combatants. It quickly became clear that UNMIL had neither the numbers nor the resources to do so effectively when the true size of the armed groups became apparent. This meant that the initial disarmament and demobilization phase, which began on December 7, 2003, and focused on the area surrounding Monrovia, was underprepared for the scale of the task. This sparked riots at the cantonment site, which resulted in several deaths and spread to rioting and looting in Monrovia, leading to the suspension of the program after a few days for redesign.4 UNMIL subsequently shifted its approach, increased the number of personnel, and undertook a wider community consultation ahead of the second phase, which began in April 2004.5 Subsequent phases were more effective, although there were still significant problems and weaknesses in the program. Before the program began, the number of fighters to be demobilized was estimated at 38,000, but more than 103,000 fighters presented at the cantonment sites.6 Twenty-eight percent classified themselves as “other” (i.e., not belonging to LURD, MODEL, or GOL forces), indicating that they may have been enrolling for DDRR for economic reasons rather than because they were legitimate candidates.7 The unexpectedly high number of combatants meant that the resources allocated to cover the costs of the program were seriously insufficient. Consequently, most of the DDRR funding was spent in the initial disarmament and demobilization phases, leaving little for the rehabilitation and reintegration phases.8 This also created a significant time lapse between the two sets of programs, which left demobilized ex-combatants with nothing to do, and some ex-combatants then joined armed groups in neighboring countries, particularly the militias in Côte d’Ivoire.9 During the redesign of the DDRR program, the qualification criteria for participation in the program were broadened to include not only people who could surrender a weapon, but also those who could hand over 150 rounds of ammunition. The ICG suggests that this was so that unarmed camp followers, such as women and children, could access the program, although the exact reason for the policy shift remains unclear.10 This led to a large discrepancy between the number of demobilized combatants and the number of weapons surrendered: only 27,800 weapons were relinquished by the more than 100,000 demobilized fighters.11 Wolf-Christian Paes argues that this discrepancy is explained in large part by the evidence of widespread abuse of the DDRR process; for instance, the phenomenon of civilians buying weapons and ammunition from the commanders controlling weapons caches in order to access the resources, particularly the cash allowance, provided by the program.12 This also helps to explain the large proportion of those demo-

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bilizing who did not claim affiliation with either rebel or government forces. Further, UNMIL internal intelligence shows that substantial arms caches remained in Liberia after the disarmament and demobilization process, and there is evidence that heavy weaponry was not surrendered to UNMIL but rather trafficked by LURD and MODEL to armed groups in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire, respectively.13 This means that there was a significant number of small weapons in Liberia and the region, which could be used to remilitarize the conflict. Because of this, there was significant concern during the 2011 presidential elections that opposition groups might abandon the formal political system if they lost the race.14 The failure of the DDRR process to recognize and address the regional nature of the security challenge has meant that fighters and weapons have been redeployed to armed struggles in neighboring states, most notably in the violent aftermath of the 2010 Ivorian elections when both sides in the struggle for power recruited former Liberian combatants to support their military campaigns.15 The cross-border movement of weapons and soldiers not only contributes to further regional destabilization, but also puts Liberia in a highly volatile situation where it is vulnerable to a resurgence in violence given the right trigger conditions, such as the continued shortage of viable legitimate income-generating opportunities and widespread feelings of political disenfranchisement. The reintegration and rehabilitation elements of the process were also less than successful, in part due to the lack of adequate funds mentioned earlier. Of the $13.5 million allocated by the UNDP for the DDRR trust fund, $10.2 million was used in the initial two phases of the disarmament and demobilization process, leaving little for the reintegration and rehabilitation programs.16 The lack of funds also resulted in a gap between the demobilization and reintegration phases of the program. One of the serious side effects of this was that many of the ex-combatants who chose to be relocated to Monrovia ended up living in IDP camps outside Monrovia with scarce opportunities or support, swelling the already inflated populations of those camps.17 Another side effect was that the initial cash allowance given on demobilization was often spent on alcohol and consumer goods, leaving little or nothing to tide people over while waiting for reintegration and rehabilitation support and resulting in riots, criminality, and roadblocks.18 Further, the increased scale of the DDRR program and inadequate funding meant that the transitional payments to former combatants were reduced significantly. There are accounts of this resulting in rioting and violence among rebels when DDRR program personnel informed them of the lower than expected payment rates—for example, an officer in the UNMIL DDR program described being attacked from behind with a log while explaining the situation to ex-combatants, which sparked fighting among rebels about whether or not they should attack the UN officials.19

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The reintegration and rehabilitation program had three main elements: the relocation of ex-combatants to their home communities, transitional payments to help repatriate foreign combatants, and a social services plan that included educational and vocational training. 20 Upon demobilization, ex-combatants chose where they wanted to be resettled and about 45 percent chose the greater Monrovia area, in many cases over their actual areas of origin, probably because of a fear of returning home combined with a perception of the greater opportunities afforded by the capital city. 21 This resulted in rapid urbanization, the negative effects of which were compounded by the ongoing lack of employment opportunities, social services, and basic infrastructure in the capital. The ICG reported a surprising willingness of communities to allow ex-combatants to resettle in their midst, which bodes well for longer-term reintegration and reconciliation.22 One significant problem with the reintegration and rehabilitation programs was that they did not adequately address the problems faced by child soldiers. During the civil war, all three conflict parties extensively used child soldiers as a tactic of war, with UN agencies estimating that approximately 15,000 children were involved in the fighting after the violence resumed in 2000.23 Although the DDRR program contained specific provisions for child soldiers, only about half of the child soldiers fighting in Liberia at the time of the CPA went through the DDRR program.24 Further, Human Rights Watch reported that child soldiers could not, or at least felt that they could not, easily return to their home communities because of the stigma attached to their participation in the conflict.25 The result has been that former child soldiers remain unsupported, with many drifting into criminality and many still vulnerable to manipulation by former rebel leaders, with reports that they have been pressured to join armed groups in neighboring countries.26 A second weakness of the reintegration program was that inadequate emphasis was put on reintegrating ex-combatants into agricultural ways of life, with 88 percent of those demobilized opting to receive vocational training or further education and only about 4 percent opting to become fishermen or farmers.27 There were a few serious problems with this. First, not enough training or education positions were available for all those who wanted them, leaving up to 80,000 ex-combatants outside the rehabilitation process at least in the initial phases.28 Second, the labor market and economy in postwar Liberia had a limited absorption capacity, meaning that the demand for formal jobs (which was exacerbated by the reintegration program’s emphasis on vocational training and education) far exceeded the opportunities available.29 Experience in similar postwar states, such as Sierra Leone, has shown that ex-combatants will likely have to rely on subsistence agriculture, which suggests that the focus of the Liberian reintegration and rehabilitation process may have been fundamentally flawed given

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the economic context and should have focused more on agricultural training. The DDRR process also did not offer the technical mining skills that were high in demand and would have equipped ex-combatants to work in the mining industry.30 Although some ex-combatants earned a small income doing menial jobs, not all were happy to do so. The lack of job opportunities was complicated by the fact that recruitment into a new army was not used to absorb ex-combatants, as it often is in DDR processes, which left former troops with few viable and legitimate income sources given the postwar economic climate. This had the potential to destabilize the fragile peace, especially given the large numbers of small weapons still available in the country. A former Liberian combatant working as mercenary in Côte d’Ivoire argued that he had no choice but to move across the border to work because ex-combatants were disarmed but were refused entry into the Liberian army and had no other employment opportunities.31 According to the ICG, undetermined numbers of Liberian excombatants were selectively recruited for their fighting experience by both former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo and the new president Alassane Ouattara during the postelection crisis in 2010–2011, and paid between $500 and $1,500 in addition to other unnamed incentives.32 These mercenaries have been implicated in atrocities in Côte d’Ivoire, have bought back weapons and ammunition when they returned to Liberia, and have been implicated in rising crime rates in the areas to which they returned. These various problems suggest that the DDR process has created a security situation that is fundamentally unstable and in which there remain significant incentives for ongoing violence and conflict. Security Sector Reform The goal of SSR in postwar Liberia was “to establish sustainable, non-partisan and law-abiding security forces capable of defending Liberia’s territorial integrity, restore law and order and return the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to the state.”33 The CPA was unusual in that it provided for the complete dismantlement, restructuring, and reformation of the armed forces, and established limitations on who could be admitted to the new forces based on their involvement in the war and criminal history. It also provided for the restructuring of the Liberian National Police (LNP) and the disbandment of the Special Security Units and paramilitary groups that Taylor had established and used as his own private army.34 The dismantlement of these structures and the army was made necessary by their complete co-option by Taylor, who manipulated their ranks so that they were mainly drawn from his own ethnic group and served his purposes, which delegitimized them in the postwar context. Finally, the CPA established an interim police force with limited authority to act as a stopgap before the deployment of the newly trained police force.35

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The United States funded the reform program for the armed forces, contracting DynCorp to recruit and train a new 2,000-strong army. Although the exact reasoning behind this number remains unclear, it is clear that economic considerations were at the forefront of all security sector reform planning.36 However, although the CPA allocated the task of dismantling Taylor’s AFL and the Ministry of Defense (MOD) to the GOL, it actually fell to DynCorp and complicated the company’s initial work, shifting its focus to organizing demobilization payments for the 13,770 AFL soldiers and more than 400 MOD employees.37 The work was further complicated by the fact that the demobilized soldiers took everything with them when they left their barracks, including the roofs, which meant that DynCorp had to entirely rebuild the army facilities. This contributed to the three-year gap between signing the CPA and beginning the training program for new recruits. The complete reconstitution of the AFL was central to reestablishing public confidence in the forces by distancing them from their history of abuse and embedding them with respect for the law and human rights. However, it did present challenges, such as the lack of experienced middle management that, according to the ICG, would be a concern for at least a decade while the new officer corps were trained and consolidated their skills on the job.38 It also meant that the army was not fully operational, nor led by a Liberian, until 2014, more than ten years after the war ended.39 The vetting conducted by DynCorp during the recruitment process was one of the most successful elements of the security-building programs in Liberia, hailed by some experts as international best practice.40 During this process, international researchers “vetted every applicant, interviewing them, visiting their home villages or neighbourhoods and schools and talking with family members and acquaintances. They also distributed posters with applicants’ photographs and a call-in number where people could anonymously lodge accusations of wrongdoing [which were then investigated].”41 Stringent regulations around eligibility, which included requirements that applicants pass a written high school proficiency test, be at least eighteen years old, and pass initial physical and medical tests, were strictly and uniformly applied according to an ICG investigation. The rejection rate for applicants was 82 percent, with 52 percent turned away after the initial written exam.42 The commitment to establishing a legitimate and effective new force was further demonstrated by the necessary, but expensive, steps taken to ensure that the recruitment process was transparent and geographically and ethnically inclusive. There was also a strong commitment to meet the targets for women’s recruitment, although these were not met, ultimately, because of practical challenges, most prominently the limited number of female high school graduates in Liberia and the small proportion of those graduates who were interested in joining the military.43

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The delay in beginning the training process was partly due to the longer time frame for demobilization, recruitment, and vetting processes. However, time pressures meant that the training, rather than being run as initially designed, was decreased from fifteen to eight weeks, and the human rights and rule-of-law training components were postponed. The ICG argues that this indicated a backslide from the initial training concept, which had human security at its core, and also that it highlights the problems with contracting such vital tasks to private military and security companies (PMSCs), which are less able than state armies to absorb shocks, such as delays, due to their resource constraints.44 The US-funded army reform process concluded at the end of 2009, when the Army Readiness Training and Evaluation Program concluded that its goals had been achieved and passed responsibility for running the AFL to the MOD, although sixty-one US military personnel stayed on to support the training programs that the AFL took over.45 Overall, while there were some positive achievements in army reform after the CPA, the AFL’s skills remained rudimentary and required further development and support after the US-funded army reform process concluded, according to a report by the UN Secretary-General.46 The report notes that UNMIL continued to provide military capacity building to the AFL and continued to identify and respond to outstanding needs with the mentorship program and the MOD to guide increased UNMIL assistance in the future.47 A study commissioned by the US Army found that, despite the sixteen-week training course provided to the 100 new MOD staff, the MOD “still [lacked] basic management capacity and [was] hard pressed to administer the salaries and see to the welfare of the 105 soldiers and 525 recruits currently on its payroll.”48 These institutional weaknesses, which resulted from flaws in the SSR process, may undermine longer-term peace and security in Liberia. The police reform process has been somewhat less successful than that of the army, particularly in terms of vetting and training new recruits. From June 2005, UNMIL included 1,060 UN Civilian Police (CIVPOL) personnel tasked with training the LNP. Given that the LNP was compromised by the way that Taylor had embedded his own supporters in it, it was completely disbanded and reformed in an effort to restore public confidence, although UNMIL’s capacity to do this comprehensively was limited by funding constraints. 49 Officers who joined the LNP after Taylor took power were officially barred from applying for reentry, and recruits were vetted for human rights abuses, with their names and photos published in the press for the public to see, just as with the army.50 However, the International Crisis Group argues that the new police force was “recruited, vetted and trained to a far lower standard than the army,” and that UNMIL’s own human rights and protection unit labeled the police vetting system a failure as early as 2005. Compounding

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this, the ICG argues that the LNP is “widely considered ineffective and corrupt.”51 In part this is because of poor management, poor community relations, and a severe lack of basic equipment, including vehicles, communications equipment, handcuffs, and even torches. It is also linked to the lack of an effective judiciary in Liberia, which is essential to complement and consolidate the work of the police. Funding deficiencies remain a serious problem for LNP effectiveness, with the size of the Emergency Response Unit decreased from 500 to 300, which is well below what is needed to maintain security.52 However, there has been some progress in building community confidence in the LNP, with the Peacebuilding Fund sponsoring a statewide community policing program in 2009–2010.53 While the GOL has taken important steps to institutionalize the reformed security architecture in Liberia—for instance, by passing the Liberia Security Reform and Intelligence Act in 2010, which streamlined the sector and aimed to improve information sharing and coordination between agencies— budgetary deficiencies remain a stumbling block and budgets have not allocated enough funding for key security agencies.54 Further, there was little local consultation or ownership over the SSR processes, with international actors taking full control, in part due to the government’s preoccupation with stimulating economic recovery and consequent absence from SSR decisionmaking processes.55 The lack of local ownership of these processes may undermine the sustainability of these security-building reforms, particularly when international third parties leave Liberia.

Technical and Context-based Challenges to Peacebuilding Although security building in postwar Liberia has had some positive outcomes, particularly around the establishment of a well-vetted army, it has been undermined by a number of broad weaknesses. These revolve around technical difficulties in implementing DDRR and SSR, and the depoliticization of security-building processes. As a result, such processes have not addressed some of the fundamental security concerns in Liberia and have contributed to the entrenchment of insecurity and instability in the postwar state. While the peace process, to date, has prevented a resurgence of armed warfare, it has not been successful in establishing a stable security situation. The peace processes in Aceh and Cambodia show a remarkably similar anatomy of weaknesses in security building, while the peace processes in South Sudan, Bougainville, and Mozambique mirror some elements of these weaknesses but to varying degrees. Next, I will explore the technical and context-based problems identified in Liberia’s security-building process in turn, while simultaneously developing analytical narratives of security building in the other cases around these themes.

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Technical Problems The most prominent problems identified in the above account of postwar security-building programs in Liberia were the technical weaknesses of the DDR56 and SSR processes, particularly poor program design, the late deployment of international assistance, the lack of funds, and the establishment of weak security institutions. These weaknesses were interconnected and mutually reinforcing, as becomes clear below. What also becomes clear is the dominance of a particular approach to security building after civil wars, which is implemented in much the same way across often very different contexts. While the underestimation, or misrepresentation, of the true number of combatants that would need to be disarmed put pressure on the DDR process initially, disarmament and demobilization programming failed to effectively demilitarize the country, with large arms caches remaining.57 The demilitarization process was also set back by the delayed deployment of UNMIL troops to some areas of the country, which meant that armed factions maintained control of certain regions for some time after the ceasefire agreement, with ongoing violence and atrocities committed even in the vicinity and presence of UNMIL soldiers.58 The problems caused by the delayed deployment of international forces, as well as the difficulties in demilitarizing postwar societies, are not uncommon in postwar securitybuilding processes; Cambodia, Aceh, Mozambique, and South Sudan experienced similar shortcomings. Cambodia, Sudan, and Mozambique: Incomplete demilitarization. Cambodia’s DDR process was particularly flawed, not least because the Khmer Rouge’s Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK) refused to cooperate entirely. The Paris Peace Agreement of 1991 gave the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) military responsibility to supervise, monitor, and verify the cease-fire and the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, as well as disarm the four warring parties’ armed forces and demobilize at least 70 percent of those forces.59 These forces were the Khmer Rouge; the Vietnamese-backed government’s forces (the State of Cambodia [SOC], which later became the Cambodian People’s Party [CPP]); and two smaller groups that fought the new government alongside the Khmer Rouge, the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), led by the deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF), led by former prime minister Son Sann. The deadline set for this process was June 30, 1992, but it was not met for a number of reasons. First, the UNTAC military component was not deployed quickly enough to begin the process on schedule—mirroring the situation in Liberia described above.60

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Second, while the SOC, FUNCINPEC, and KPNLF complied with their obligations to disarm and demobilize, the PDK refused to do so on the pretext that a large Vietnamese military presence remained in Cambodia disguised as settlers, in contravention of the accords, and demanded the expulsion of all Vietnamese. This allegation was proven false by an UNTAC investigation.61 The PDK also justified their refusal to disarm by asserting that UNTAC had not established the neutral political environment called for in the peace agreement.62 UNTAC tried but failed to get the PDK back on board with the implementation of the peace agreements, and the other parties to the conflict became reluctant to disarm in the face of the PDK’s withdrawal from the process. UNTAC consequently suspended the process so as to avoid a military imbalance that would have the potential to spark renewed fighting.63 Although responsibility for the failure of the disarmament and demobilization program lies primarily with the PDK, a 2006 UN report argues that a number of other factors also contributed to the failure, including the absence of clear definitions of and penalties for noncompliance in the peace agreements, the assumption that major power consensus on the peace process would be enough to keep the process on track, the absence of sufficient incentives for PDK disarmament (especially given that the PDK was the one party with no chance to benefit from a multiparty democratic election, given its history), and the tendency of the peace operation to indiscriminately blame the PDK for any cease-fire violations without serious investigations (which encouraged the PDK’s belief that the UN was no longer neutral and favored the SOC).64 Deficiencies at the operational level also inhibited the UN’s capacity, and many involved in UNTAC argue that, if the mission could have been deployed more quickly and disarmament begun immediately after the peace agreement was signed, it would have been easier to keep all parties in the process—in fact, all parties, including the PDK, wanted a quick UN deployment.65 A number of factors are cited as being responsible for the delayed deployment, including inadequate mission planning, the bureaucratic nature of the UN recruitment and procurement system, the changeover in Secretaries-General, the unprecedented size and complexity of the mission, and the struggle for scarce resources in the context of another large mission start-up in the former Yugoslavia.66 A second attempt at DDR was made in 1998, with the establishment of the General Secretariat of the Council for Demobilization, chaired by the minister of the Council of Ministers and the adviser to the prime minister, both of whom were civilian staff.67 The World Bank then planned a program that would have given demobilized soldiers $1,200 (around five times the average per capita annual income), but word of the program spread and there was widespread corruption with officials taking bribes to add names to the list of soldiers to be demobilized.68 When a senior World Bank offi-

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cial exposed this corruption, he was severely harassed by the government, and tensions between the General Secretariat and the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) rose in 1999 to the point that the project almost collapsed. The World Bank then redesigned the project. The new process removed about 20,000 “ghost soldiers” from payrolls, and 31,500 soldiers were billed for demobilization by 2004. Demobilized soldiers under this project had to surrender their weapons and receive discharge papers before receiving about $250 (one year’s salary), three months’ worth of rice and fish for a family, and a number of basic household utensils from various World Bank, German Agency for International Cooperation (GTZ), and UNDP programs. A serious problem with this project was that weapons were not initially confiscated as they should have been, which seriously undermined the demilitarization of the country. This was apparently because the ministry was reluctant to force soldiers to disarm, and instead mostly targeted the program at soldiers who had already been unfit for service for a while and had already given up their weapons.69 The DDR program was independently assessed by the Khmer Working Group on Weapons Reduction in 2002, which, while positive about the program’s impact, argued that too much emphasis was put on demobilization instead of disarmament (especially the destruction of confiscated weapons) and reintegration more broadly.70 This issue of inadequate attention being given to reintegration is pervasive across peace processes, as discussed below. Technical problems also contributed significantly to the failure of DDR processes to effectively demilitarize South Sudan after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, despite numerous attempts at DDR and the fact that the country was used as the pilot for the UN’s new Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards (IDDRS). While the CPA did not contain specific provisions for DDR, it did stipulate that DDR programs would be implemented “for the benefit of all those who will be affected by the reduction, demobilization and downsizing of the forces as agreed [in the CPA].”71 It also mandated that the South’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)—which later became the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM)—and the North’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) would downsize proportionately. Although the details of the downsize were not specified, they later agreed to downsize by 90,000 troops each. There have been three main elements to the DDR in southern Sudan: forcible civilian disarmament carried out by the SPLA/Government of South Sudan (GOSS) in 2006 and 2008; the Interim Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Program (IDDRP), which began planning in 2006; and the full DDR program, which began in 2009. The militarization of the civilian population was a significant source of insecurity in postwar South Sudan, given the long history of intergroup and tribal violence, which was exacerbated by the ethnic dimensions of the civil

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war. As a result, civilian disarmament was considered a key part of the DDR program. The GOSS forcible civilian disarmament program began in early 2006, with a failed operation in northern Jonglei state, conducted by the SPLA, that collected 3,000 weapons but was ethnically focused and politically motivated. The operation highlighted the ongoing communal dimensions of the insecurity in the South and sparked a massive backlash that resulted in 1,600 deaths and did nothing to improve the area’s security. 72 It was followed by a second attempt at complete civilian disarmament in 2008, which gave the ten state governors responsibility for its rollout, included incentives for civilians to surrender their weapons, and allowed for the use of force to disarm them if they did not do so. An analysis commissioned by the Small Arms Survey found that this program was largely ineffective due to poor planning and haphazard implementation and as such had a minimal impact on security, collecting only a small fraction of the total holdings of small arms in southern communities.73 These campaigns also deepened communities’ mistrust of the SPLM/GOSS because they seemed to be politically motivated with the aim of neutralizing the military capacity of certain tribes, and there were concerns that, if disarmament upset the balance of power between tribes or clans in any given area, it would be strongly resisted.74 In late 2009, the ICG investigated the imminent civilian disarmament campaign in South Sudan, which was driven by pressure on the GOSS to address the high incidence of intergroup violence. This investigation showed a disturbing acceptance by prominent government and army officials that the campaign might again result in many deaths, with officials arguing that these deaths would be justified by the longer-term security gains. According to one official, “You’ll kill 500, but the rest will hand the guns over. It is necessary to use a well-equipped force to disarm. We don’t want to hurt anyone, but we must start somewhere, and we must do our best to provide security to those disarmed.”75 Another major challenge to civilian disarmament is the fact that bearing arms is associated with economic, social, and political prestige in many communities. In some areas, the GOSS has actually encouraged civilians to own guns as a means of protection against armed groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).76 Later in this chapter, I revisit the issue of violence becoming normalized, through civil war, as a part of political culture and social organization, as it is a relatively common phenomenon in postwar societies, which often is not accorded adequate attention by international actors in their efforts to consolidate postwar security. The DDR process for ex-combatants has been equally ineffective and fraught with challenges to date. The IDDRP was established to address the needs of some specific special needs groups that could be identified up front, including women and child combatants, while planning for the fullscale program that would start later. The IDDRP failed to implement any programs due to delays, and was abandoned and replaced with the full DDR

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program, which began in 2009 four years after the CPA called for it.77 This DDR program was designed for 182,900 combatants—90,000 each for the National Congress Party/SAF and the SPLA, and 2,900 for groups on the Eastern Front. In addition, the program planned for 8,000 child soldiers or children associated with armed groups.78 The DDR program was supported by the UN, which used it as a pilot for the newly adopted IDDRS—and it has had reasonable success to date—although it is too early to make a full assessment of its effectiveness. An analysis of the program’s early stages concluded that disarmament and demobilization of ex-combatants had proceeded slowly but relatively well.79 However, a more recent analysis argues that, while “both sides seem committed to completing the first phase, it is highly unrealistic to expect the full 180,000 to be processed on time” due to limited resources and institutional capacity—which mirrors the challenges faced in Liberia and Cambodia.80 Another problem with this process was that the disarmament element was handled by the SAF and SPLA themselves, with no involvement of international stakeholders. Participants would then arrive at the demobilization sites having been “disarmed” by their own group, and this led to frustration among those in the international community involved in the process, some of whom have called for the UN to have at least minimum oversight and verification of the disarmament.81 The SAF and SPLA resisted UN involvement on the grounds that it was not agreed to in the CPA. This suggests the existence of motivations to not demilitarize completely—potentially because of the fear that groups had that the conflict would reignite and they would have to remobilize their troops—and highlights how political concerns and motives define how parties engage in security-building processes. Nevertheless, the failure to demilitarize South Sudan has remained a challenge to the consolidation of security, with insecurity and armed conflict ongoing between different southern groups, especially since independence in 2011, and an estimated 2 million small arms mostly in the possession of civilians, who see these weapons as integral to their security.82 That the ownership of firearms is a deeply ingrained part of everyday life in South Sudan creates a level of complexity that the largely technocratic DDR processes examined so far are unable to accommodate. Where DDR programs focus on the wholesale removal of weapons from an area without recognizing the multiple purposes of those firearms in peacetime, they set themselves up for failure and manipulation by individuals and communities who are unwilling to give up their firearms. In the cases discussed earlier, such as Yemen and Afghanistan, small arms are used for a variety of nonmilitary purposes, and their use is part of everyday life and sometimes enmeshed with the maintenance of social order. In other cases, like South Sudan, protracted conflict has left communities with a deep distrust of peace, and holding on to firearms is a way for communities to feel

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secure and able to safeguard their interests. This suggests that DDR programs should recognize that the confiscation of weapons and the demobilization of rebel groups alone is not enough to build security—a broader range of issues is relevant, including those around community perceptions of their security, and the nonmilitary role of firearms in certain societies and the codes surrounding their use. Mozambique faces a predicament similar to Liberia, Cambodia, and South Sudan in terms of unsuccessful demilitarization as part of DDR programming. Although expected to be a quick six-month process after the 1992 General Peace Agreement, the disarmament and demobilization of troops was delayed, initially by RENAMO’s refusal to demobilize before 65 percent of UN troops had been deployed in Mozambique, and then because both parties refused to demobilize until all assembly areas had opened.83 After it began, the DDR process was accelerated by a UN Reintegration Support Scheme (RSS), which dramatically improved the resources available to demobilized soldiers and thereby encouraged them to demobilize.84 The UN coordinated the DDR process but, instead of relying exclusively on UN military observers, it created an ad hoc technical unit that included civilians from donor government and NGOs to work with both sides to plan and implement the process.85 Just under 93,000 soldiers were demobilized.86 The DDR process was primarily aimed at ensuring that the 1994 elections could happen peacefully, which led to a focus on the demobilization aspects of the process while elements of the disarmament and reintegration processes were not given adequate attention.87 Interestingly, the delay in starting the demobilization process meant that it was not completed in time for the October elections, which Barbara F. Walter claims helped deal with any insecurity that the parties felt about participating in the elections.88 A serious shortcoming of the demobilization process in Mozambique was that, as in the other countries discussed, disarmament was not properly carried out. Both the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) ordered weapons to be hidden, and combatants hid their best weapons rather than surrender them upon demobilization in order to secure their own personal, and often economic, interests postconflict.89 In fact, Alex Vines recounts a RENAMO soldier explaining that “guns can mean food. We do not want to be hungry. Before the elections we saw that we were being betrayed by politicians. Why give up the guns to weaken us further? We handed in the bad ones. Business is good with a gun.”90 Similarly, a FRELIMO soldier told him, “We know that guns make good business. So we kept the best for ourselves. I have sold some to dealers from [Johannesburg] and I keep others for the future. The secret is to keep them in good condition. FRELIMO was never going to pay us for the years we were made to fight. We have to look after

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ourselves.”91 While some of the hidden arms caches were seized by the UN Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ) after the 1994 elections, many were not found. There were also problems with confiscated weapons in UN custody disappearing—which is similar to the problems of Liberia’s DDR process.92 Many light weapons were trafficked into South Africa as a result of these weaknesses in the disarmament process—this again has parallels with the destabilizing regional impact of Liberia’s flawed DDR process.93 I revisit this issue below, as it suggests the separation of what are considered security and political issues in peace processes. Cambodia, Sudan, and Mozambique illustrate the practical difficulties inherent in demilitarizing large and divided postagreement states. They also highlight the way that social and economic conditions can discourage armed groups and ex-combatants from surrendering their weapons and participating in the demilitarization process, with clear implications for the consolidation of peace. The broader impact of incomplete demilitarization on the peace process is drawn out below. Aceh and Bougainville: Smaller scale, greater success? In contrast with the processes in Liberia, Cambodia, South Sudan, and Mozambique, Aceh’s demilitarization process happened quickly and effectively, with the disarmament and demobilization process implemented between September and December 2005, beginning just weeks after the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Government of Indonesia (GOI) on August 15, 2005. The success of this stage of the demilitarization process was an important confidence-building step between the parties, given that the previous Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (COHA) unraveled in 2003 over the decommissioning issue.94 GAM committed to decommissioning 840 weapons in the MOU, which it did within the time frame stipulated.95 The confidence-building impact was especially high during the second phase, when a GAM hard-liner surrendered a large number of weapons, underscoring GAM’s commitment to the peace process.96 The decommissioning of GAM weapons began on the first day of the official European Union (EU) Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM), which was made possible by the rapid deployment of an Initial Monitoring Presence that was on the ground in Aceh on the day the MOU was signed and acted as a stopgap while the AMM deployed, in contrast to the delayed deployments of peacekeepers in Liberia and Cambodia discussed earlier.97 The AMM was established in the MOU to monitor the agreement’s implementation by both parties, and was constituted by the EU and five Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries.98 The redeployment of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) happened concurrently with the disarmament of GAM, with more than 30,000 troops redeployed out of Aceh in

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accordance with the MOU.99 While there were some obstacles in the early stages of this process, including aggression and violence by TNI forces toward civilians and former GAM combatants, these were dealt with effectively when brought to the attention of the commander of the Indonesian military in Aceh. Therefore, they did not undermine the confidence being built between the parties, and the demilitarization process was carried out successfully.100 The demilitarization process in Bougainville was also successful, although some parts of the island remain flush with small weapons, indicating a shortfall in the process. The Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA), signed on August 30, 2001, had three main elements: (1) a constitutionally guaranteed, but deferred, referendum on independence for Bougainvilleans; (2) constitutional arrangements for the development of a high degree of autonomy for Bougainville; and (3) a complex three-stage plan for the disposal of weapons by ex-combatants.101 The demilitarization process was framed in terms of weapons disposal, rather than the more recent model of DDR, which focuses on the ongoing needs of ex-combatants. The process for weapons disposal, and the inter-relationship between that process and political reforms, was developed in 2001 and outlined in the Agreed Principles on Referendum of January 26, 2001, and the Rotakas Record of May 3, 2001, and reaffirmed in the BPA. Weapons disposal was conceived of as a three-stage process designed to be implemented gradually depending on the readiness of different parts of Bougainville, with the program initiated by the withdrawal of Papua New Guinea security forces from an area. The process was designed by the UN Political Office in Bougainville, which was initially given the mandate in 1999, but was unable to implement it because of the insistence of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) on linking weapons disposal to progress on the political agreement and the referendum.102 The agreements in 2001 paved the way for the process to start and it was monitored by the UN Observer Mission in Bougainville (UNOMB). The first stage of the process involved ex-combatants putting weapons in secure storage containers organized by local-level unit commanders of BRA and the Bougainville Resistance Force (BRF), and sealed by UNOMB for verification purposes. The second stage was threefold and involved (1) the movement of weapons containers to some central locations, under control of more senior BRA and BRF commanders; (2) when the constitutional laws were passed by parliament, the movement of the weapons to these secure containers with two locks, one held by the commander of the group handing over the weapons and the other by UNOMB; and (3) the constitutional laws coming into force only on UNOMB verification that the weapons were in secure double-locked containers under its supervision. The third stage provided for a decision to be made on the final fate of the weapons,

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within four and a half months of the constitutional laws coming into operation. This was left open-ended because of difficulties in reaching agreement in the final stages of negotiating the disposal plan, and it is unclear what the decision was.103 Thus, there was a clear two-way link between the constitutional amendments and the implementation of Bougainville’s autonomy within Papua New Guinea and the weapons disposal plan—they had to happen in tandem, which was an obvious confidence-building measure built into the peace agreement. This linking of the political and technical aspects of DDR in Bougainville provides a stark contrast to the other processes discussed in this chapter, where DDR was implemented as a largely technical process that was not sensitive or responsive to the political and social contexts in which it occurred. The weapons disposal process proceeded successfully, in large part because of these interlinking provisions and also because of strong public encouragement by the prime minister and the minister for Bougainville affairs. By the time of the second constitutional vote, over 900 weapons had been surrendered by ex-combatants from every district in Bougainville.104 However, Francis Ona’s hard core of supporters, who formed the Me’ekamui Defence Force (MDF) and had called for full independence from PNG, refused to participate in the processes of autonomy and disarmament and maintained control of the Panguna mine area. 105 Although the MDF initially refused to join the peace process, it did not disturb or undermine it and tacitly adhered to the cease-fire.106 Since 2007, the MDF has increasingly cooperated with the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG); a factor contributing to this was Ona’s death in 2005, which highlights the role that key individuals can play in the perpetuation of conflict.107 Despite the overall success of the weapons disposal process, some parts of the island remain flush with weapons.108 One of the consequences of this has been a rise in gun violence with guns used in domestic violence, in armed robberies, and to settle land disputes, and the movement of guns into other regions of Papua New Guinea, particularly into the conflictaffected Highlands Region.109 The civil war has left the legacy of a gun culture, with some locals arguing that guns have become accepted as a “normal part of life.”110 This poses an ongoing challenge to the sustainability of peace in Bougainville. It is notable that localized armed conflict has remerged in recent years in south Bougainville, initially stemming from unresolved conflict between BRA and BRF elements, but growing to involve numerous other small armed groups, and enabled by the lack of economic development in the area that makes joining an armed group an attractive option for young men. 111 Although this violence was brought to an end by peace ceremonies in late 2011, Anthony Regan argues that the violence has undermined prospects for further weapons disposal and the situation remains fragile.112 This suggests that although the disarmament and

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demobilization process was successful in many ways, particularly in linking the political and technical aspects of security building, the continued prevalence of small arms in the region presents an ongoing threat to the stability and sustainability of peace, especially in the context of low economic development and poor employment prospects for younger generations. Both Aceh and Bougainville are geographically much smaller than the cases discussed earlier. This probably explains, to some extent, why their demilitarization processes faced fewer practical challenges and were more successful than those in Liberia, Cambodia, Sudan, and Mozambique. They were not, however, free from problems, and the issue of localized armed violence remains prominent, especially in Bougainville, with clear implications for the region’s security. Soldiers or Civilians? Challenges in Reintegration Processes In addition to failed demilitarization, another critical problem with DDR programming in Liberia was that reintegration programming did not adequately respond to the needs of ex-combatants, including female campfollowers and child soldiers. In large part this was due to the lack of funds available for the reintegration programming, particularly when funding was finite and disarmament and demobilization programs were prioritized. The South Sudanese DDR program was undermined in the same way: while the UN funded disarmament, demobilization, and the short-term reinsertion of ex-combatants from its peacekeeping budget, the reintegration programs (implemented by the South Sudan DDR Committee and the UNDP) relied on voluntary funding from participating donor countries.113 Interestingly, the IDDRS Unit tried to ensure that there was no major gap between demobilization and reintegration capacity by recommending a halt to demobilization when funding for reintegration became insufficient.114 In the same way that Liberia’s reintegration funds were forced to stretch to cover the needs of significantly more combatants than initially expected, Aceh’s reintegration process was undermined by insufficient resources and overdemand for reintegration support, which led to conflict over eligibility and access. In contrast to its relatively successful demilitarization programs, centrally coordinated by the Aceh Reintegration Board but carried out by a range of civil society groups, local government groups, and international agencies, Aceh’s reintegration process was “marred by confusion of goals, lack of strategy and lack of accountability.”115 This was partly due to confusion over the entitlements of former GAM combatants to reintegration funding under the MOU. The MOU provided for reintegration support for 3,000 ex-GAM combatants, but it became clear in the aftermath of the settlement that this was a gross misrepresentation or underestimate of

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the size of GAM’s military, which was likely closer to 15,000.116 This mirrors the problems presented by the underestimation of rebel numbers in Liberia and, while some argue that GAM deliberately misrepresented the number of combatants in order to minimize the number of weapons it would have to surrender in the disarmament process, others say that it just made an error in its estimates.117 Complicating matters further, GAM was initially ambivalent about the reintegration process, arguing that GAM fighters did not need reintegration into their society because they had never been dislocated from it.118 This was not entirely inaccurate. The relationship between GAM combatants and the civilian population was strong throughout the conflict. Boundaries between who was a fighter and who was a sympathizer were often blurred, with combatants regularly returning to their villages for rest and to visit their families, and civilians playing important nonmilitary support roles to GAM.119 Since the return of combatants to their villages, social cohesion has improved, with more than 90 percent of villagers surveyed by the World Bank describing high levels of trust between returned fighters and other community members.120 Although the social aspect of reintegration in Aceh is positive, there have been numerous problems with the reintegration programming more broadly. As a consequence of the unexpectedly high number of GAM fighters requiring reintegration support, the Aceh Reintegration Board, which was responsible for administering funds for reintegration projects, did not have enough money to pay all former combatants, which caused significant tension within GAM ranks over the uneven distribution of benefits.121 There were also issues with the identification of ex-combatants, as GAM refused to provide lists of names for fear that its members might be targeted by the Indonesian forces if the peace broke down.122 Although fighters handed in their guns, they were unwilling to identify themselves and enroll in the reintegration program for the same reason.123 As a result, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which ran the reintegration program, was unable to identify those who should receive reintegration support. In the end, funds were distributed by the government and the IOM widely across former combatants as well as GAM supporters and civilians, often through former commanders, which meant that the funds were unequally distributed and thinly spread, with some fighters receiving as little as $3.124 This highlights the problem of individual-focused reintegration programming in contexts where the line between combatants and civilians is blurred, and defined lists of combatants are neither technically feasible nor politically possible.125 Another issue was that the MOU provided for reintegration support to be given not only to former combatants, but also to amnestied political prisoners and “affected civilians” who had “suffered a demonstrable loss due to the conflict.”126 While the former category was not particularly problematic,

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the latter caused significant confusion in terms of defining who was “affected”—a problem not resolved by the Aceh Reintegration Board in any satisfactory way and which led to the complete exclusion of women who suffered sexual and gender-based violence during the war from any reintegration programs because mechanisms to address such sensitive issues were not established.127 Pro-Indonesian militias were also eligible for reintegration funding at the insistence of the GOI, with 6,500 former militiamen receiving pay-outs from the Aceh Reintegration Board.128 This exacerbated tensions about the uneven distribution of resources and may have embedded mistrust between GAM supporters and pro-Indonesia groups. While these militias were officially disbanded and reintegrated, there is evidence that some of them regrouped under the name of the Communication Forum for Children of the Nation (Forkrab) and trained in Aceh’s mountainous center.129 Tensions over the uneven distribution of resources are particularly salient in light of the fact that the support for post-tsunami recovery in the tsunami-affected regions has been far greater and more comprehensive than the support for postwar recovery in the conflict-affected regions. This led to uneven development and has fueled resentment, and in some cases violence, between those who benefited from the tsunami response and conflict-affected families or communities who received far less support.130 These shortcomings have undermined the reintegration process in Aceh. However, the Small Arms Survey argues that their impact has not been disastrous because of the high levels of social cohesion among Acehnese, the peace dividend that arose in the form of development opportunities, and the successful integration of GAM elites into the political system, which are discussed in the next chapter. 131 These saving graces were not, however, anticipated by the reintegration program, which was seriously flawed and largely ineffective in achieving its goals. In addition to the issue of inadequate funding and overdemand for reintegration support in the Liberian peace process, which was mirrored in the Acehnese reintegration process, another major issue was the limited utility of the training provided to demobilizing combatants. As discussed earlier, the training provided in Liberia was heavily focused on education and vocational training, which was of little use to ex-combatants in the context of a weak postwar economy. Similar mistargeting occurred in Cambodia, where the reintegration program was well suited to the many soldiers who had already been demobilized for some time and who had established homes, farms, and businesses, but did not respond to the needs of soldiers who were making the initial transition into civilian life. There was evidence that the latter soldiers turned to banditry and other forms of criminality to meet the costs of civilian life.132

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In contrast to these cases, the reintegration efforts for ex-combatants in South Sudan focused largely on agricultural skills, small business management, and educational support, but there were similar challenges in terms of employment opportunities for ex-combatants. The reintegration part of the program only began in 2010, and a preliminary analysis by the Small Arms Survey found that poor economic development in southern Sudan made sustainable reintegration opportunities elusive.133 Further, as in Aceh, the program adopted an individual-based approach to distributing reintegration support rather than a community-based one. In South Sudan, this placed the burden of economic and social reintegration primarily on the communities absorbing ex-combatants, which were already much worse off than the combatants themselves. Julie Brethfeld’s analysis in 2010 suggests that the high expectations of many ex-combatants for their future opportunities was a particular problem in that context and, in the fragile security climate, widespread dissatisfaction with the realities of reintegration might push excombatants into either criminality or political violence.134 This prediction was vindicated by the rapid descent into civil war after the 2013 political crisis. There are few jobs in most postwar economies and, as in Liberia, the lack of economic opportunities available to nominally reintegrated ex-combatants in civil war contexts often leads to rapid urbanization and increased criminality rates. For instance, ex-combatants in Mozambique had difficulty generating enough income to support families of eight to nine people from the smallscale village-based agricultural work that the DDR package encouraged them to undertake,135 which contributed to urbanization and growing crime rates.136 Similarly, in Aceh, rising criminality in the early years after the peace agreement were linked to the failure of reintegration programs to effectively provide alternative livelihoods to ex-combatants, some 75 percent of whom lacked regular work at the time of a World Bank survey in 2006.137 This situation changed dramatically, however: by 2009, less than 10 percent of male excombatants were unemployed or underemployed, while more ex-combatants (both male and female) had full-time work than civilians did.138 Research has suggested that this increase in employment rates is not related to reintegration efforts, with no difference in the employment rates of soldiers that received assistance and those that did not. Instead, it is due to the agricultural sector’s growth after the war, the improvements in security that enabled labor mobility and investment, and, to a lesser extent, the increased employment opportunities that came from the post-tsunami reconstruction efforts.139 Despite these positive trends, crime rates in Aceh increased dramatically after the 2005 MOU, with police claiming that the incidence of armed crimes in 2008 was twenty-two times higher than before 2005; this early spike was likely linked to the lack of economic opportunity for ex-combatants in the

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immediate aftermath of the peace agreement.140 Crimes included robberies, kidnappings, and extortion, as well increased illegal logging, and the economic dimension of these crimes is clear. While most crimes were committed by former GAM combatants, in some areas up to 90 percent, most perpetrators were not acting under the auspices of GAM’s post-MOU political body, the Aceh Transition Commission (KPA), but rather as criminal gangs.141 Nevertheless, this criminality had clear political dimensions, in that it was linked to the failure of reintegration programming to help ex-combatants find viable alternative income-generating opportunities. This suggests the importance of not viewing criminality as a process distinct from broader political processes in postwar societies.

Security Sector Reform The second main area of security building is SSR and, as seen in the Liberian case, this complements DDR efforts to demilitarize postwar countries by establishing credible and effective security institutions and processes, particularly focusing on the military and police force. As in the DDR processes discussed above, technical weaknesses also undermined the SSR process in Liberia, even though there were some obvious successes, for instance in vetting the new army forces. Delays in training the security forces, due to the longer-than-expected disarmament and vetting processes, may have compounded the impacts of inadequate reintegration support discussed above, particularly in terms of high criminality. However this causal link has not been as clearly established in the Liberian case as it has in other cases, such as Mozambique. Mozambique: SSR Delayed Mozambique’s 1990 General Peace Agreement (GPA) mandated the depoliticization and restructuring of the police force. The UN Mission in Mozambique (ONUMOZ) included a CIVPOL mission designed to oversee police neutrality during the peace process rather than offering technical or training assistance. However, while CIVPOL did have some impact on reducing abusive police behavior in the short term, it did not last. There is evidence of significant human rights abuses by police in the years after the GPA, which particularly targeted RENAMO supporters, although this has been in steady decline since the 1990s.142 The government did attempt to address this, expelling 102 abusive police officers from the force in 1995 and a further 137 in 1997, and increasing efforts to confiscate arms caches and respond to banditry from late 1996.143 However, efforts were not particularly effective until 1997, when a number of factors contributed to improve

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security sector reform. One factor was the appointment of a new home affairs minister, who took a stronger policy line with the security forces and established a new, unarmed, and specially trained police unit to combat banditry and criminality.144 Another was the 1995 UNDP project to assess Mozambique’s SSR needs and implement a comprehensive police reform project, which included providing training to all new and existing staff and reinforcing management capacity.145 This program was complemented by the Defence and Security Act passed in 1997, which outlined the restructure of the security sector and established guidelines for its reorganization within a democratic context, including by prohibiting security institutions from having or expressing political affiliations and committing them to a policy of peace.146 Consequently, SSR really only began in 1997—long after the DDR process, which started in 1992—one result of which was the increase in criminality in the short term.147 The process has been slow, with police posts not established in some RENAMO-dominated areas until 2001 for fear of creating antagonism.148 Further, despite these reforms, the security sector in Mozambique remained weak. Alexander Costy argues that, while the peace process in Mozambique is generally hailed as a success in that it ended fighting, successfully disarmed, demobilized, and reintegrated combatants into society, repatriated more than 1 million refugees, and established liberal democratic institutions, its gains are being undermined by increasing crime rates and chronic social unrest that threaten to destabilize the country and highlight the long-term destabilizing potential of delayed SSR.149 Security Sector Reform: The Institutionalization of Weakness? Beyond delayed SSR programming in Liberia, broader technical weaknesses and the poor vetting process for new police recruits undermined the legitimacy and effectiveness of the police forces, compounding a situation in which the security institutions are weak and human rights abuse by the security sector is rife. This is not uncommon: weak security sector institutions define many postwar security spheres. According to my analysis, this typically manifests in three ways, which I discuss below in turn; namely, human rights abuses by the security sector, criminal activities and corruption, and weak security sector capacity to carry out its duties. Human rights abuses by security sector personnel, and particularly police, is rife in the cases studied, despite various levels of success in SSR programming. In Liberia, police abuse, harassment, and intimidation of detainees and civilians remains a problem, and has commonly been used to extort money on the streets.150 This is perhaps unsurprising, given the poor police vetting process, funding constraints for the police reform program,

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and the weak capacity of the police force discussed earlier in this chapter. Police abuse has been more violent in Mozambique, where police have been responsible for deaths in detention and extrajudicial executions and have been implicated in the excessive use of force and firearms, which has led to numerous deaths.151 Police have also been responsible for arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, including the sexual abuse of women and deaths in custody.152 While some argue that this violence is not politically motivated,153 other cases suggest that it may in fact have political aspects. For example, in 2000, up to ninety-two opposition supporters died of asphyxiation while being held in police cells after a RENAMO–União Electoral (Electoral Union) demonstration, which raised questions about the supposed impartiality and depoliticization of the police.154 While the independence and impartiality of the security sector was central to the peace agreement, and although RENAMO ex-combatants were integrated into the army, they were not integrated into the police forces, and the Rapid Reaction Force in particular remained loyal to FRELIMO.155 As a result, RENAMO maintained armed groups that in 2006 were still patrolling areas of Sofala province to provide protection for RENAMO’s leadership and calling themselves the “Presidential Guard,” despite RENAMO being in opposition since the first postwar elections in 1994.156 Putting the problem of demobilization and the demilitarization of political competition aside, the prevalence of human rights abuses indicates significant technical weaknesses in the SSR program, particularly given its focus on training. Aceh’s police have similarly been implicated in human rights abuses, despite the fact that the SSR program was mainly limited to police reform, with international donors “hoping to inculcate the idea of community policing in a force that was marginalized by the military during the conflict” by changing public perceptions of the police as well as changing police behavior.157 To this end, the EU and other donor governments provided funding for a police reform program that trained around 8,000 police officers in community policing and human rights between 2007 and 2009.158 It also established fifteen community police forums with around 1,050 members of the public and conducted train-the-trainer programs for police officers.159 While this program was implemented successfully and has produced some positive results, there have been reports of police brutality and extortion, which revolved around the enforcement of the controversial sharia law enacted by the Acehnese government in 2009.160 The issue of human rights abuse is often compounded by the lack of effective systems to hold police officers accountable for such offences, which is indicative of a broader issue of weak institutional capacity in the security sector, which I return to below. In Mozambique, police impunity is evidenced by the fact that there is no independent external mechanism to

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consider complaints against the police, and few complaints made by civilians are submitted to the Public Prosecution Service by the police leadership.161 Apart from the inadequacy of investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by police, there are also reports of police engaging in obstructive and intimidating behavior toward victims’ families and a lack of transparency in the progress of investigations into allegations. 162 That said, some 1,000 police have been dismissed from the force for unethical conduct, including using firearms unduly, selling and renting guns, and homicide.163 Nevertheless, widespread impunity has also meant that police and other security sector staff engage in illegal activities for private gain, although it is critical to recognize that while this is common in postconflict states, it also affects many other states globally, both developed and developing. In Mozambique, there have been reports of police renting out their guns and uniforms for criminal purposes.164 Similarly in Aceh, the security sector is allegedly engaged in illegal activities in order to supplement low salaries, with army troops hiring themselves out, and both army and police officers involved in illegal logging and other criminal activities.165 The security sector’s institutional capacity is often low in postwar contexts, in large part because of the technical weaknesses in the SSR programming around funding and training. The capacity of Liberia’s security sector was limited by funding deficiencies and the delays and shortcomings in reforming and retraining the LNP, which contributed to the police’s inability to check rising crime rates. Human Rights Watch (HRW) data show that the situation in Liberia in terms of law and order deteriorated in 2009 with “an increasing incidence of violent crime, including armed robbery and rape; violent protests over layoffs and employment disputes by youths and former combatants; and deadly land disputes.”166 The LNP was unable to effectively address many of these issues, sparking UNMIL intervention in some cases. There was also a rise in vigilantism in Liberia, with the public taking responsibility for justice and retribution into their own hands. 167 That criminality rates remained high and the police have been largely unable to address them bodes poorly for the stability and security of Liberia in the coming years, although the government did request additional international assistance to build national capacity in the rule of law and security sectors in 2010.168 This case reinforces the importance of understanding criminality in postwar societies in terms of the broader political context of the war and peace process, rather than as the result of discrete economic interests. However, recent analyses suggest that the performance of the police improved somewhat from 2010—Monrovia’s crime levels dropped slightly, the elite Emergency Response Unit and Police Support Unit functioned well in responding to unrest, and police leadership showed an increased willingness to respond to misconduct in its ranks.169

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The limited institutional capacity of the security sector seen in Liberia is mirrored in all of the other cases that I examined. In Aceh, the police force is too weak to effectively police some parts of the province, in part because the force is too small, at 13,000 for a population of 4.4 million. 170 The police force has been unable to effectively exercise its authority in some GAM strongholds, especially when responding to crimes conducted by former GAM and KPA members.171 That said, and although the police force has not been able to stem rising crime rates (which were twenty-two times higher in 2008 than in 2005 when the MOU was signed), the police response to reported crimes was more effective by 2008 than predicted, suggesting improved institutional capacity.172 In Bougainville, the establishment of an autonomous Bougainville police force was a key BRA position during peace negotiations. The BPA provides for such a police force, with Papua New Guinea police deployable to Bougainville only at the request and with the consent of the ABG. By late 2008, the Bougainville Police Force (BPF) had only 170 regular police officers and 375 community auxiliary police. In constituting the BPF, officials aimed to make the police an integral part of a justice system based on customary practices of restorative justice, but the status of the police remains ambiguous and police are not perceived by communities to be important providers of law and order.173 Further, there are large areas of Bougainville that they cannot access, and the police force is seen as being at a critical stage where there is potential for improving its capacity, but there is also a danger that it will fall back on the bad habits of the Papua New Guinea force before the BPA. Australia has funded the recruitment and training of over 100 BPF officers and has provided ongoing training, housing, uniforms, vehicles, and equipment to the force to support the establishment of law and order in Bougainville in the future.174 However, more than ten years since the peace agreement, security sector capacity is weak, which may become a greater problem as rising tensions over land use and the reopening of mines pose a challenge to the region’s security and stability. Security in the Absence of Security Sector Reform Unsurprisingly, in cases where SSR was not undertaken during the postagreement peace consolidation process, security institutions are also not only endemically weak, but often complicit in undermining the rule of law, including through perpetrating human rights abuses. The weaknesses are actually very similar to those in countries that undertook SSR, although it is apparent that where SSR did happen the situations are somewhat better than in cases where there were no reform programs at all. That said, these challenges reflect similar problems faced by developing countries that are not recovering from civil wars, suggesting broader challenges to the develop-

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ment of state security capacity in weak states. Building state capacity is highly complex in peaceful contexts, and it is only made more complicated by the deep divides and traumas of postwar societies. Security sector reform was not part of the initial peace process in Cambodia, and the security sector is plagued by some fundamental challenges. A decade after the peace agreement was signed, the army was about twice as large as international analysts claimed it needed to be in order to ensure national security.175 This was primarily due to the difficulties inherent in extensive reforms and the possibility that downsizing armed forces would increase tensions between FUNCINPEC and the CPP, and potentially also lead to increased lawlessness among demobilized soldiers. While the army is arguably too strong, the police force is weak, characterized by a lack of adequate training as well as resource constraints, low pay rates, lack of equipment, and weak forensic and investigative capacity, which limit the police’s capacity to effectively tackle crime.176 Police brutality in Cambodia remains a problem, with security forces committing arbitrary executions, acting with impunity, and abusing detainees.177 According to the Small Arms Survey, the lack of competence, professionalism, and integrity of the security forces is in part a consequence of the influx of former combatants into the security forces and the fact that the “core values and norms that govern the behaviour of the police and armed forces continue to be based on informal relationships that often override formal rules.”178 This has meant that corruption is inherent in the security forces and positions are often exploited for personal social and economic gain. Widespread lawlessness in Cambodia, exacerbated by the breakdown of state authority, led to increased links between business and organized violence, with various strongmen establishing lucrative illegal business activities that the government could not control, including prostitution, narcotics trafficking, land grabbing, and illegal logging.179 Far from attempting to rectify this problem, security forces have been implicated in it as they sought alternative income sources in response to the government’s inability to pay adequate wages, mirroring the Acehnese police’s motivations for engaging in illegal activities.180 Had SSR been a part of the postwar security-building process, some of these issues might have been addressed. However, that similar security sector problems have been present even in states that undertook SSR suggests that they are difficult challenges that face developing states in general, rather than postwar states in particular. In a similar way, while there was some reform of the army in South Sudan, primarily through the professionalization of the SPLA into the region’s official army, there were no substantive efforts to reform the police force.181 Although the CPA refers to the need to deal with “structures and arrangements affecting all law enforcement organs,” SSR in South Sudan focused disproportionately on the transformation and professionalization of the army. 182

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Unlike in many other peace processes, the international community has not played a significant role in overseeing this military reform, particularly in terms of training and advising, in large part because of the resistance of the National Congress Party (NCP) in north Sudan to such involvement, and despite the UN’s heavy involvement in the DDR process.183 The South Sudan Police Service (SSPS) was largely neglected during the SSR process. According to the ICG, four years after the CPA was signed, the SSPS was “abysmal,” with significant numbers of “ghost” police on its payroll.184 Police officers were generally former SPLA members who were not incorporated into the post-CPA army because of their poor quality and capacity: as many as 90 percent were illiterate. While there were significant UNDP efforts to build police stations and prisons, many areas lacked basic facilities and resources, although more recently there have been moves to retire older illiterate officers, teach the rest of the 25,000-strong force, and encourage the recruitment of high school graduates.185 Further, the terrain in many areas and the lack of appropriate transport resources meant that police were often unable to respond to situations and, when they did respond, they were often outnumbered and outgunned, so they fled.186 Additionally, the lack of a vetting program for those absorbed into the SSPS after the CPA contributed to the high rates of human rights violations by police.187 While there were efforts to improve recruitment and training, they proved difficult because the police force was not an attractive career option to many young graduates, in part because of allegations of sexual abuse and torture of young recruits in the training centers.188 The North-South Institute also argues that, where donors have provided training support to the SSPS, it has focused more on donor interests, such as protection of very important people and special weapons and tactics, than on skills that would be most useful to the police, such as community mediation and traffic-directing skills.189 A police reform plan was adopted by South Sudan in late 2011, however, little progress has been made in implementing it. The low capacity and quality of the police force will remain a stumbling block to the consolidation of security in South Sudan, which is now struggling with renewed civil war and increasing communal violence. *** This discussion of the technical weaknesses of security building in postwar contexts shows that there are some common sets of technical weaknesses across the range of peace processes studied, which coalesce around flaws in the ways that DDR and SSR are implemented and the challenges they face, the late deployment of international assistance, funding deficiencies, and the establishment of weak security sector institutions. Having established the ubiquity of these challenges across a range of diverse security-building processes, it becomes clear that these technical weaknesses are linked to a

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second major theme in why these processes have often not consolidated security; namely, the depoliticization of security building in postwar peace processes. Separating technical processes of security building, such as disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating soldiers, from the political and social context in which they are implemented meant that security-building processes did not recognize or respond to the ongoing incentives for violence or the sources of instability and insecurity in postwar societies. For instance, the failure of DDR programs in Liberia and Mozambique to recognize the effect of regional conflicts on ex-combatants’ commitment to DDR significantly undermined the capacity of those programs to achieve their demilitarization goals. The entrenched nature of violent political cultures in the aftermath of civil war—for instance, in Liberia, Bougainville, and Mozambique—also undermined the effectiveness of DDR and SSR. Some cases highlighted the political and economic dimensions of criminality, which were deeply linked to the failure of DDR programs to ensure viable alternative income–generating opportunities to ex-combatants as well as the failure to properly train and equip security forces so that they did not seek income through criminal channels. I now draw these issues out in greater detail, examining the ways in which security is depoliticized in civil war peace processes and what the implications for security building, and, by extension, peace building are.

The Depoliticization of Security In this chapter, I have suggested that Liberia’s security-building process was heavily focused on reconstituting the institutions of the security sector and have approached DDR and SSR processes in a largely technocratic manner. These processes focused on specific tasks, such as disarming rebels and providing reintegration training, without being responsive to the broader postwar context, which impacted the effectiveness of those discrete programs—for instance, the incentives for the movement of weapons and fighters across borders and the postwar economy that rendered redundant many of the new skills demobilized soldiers acquired through reintegration programs. Although some of these weaknesses were related to the technical shortcomings of DDR and SSR processes discussed earlier, many point to a deeper problem with the security building that was pursued in Liberia. The technocratic and institutionally focused approach effectively separated security building from the broader dimensions of ongoing insecurity, particularly the underlying social and economic circumstances that shape individuals’ choices about the use of violence. In other words, the approach depoliticized security in postwar Liberia by assuming that insecurity could be made accountable to institutional structures

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while neglecting to consider the social, political, and economic drivers of ongoing insecurity that do not vanish with the demobilization of armies and the reconstitution of security sector institutions. By seeing the means and ends of security building as primarily technical, the political dimensions of violence and insecurity and the conflicting interests in the postwar society were ignored by DDR and SSR processes. Two issues raised in the earlier analyses of security-building processes are illustrative as symptoms of the separation of technical and political processes. First, the broader dynamics of the conflict were often overlooked during DDR. Second, there was commonly a misunderstanding of, or insensitivity to, the everyday security concerns of the postwar society and what the incentives for ongoing violence in the society actually were. These issues were seen, to varying degrees, in the range of security-building processes that I examined. Negotiated settlements produce complex incentive structures for excombatants. DDR and to some extent SSR attempt to incentivize participation in the peace process by providing new livelihood opportunities. However, the broader postconflict context creates a range of other pressures, which may deter participation in the peace process. For instance, the lack of income-generating opportunities and easy access to weapons, along with the normalization of violence and the authority that ex-combatants are used to commanding, may contribute to a microeconomy of conflict that operates at the individual level against the interests of peace building. These factors received inadequate attention in the Liberian security-building processes discussed above, and numerous other cases suggest that it is a common problem during the implementation of peace agreements. Incentives for Ongoing Conflict: Regional Opportunities and Strategic Dynamics A serious shortcoming of the Liberian security-building process identified earlier was that the regional dimensions of the conflict, and the opportunities they afforded ex-combatants, were overlooked in the peace process. The failure of the DDR programs to recognize and respond to the regional nature of the security challenge meant that fighters and weapons were redeployed after the war to armed struggles in Côte d’Ivoire. This contributed to regional instability and put Liberia in a volatile position, particularly given that fighters bought back weapons and ammunition when they returned to Liberia, which contributed to rising rates of armed crime and potentially also the violence around the 2011 presidential elections.190 Peace processes are complex, crowded, and often under-resourced undertakings, and attention tends to focus, justifiably, on the most immediately important tasks such as demilitarization processes, which as I have shown in this chapter

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tend to be quite technocratic in that they privilege technical “fixes” and mechanisms in programming over a deeper engagement with questions of how a society can move away from violent interaction and toward peace. The experience in Liberia suggests that, while the technical aspects of security building are vital, it is equally important to be responsive to broader regional or international processes that provide alternative incentives for conflict and shape ex-combatants’ choices. However, many peace processes do not effectively respond to the broader dimensions conflict. As a result, the security building being undertaken appears, at times, to be divorced from the social and political conflict context. In Mozambique, for instance, many combatants hid their weapons rather than surrender them during the DDR process and, while ONUMOZ seized numerous weapons caches after the 1994 elections, accounts suggest that these were often the older weapons and not the many caches that held newer weapons.191 There was also the problem of weapons in UN custody disappearing.192 As a result of the weaknesses in ONUMOZ’s disarmament operation, Mozambique remained flush with weapons, and many small arms were trafficked into South Africa, with serious consequences for South African insecurity and criminality rates. A 1994 edition of South African Cosmopolitan carried a rare article detailing the experiences of one former RENAMO combatant who had been involved in this trafficking. This involved digging up hidden caches, trafficking them to South Africa through Red Cross camps and barren stretches of Kruger National Park, bribing long-haul truckers to carry them to warehouses in Johannesburg’s flatlands, and then welding the weapons into the doorframes, roofs, and petrol tanks of vehicles that took them into the townships where they were sold to anyone who could pay.193 The failure of the Mozambican security-building process to recognize and respond to the opportunities that these regional dimensions offered ex-combatants compounded the weaknesses of the demilitarization process, which left many ex-combatants with insufficient legitimate incomegenerating opportunities, and, in so doing, contributed to increased regional instability. By focusing primarily on the technical aspects of security building, such as weapons confiscation, rather than on addressing the broader web of factors that provided incentives for ongoing insecurity, the Mozambican security-building process overlooked the political nature of security in both Mozambique and the region. In Liberia and Mozambique, the incentives for ongoing violence that were not addressed by the security-building processes stemmed from the economic opportunities provided by the regional conflict context and undermined the effectiveness of DDR efforts to demilitarize the postwar countries and reintegrate ex-combatants into civilian life. In contrast, it was the broader strategic dynamics of the Sudanese conflict that played a major role in undermining security-building processes, and these were largely over-

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looked in the post-CPA peace-building process. One of the central principles on which the 2005 CPA was based was the decentralization and democratization of government functions and power in Sudan, and as such the agreement had implications for the numerous other conflicts between regions and the central northern government—for instance, in Darfur, Kordofan, on the Eastern Front, and in the far North. Many in Sudan expected that the settlement of the North-South conflict would lead to negotiations and settlements of the other conflicts. This was largely because of SPLA leader John Garang’s commitment to the ideal of a united secular and democratic “New Sudan,” rather than an independent South.194 However, this did not happen. After the sudden death of Garang in a helicopter crash three weeks after his inauguration as first vice president in the Government of National Unity (GNU), the South leaned away from the unity option, culminating in the 2011 referendum that overwhelmingly supported the creation of an independent South Sudan. While this shift was happening in the South, the international community’s attention shifted sharply to the escalating conflict in Darfur, which meant it was relatively disengaged from the CPA implementation process. This disengagement allowed the SPLM to build its military capacity and forge alliances with antigovernment movements in the other volatile regions in Sudan, which has complicated the broader conflict in Sudan, and thereby also the peace-building context in the South.195 Another issue that contributed to the fragile security situation in South Sudan and was not addressed in the security-building process is the presence of the LRA in the region, which dates back to the early 1990s. What exactly caused the LRA’s movement into the Eastern Region of South Sudan is not clear, but Ugandan military pressure and the opportunity to get funding from the North to run a proxy war against the SPLM (which in turn funded the LRA’s war against Ugandan forces) were contributing factors.196 Further, the Ugandan military already had close links with the SPLA, providing an additional motivation for the LRA to be co-opted into the North’s war against the SPLA, complicating the already muddied military environment of Sudan during the war in the 1990s.197 The LRA had official residences in northern-controlled Juba for a time, and there are allegations that the North “borrowed” LRA soldiers and redeployed them to support the Janjaweed militias in Darfur in the late 1990s.198 Despite the links between the LRA and Khartoum dissolving sometime in the late 1990s, the group has remained a significant military presence in the region, which has challenged the post-CPA security-building efforts. In 2006, the SPLA hosted talks in Juba between Uganda and the LRA, but they received little international support and ultimately failed.199 Since then, the LRA has maintained a military presence in parts of South Sudan, and has also moved into the Central African Republic. In 2009, the LRA’s activities resulted in the

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abduction of many children, caused the displacement of some 68,000 South Sudanese, and brought about an influx of around 18,000 refugees from their military activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic.200 This has affected both the security situation in South Sudan and the broader social context and has contributed to the high levels of insecurity in the state since the CPA. The strategic dynamics of the ongoing insecurity in the South have not been addressed by the security-building process and, as a result, the effectiveness of that process has been undermined and regional instability has increased. As discussed earlier, the DDR process in South Sudan focused largely on disarming civilians rather than armed groups, and no SSR process was pursued until recently. The security-building process did not address the ongoing communal conflicts in parts of the state,201 nor the broader strategic context shaped by the LRA and the conflicts in other parts of North Sudan. Although the international community, through the UN, deployed a peacekeeping force to South Sudan and supported the DDR process, little attention has been given to addressing the ongoing conflict dynamics in the South. Instead, most international support has gone to the establishment of state institutions in the newly independent country as well as dealing with the ongoing conflict between the North and South over the border and oil rights. The lack of attention given to the broader conflict dynamics within South Sudan—many of which were reignited after an initial period of southern unity successfully secured independence from the North—undermined the establishment of security in the aftermath of the CPA and left South Sudan in a precarious security position. Misperceptions and Misconceptions In addition to overlooking the broader dynamics that work against the interests of peace, the depoliticization of security is illustrated in the way that the everyday security concerns of postconflict states are often misunderstood in peace processes and individual-level incentives for ongoing violence and insecurity are not addressed. Political, economic, social, and cultural pressures shape everyday individual choices across all societies. Postconflict societies are the site of particularly entrenched incentives for violence and ongoing conflict but, rather than responding to these incentives, technical security-building mechanisms are underpinned by the assumption that ex-combatants and individuals in postconflict societies will make rational choices based on the interests of peace. In effect, technically focused security-building processes are unable to see or respond to the pressures that undermine security in postwar states, whether they be political, social, economic, or otherwise.

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There are two issues worth noting here. The first is the way economic incentives for ongoing violence, which manifest in different ways and interact with peace consolidation differently but are present in all postconflict environments, interact with social and political factors to shape individual choices about participation in acts of violence and criminality. Second, it is important to consider the place that violence comes to occupy in the political culture and social order of societies that have experienced protracted civil wars, and the effect this has on the war-to-peace transition. The international community of states and organizations involved in the Liberian peace process fundamentally misunderstood the economic incentives for ongoing violence in postwar Liberia. This is illustrated by the way that the security-building processes did not adequately address the economic dimension of violence or support the creation of viable alternative economic opportunities. This is surprising given the growing body of academic work on the economic dimensions of conflict onset and continuation.202 The weaknesses of the DDR programming in Liberia contributed to entrenching ongoing violence and general insecurity in the country, in that they did not adequately support ex-combatants to develop viable and legitimate modes of income generation, for instance, through providing agricultural or mining training. Instead, as discussed earlier, retraining focused largely on vocational training or further education, and the postwar economy was too weak to meet the demand for jobs this created, leaving many without a legitimate income. Consequently, criminality rates rose, a phenomenon facilitated by the fact that rebel command structures remained intact despite DDR processes, particularly in Monrovia. The rise in lawlessness was compounded by the weak security institutions, which were unable to check it. Further, security institutions were implicated in some of this criminality, including through bribery, extortion, and corruption.203 While the postwar violence in Liberia was not organized along the same lines of the civil war, it has had communal and political dimensions. In mid-2008, the ICG interviewed a security specialist with access to intelligence on the subject, who suggested that “there were some signs the rash of robberies might be linked to a coordinated attempt to destabilise the government and prompt violent mass reactions. There are some indications that truckloads of young men have been transported between Kakata and central Monrovia to become involved in the crime spree.”204 This suggests that the rise in criminality might indicate a return to politically motivated organized violence that could threaten a return to civil war if not effectively addressed. A related issue is that mob violence prompted by lack of confidence in the police and judicial system took on increasingly political connotations in the lead-up to the 2011 elections. 205 Despite these problems, the elections and the presidential runoff poll passed with only minimal violence, although there were fears during the controversial 2011 presidential

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elections that the opposition forces might, and could, mobilize disenfranchised ex-combatants to violently resist President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s continued leadership.206 This highlights the need to see security building as being rooted in the broader political, social, and economic context of peace building and to address the diverse set of incentives for violence and insecurity, rather than seeing it as a primarily technical endeavor that disarms and demobilizes combatants and reestablishes state security institutions. Liberia’s high criminality rates and the state’s inability to suppress them has the potential to destabilize the fragile peace, even though the extent to which the violence is organized remains unclear. The securitybuilding process in Liberia focused largely on security institutions and frameworks, without considering the broader sources and dynamics of insecurity in the postwar society, which were not diminished by programs that demobilized rebel armies and established a new army and police force. By not adequately responding to the political, social, and economic contexts in which DDR and SSR were being implemented, the security-building process essentially depoliticized security and contributed to the entrenchment of insecurity in the postwar society. A similar trend can be seen in other postwar security-building processes that did not effectively satisfy the reintegration needs of ex-combatants and, as discussed earlier, compounded a situation of limited formal economic opportunities, contributing to increased criminality rates. In South Sudan, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Aceh, the mistargeting of reintegration support and training in the context of weak economies meant that many ex-combatants were unable to establish alternative livelihood opportunities, which contributed to rising criminality rates. The participation of security sector personnel in criminality and the mistreatment of civilians suggest that the incentives to ensure the commitment of soldiers and police to peace were inadequate. The technocratic focus of peace processes likely put those processes on a particular path, from which those involved in implementing DDR and SSR were unable to either see or respond to the broader political and social dynamics that created incentives for individuals to perpetuate violence and insecurity. The treatment of security building as a process separate from other aspects of peace building in the cases analyzed in this chapter not only meant that those processes were inherently flawed, but also that they themselves contributed to insecurity. Bougainville: A rare outlier. In contrast, the peace process in Bougainville more effectively linked the technical, political, and social aspects of security building, in part because of the way the progress of the DDR process was tied to political progress. This had positive impacts on peace building, despite the technical shortcomings of some aspects of the process discussed earlier. In Bougainville, the reintegration process funded by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) provided business and

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training opportunities, which successfully helped ex-combatants to develop viable alternative income sources, although there was significant fraud in the process and most of the businesses established were unable to sustain themselves in the long term. Despite this, many ex-combatants were absorbed into the police and auxiliary police forces, and many more were employed through AusAID’s infrastructure rebuilding projects.207 However, there were reports that younger ex-combatants, who remained poor, felt excluded from the business and political success of their former leaders, which has contributed to the phenomenon of rising criminality and increasing violence against women and children, domestic violence, incest, drug and alcohol abuse, and violent crime.208 Some analysts argue that that pressure stemming from the weak formal economy and the use of land for mining, tourism, plantations, and other activities could reignite conflicts over land and resources in the future. They see the “disgruntled young men” who, due to the war and their participation in it, missed out on receiving either a formal or a customary education and have few prospects in the formal economy, no societal status, and no prestige, as a potential source of violence and criminality in the future.209 However, Bougainvillean leaders have supported the establishment of the rule of law not through the exertion of force, but by fostering positive mutual accommodation of state, customary, and civil society institutions to promote law and order, which brought a social dimension into the securitybuilding process unseen in the other cases I studied.210 This, along with the other strengths of the security-building process, has likely contributed to the fact that Bougainville has not suffered the same widespread lawlessness and insecurity experienced in Liberia, Mozambique, Aceh, and other postwar countries. Other factors, including the small size of the island, likely also contributed to the successes of security building in Bougainville, in contrast with the much larger African postwar states. A postwar culture of violence? The Bougainville case raises another issue that has largely escaped attention in security-building processes and highlights the ways in which the technocratic nature of peace processes leads to the delinking of security and politics; namely, the particular challenges posed by societies in which violence has become a norm or a central element of traditional political culture. In Bougainville, the “gun-culture” that took hold during the war in the “once peace-loving” society has presented significant challenges to the sustainability of peace on the island. 211 However, while this has been somewhat reduced by the successes of the demilitarization process,212 the normalization of violence that occurs in protracted conflict situations has long-lasting societal and political effects. For instance, rates of violence against women and domestic violence rise significantly in the aftermath of most civil wars—effectively, violence was

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pushed off the streets and into the home, demonstrating how violence, and particularly sexual violence, is normalized in many postconflict societies.213 For example, in Bougainville, there are accounts of violence against women rising in the aftermath of the conflict because of a complex interaction of factors that a report by the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) found to hinge on the widespread alcoholism among men. According to that report, “Women explain that the drinking is directly linked to trauma, the lack of education, and the continuing bonds between ex-combatants who still only really take orders from their factional leaders. Women repeatedly appealed for help to combat violence against women caused by the brewing and drinking of ‘jungle juice,’ which is often distilled and sold by women to sustain livelihoods.”214 There are remarkably similar accounts of violence against women in Mozambique, Uganda, Algeria, and Guatemala.215 There is also evidence that more generalized violence against women, especially gang rape, increases in the aftermath of civil war and is directly linked to the fact that DDR processes often exclude women and girls involved in conflict, as well as the failure of those processes to reintegrate male ex-combatants into the legitimate postwar economy and the absence of psychological support to those demobilized male soldiers who are often unemployed and socialized to violence.216 Michelle Barron argues that the breakdown of traditional social norms and sanction regimes also means that acts of sexual violence that previously would have been punished no longer provoke strong social reactions.217 The high incidence of such violence in newly postconflict societies suggests something quite profound about the difficulty in changing the role that violence plays in social relations and the impact that civil war has in normalizing violence. Protracted civil wars not only leave a weak state infrastructure, but also cause the disintegration of the social fabric, destroy traditional values and authority systems, and leave a legacy of extreme violence.218 In this context, young people are being raised unaccustomed to the demands of living in peace. It is this characteristic of the postwar society that is unaddressed in the security-building processes discussed earlier in this chapter. The high levels of postwar violence and criminality that persisted in the cases discussed, despite attempts to build security, suggest that changing the role that violence comes to play in the way a conflict-affected society is organized and run requires more than just technical interventions such as DDR and SSR. It requires dynamic responses to the various conditions and pressures that incentivize violence, making it a more attractive option for individuals than peaceful social interaction. As the cases studied suggest, responses must go beyond attempting to confiscate weapons, demobilize militias, and rebuild security institutions to address the reasons

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why individuals make the choices that undermine the establishment of security and the consolidation of peace. Security-building processes in the cases I examined attempted to foster precisely this changed relationship to violence in postwar societies, but repeatedly failed to accomplish it because of their technocratic focus, which precluded attention to the broader social, political, and economic dynamics of insecurity. South Sudan’s experience highlights some further complexities around the political dimensions of postwar security. The civil war not only entrenched the absence of formal law and order in the region (although it must be recognized that law and order does not really exist in much of North Sudan either), but also destroyed traditional forces and sources of law and order, such as paramount chiefs. The SPLA assumed authority over local administrative institutions in areas under its control, removing the power of traditional authorities and replacing it with young gun-toting men, thereby destroying traditional methods of dealing with interpersonal or intergroup conflict, which are not easily rebuilt. 219 Complicating this reality is the fact that bearing arms is associated with economic, social, and political prestige in many southern communities, which along with a long history of violent intertribal conflict adds another dimension to the securitybuilding process.220 That violence is a part of traditional political culture and a signifier of status is also a challenge in the peace processes in Mindanao and Yemen, as discussed in Chapter 2. In cases like these, security-building processes face a more complex challenge as violence is not just normalized, but a central element of traditional political culture. A vision of security that acknowledges the traditional and probably inevitable place of violence in the way a postconflict society is organized and functions is necessary to avoid unrealistic expectations of what can and should be achieved in terms of demilitarization in that context. As discussed earlier, rather than focusing on complete demilitarization, questions might more usefully be asked about how the use of violence can be returned to traditional accountability structures and frameworks. Ongoing Violence and Insecurity In this chapter, I have suggested that the technical weaknesses of DDR and SSR processes and the depoliticization of security building contribute to violence and insecurity being entrenched in many postwar contexts, thereby undermining the peace process. Such violence may have communal dimensions that reflect some of the wartime divisions, as in Liberia where relatively minor issues have aggravated intercommunal tensions and rapidly escalated into widespread violence.221 Similarly, in South Sudan interclan and intertribal violence was widespread in the aftermath of the peace agreement. This was at least in part a continuation of the intergroup conflict that

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southern communities had descended into during the 1990s, which was spurred on by the death of Garang, a unifying leader, in 2005, as well as the South’s secession in 2011, after which there was less impetus to present a unified South in opposition to North Sudan.222 UN sources report that in 2009 intergroup violence escalated to “levels rarely seen even during the war,” estimating the number of fatalities that year at more than 1,000 (significantly exceeding the death toll in Darfur), with more than 350,000 people displaced.223 The worst of this occurred in the vast and impassable state of Jonglei, where the violence that has regularly affected pastoral communities began to take on a “new and dangerously politicised character”224 in the lead-up to the national elections and the South’s referendum vote. The high levels of violence have continued in the aftermath of independence, particularly in Jonglei and Unity states, culminating in December 2013 in the renewal of civil war, the first year of which resulted in an estimated 50,000 dead and 2 million displaced.225 In some cases, the violence stems from lawlessness and criminality; for instance, as discussed in detail earlier in relation to Liberia, Mozambique, Aceh, South Sudan, and Cambodia. Although such criminality may not always reflect wartime divisions or function as a continuation of the conflict by other means, the cases analyzed suggest that it often does have political dimensions and may reflect other aspects of the conflict, such as the continuing existence of former rebel organizational networks, the regional context, or the economic disenfranchisement of particular groups. It may also suggest the opening of new cleavages. For instance, the criminality in Liberia, Aceh, and Mozambique was largely committed by former rebels and, while this primarily suggests failures in the DDR programming and weak law and order systems, it may also indicate the potential for the regrouping and rearming of rebels in response to future events. For instance, RENAMO rebel structures have remained intact in the years since the war, partly because of the group’s transition into a political party and its maintenance of militias to protect its leaders but partly also because of criminal networks that developed among former combatants during DDR. There were reports in 2000 that ex-RENAMO combatants had regrouped and mounted offensives against police and government posts in the north and center of the country, suggesting the potential for a return to political violence, which was compounded by statements by the RENAMO leader saying that he was prepared to regroup and rearm demobilized RENAMO troops to address what he claimed was the “harassment” of RENAMO supporters in Mozambique’s north and center.226 In some cases, ongoing violence reflected political conflict more clearly, manifesting through electoral violence or other forms of political violence. In Liberia, while there was an almost complete absence of violence in the lead-up to the 2005 elections,227 there were violent uprisings in December

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2003, October 2004, and December 2005, due to widespread anger among former combatants and former members of the armed forces about the nonpayment of demobilization allowances and, in some cases, pensions.228 In Aceh, there was also low-level violence in the lead-up to the first legislative elections in April 2009 and, while it did not escalate, it did indicate deep distrust between GAM and the TNI, based on the perceptions carried over from the civil war and exacerbated in the time after the MOU.229 In Cambodia, the political dimensions of postwar insecurity are particularly clear, with Hun Sen manipulating security and governance structures to ensure his consolidation of power, which culminated in the 1997 coup that effectively destroyed the power of opposition parties to challenge his authority. I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 4. However, despite the insecurity and political violence that has occurred since then, there has been a general understanding in the international community that the probability of government collapse or large-scale violence resuming in Cambodia is very low, even though rising economic inequalities, tensions within the armed forces, reform of the security sector, and local power structures could potentially reignite small-scale violence.230 Admittedly, this is partly due to the collapse of the Khmer Rouge and the total monopolization of state structures by Hun Sen, but there is little chance of his opponents taking up an armed struggle. This leads us to a particularly interesting trend in postwar security-building processes, which is that, despite the endemic weaknesses leading to situations of ongoing violence and insecurity, many of these same postwar states are considered unlikely to collapse into armed conflict in the foreseeable future. In Liberia, despite the significant shortcomings of the security-building process, ongoing criminality, ethnic and communal tensions, and disputes over resources and land, the Secretary-General’s August 2011 report concluded that the security situation in Liberia was generally stable, albeit fragile.231 With the relatively peaceful passing of the October 2011 presidential elections, there is little sense in the international community that Liberia is at risk of renewed civil war in the near future. Similarly, in Mozambique and Aceh, even though there were serious weaknesses in the security-building process and evidence that former combatants may be regrouping and rearming,232 the peace processes on the whole seem relatively successful in that there is little concern about renewed civil war in the foreseeable future. In Aceh, this may be because the disincentives for violence are quite strong—including GAM’s weakened military capacity and the destruction caused by the 2004 tsunami.233 And in Mozambique, it may be because the process was generally successful in implementing governance reforms in the aftermath of the civil war, thereby creating an alternative forum for the resolution of conflict. This will be explored in more detail in the following chapter.

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Overall, this analysis suggests that despite the significant weaknesses in the postwar security-building processes examined, which revolve around technical shortcomings and the depoliticization of security, peace processes may still produce what are considered somewhat stable postwar societies. South Sudan is the obvious exception in the set of cases studied here. Further, in those cases that the international community does declare to be stable, there may be institutional or political motivations for doing so, such as the need to claim success to justify the withdrawal of military, technical, or other support. For instance, when the EU left Aceh in December 2006, the EU high representative for the Common Foreign Security Policy (CFSP), Javier Solana, declared that the peace process had been successful and that peace was “firmly established in the Indonesian province of Aceh.”234 While there had been some clear successes by that stage, the ongoing challenges in terms of weak security sector institutions and problems with the reintegration of ex-combatants suggest that this declaration of success might not be justified. Consequently, declarations of success and stability should not be taken to necessarily reflect the reality of the situation, given the varying motivations and pressures for such declarations, which will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, what is striking in all of the cases studied (except South Sudan) is that, despite significant shortcomings in security-building processes, these societies have not relapsed into renewed civil war, even though violence and insecurity remain pervasive.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have demonstrated that security-building processes in the post–Cold War period have suffered a set of weaknesses that are interlinked, mutually reinforcing, and common across a range of countries. Technical weaknesses in the way that DDR and SSR were implemented limited the effectiveness of those security-building approaches. However, the ability of DDR and SSR to address security needs and promote peace building was undermined more fundamentally by their largely technocratic focus, which privileged technical, measurable, and discrete activities over those that were more flexible and responsive to local dynamics and changing contexts. This meant that certain tasks, such as the disarmament and demobilization of rebel forces or the reconstitution of army and police forces, were undertaken without adequate attention being paid to the political, social, and economic contexts in which they occurred and which defined the incentives and disincentives for individuals and communities to participate in the peace process. The commonality of this theme across the peace processes examined was striking, as was the way security-building processes, as a result, inadvertently contributed to the entrenchment of gen-

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eralized insecurity in many postwar states. Even though the levels of insecurity were not considered an immediate threat to peace in most cases studied, my analysis demonstrates that one of the causes of insecurity was the security-building mechanisms themselves. By virtue of their technical focus on the constituent elements of DDR and SSR, they not only failed to consider the underlying social and economic circumstances of individuals, but often aggravated those conditions that incentivized violence, including economic, social, and political disenfranchisement. The interaction between security-building processes and other peace consolidation efforts in postwar societies is probably the reason why states like those examined here are not considered to be at risk of renewed civil war despite pervasive insecurity. These other processes are discussed in coming chapters. Given that the anatomy of weakness is so similar across a variety of security-building processes, and that it appears to stem from a fundamentally technocratic approach to DDR and SSR, it is surprising that this approach is so dominant. As shown in Chapter 2, many frameworks that define the goals of peace processes emphasize DDR and SSR and highlight the specific technocratic tasks that should be undertaken. My analysis has shown that the endemic weaknesses of security-building processes undermine the consolidation of peace in post–civil war societies and indicate deep faults within newly established security infrastructure and systems. I have suggested that security is often depoliticized in DDR and SSR processes, with technical programs implemented in ways that are not responsive to the incentives for ongoing violence in the postwar society or the political, economic, and social drivers of insecurity. In essence, where security-building processes are undertaken without due regard for their political dimensions—in terms of who gets what, when, and how—they build insecurity and violence into the foundations of postwar societies.

Notes 1. Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95. 2. Charles Abiodun Alao, “Commentary on the Accords,” in The Liberian Peace Process 1990–1996, ed. Jeremy Armon and Andy Carl (London: Conciliation Resources, 1996), 34; Max Ahmadu Sesay, “Bringing Peace to Liberia,” in The Liberian Peace Process 1990–1996, ed. Jeremy Armon and Andy Carl (London: Conciliation Resources, 1996), 9–26. 3. “Accra Peace Agreement,” August 18, 2003, Parts 3, 4. The International Contact Group on Liberia was comprised of members from the UN, ECOWAS, AU, World Bank, United States, Ghana, Nigeria, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. 4. Wolf-Christian Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” International Peacekeeping 12, no. 2 (2005): 253–254.

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5. Gerry Cleaver and Simon Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” in Ending Africa’s Wars: Progressing to Peace, ed. Oliver Furley and Roy May (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 189. 6. Ibid., 190; Desiree Nilsson and Soederberg Kovacs, “Breaking the Cycle of Violence? Promises and Pitfalls of the Liberian Peace Process,” Civil Wars 7, no. 4 (2005): 405. 7. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 190. 8. Ibid., 190–191. 9. Nilsson and Kovacs, “Breaking the Cycle of Violence?” 405; Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” 258. 10. International Crisis Group, Liberia and Sierra Leone: Rebuilding Failed States (Dakar: International Crisis Group, 2004), 10. 11. Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” 256. 12. Ibid., 256–257. 13. See Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 190; Nilsson and Kovacs, “Breaking the Cycle of Violence?” 405. 14. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? (Dakar: International Crisis Group, August 2011), 15; African Elections Project, “Liberia 2011 Elections Violence Early Warning and Response,” August 30, 2011, www.africanelections.org/liberia/blogs/?post=875; “Liberia: Upcoming Elections Threaten Security,” Global Post, accessed March 6, 2013, www.globalpost.com /dispatch/news/regions/africa/110916/liberia-upcoming-elections-threaten-security. 15. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? 14–15. 16. Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” 259. 17. Ibid., 258. 18. Ibid. 19. Richelieu Wollor, national officer, DDRR program, UN Mission in Liberia, interviewed by the author, Bologna, July 4, 2010. 20. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 190–201. 21. Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” 258. 22. International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform (New York: International Crisis Group, January 2009), 6. 23. “‘Up to 15,000 Child Soldiers in Liberia,’ UN Says,” United Nations Integrated Regional Information Networks, September 24, 2003, www.irinnews.org. For a detailed discussion of the use of child soldiers in the Liberian civil war, see Human Rights Watch, How to Fight, How to Kill: Child Soldiers in Liberia (New York: Human Rights Watch, February 2004). 24. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 191. 25. Human Rights Watch, How to Fight, How to Kill. 26. Ibid., 32–33. 27. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 192. 28. See Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” 158; Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 192. 29. Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” 260. 30. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? 15. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid.

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33. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 192. 34. “Accra Peace Agreement,” Part 4; See also Adekeye Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 235. 35. “Accra Peace Agreement,” Part 4. 36. An ICG report recounts a story from in Monrovia that in 2005 US Ambassador John Blaney, at lunch with Transitional Government Chairman Gyude Bryant, came up with the number of soldiers Liberia could afford to pay regularly by making a quick calculation on a napkin of the government’s probable revenues and budget and the cost of army salaries. He thus decided 2,000 was the cap on what it would be responsible for the US to train. (The ICG does note that this story is “possibly apocryphal.”) International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform, 5. 37. Ibid., 10. 38. Ibid., 9. 39. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “Armed Forces Day Message Delivered by Her Excellency Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President, Republic of Liberia and Commanderin-Chief of the Armed Forces of Liberia During the 56th Armed Forces Day Celebration,” Barclay Training Center, Monrovia, November 2, 2013, www.emansion.gov.lr /doc/Presidents_Armed_Forces_Day_Message.pdf; Jennifer Lazuta, “Liberian Takes Charge of Liberia’s Army,” VOA News.com, February 11, 2014, www.voanews.com /content/liberian-army-takes-charge-of-liberia-army/1849307.html. 40. International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform, 12. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 11. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 14. 45. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, UN Doc. S/2010/429 (New York: UN Security Council, August 11, 2010), 6, www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol =S/2010/429. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid.; UN Secretary-General, Twenty-third Progress Report of the SecretaryGeneral on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, UN Doc. S/2011/497 (New York: UN Security Council, August 2011), 7–8, www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp ?symbol=S/2011/497. 48. Mark Malan, Security Sector Reform in Liberia: Mixed Results from Humble Beginnings (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2008), 43. 49. Ibid. 50. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 193. 51. International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform, ii, 17. 52. Ibid., 18. 53. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, 7. 54. Ibid., 6. 55. International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform, ii.

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56. Even though the Liberian process was called DDRR, I henceforth refer to it as the DDR process to improve ease of expression in comparing it to similar processes elsewhere, which across the board are called DDR. 57. UN Secretary General, Twenty-third Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, 2–3. 58. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 189. 59. “Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict,” October 23, 1991, par. 11, Annexes I, II, http://peacemaker.un.org/cambodia parisagreement91. 60. Paris, At War’s End, 83. 61. Ibid., 86; Frederick Z. Brown, “Cambodia in 1992: Peace at Peril,” Asian Survey 33, no. 1 (1993): 86. 62. Brown, “Cambodia in 1992,” 86. 63. See United Nations, Second Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, UN Doc. S/24578 (New York: UN Security Council, September 21, 1992); Paris, At War’s End, 84. 64. Jainwei Wang, Managing Arms in Peace Processes: Cambodia, Report No. UNIDIR/96/17 (New York: UN Institute for Disarmament Research, 1996), 82–87. 65. Ibid., 85–87. 66. See James A. Schear, “Riding the Tiger: The United Nations and Cambodia’s Struggle for Peace,” in UN Peacekeeping, American Politics and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s, ed. William J. Durch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 152– 153; Paris, At War’s End, 83 fn. 7; Steven R. Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conflict After the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 166–168. 67. International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend (Phnom Penh: International Crisis Group, August 2000), 21. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 21–22. 70. Working Group for Weapons Reduction, The 2001 Cambodian Demobilization Program: Observations and Recommendations (Phnom Penh: Working Group for Weapons Reduction, March 2002), 8–10. 71. “The Comprehensive Peace Agreement Between The Government of The Republic of The Sudan and The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Sudan People’s Liberation Army,” January 9, 2005, chap. VI, art. 3(e), http://peacemaker.un .org/node/1369. 72. Terry O’Brien, Shots in the Dark: The 2008 South Sudan Civilian Disarmament Campaign (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2009), 10. 73. Ibid. 74. See Alfred Lokuji, Overview of the Challenges to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (Waterloo, ON: Project Ploughshares and Africa Peace Forum, 2006), 28; International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts: Countering Insecurity in South Sudan (Juba: International Crisis Group, December 2009), 11; Emma Ensign, “Arms Collection Begins in Southern Sudan,” Arms Control Today 39, no. 7 (2009): 28. 75. International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts, 11–12. 76. Ensign, “Arms Collection Begins in Southern Sudan,” 29. 77. Wally Vrey, “United Nations Mission in Sudan: UN Support to DDR,” in Southern Sudan and DDR: Adopting an Integrated Approach to Stabilization (Workshop Papers, 25–26 June 2009) (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2009), 60. 78. Ibid., 61.

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79. Ibid., 61–66. 80. Julie Brethfeld, Unrealistic Expectations: Current Challenges to Reintegration in Southern Sudan (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2010), 9. 81. Human Security Baseline Assessment, DDR Implementation (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, October 2010), 1–2. 82. Ensign, “Arms Collection Begins in Southern Sudan,” 27. Other analysts set the number much lower. For example, in a December 2009 study the Small Arms Survey estimated the total number of arms in the Sudan to be around 2.7 million, with at least 1.2 million in the hands of northern civilians and at least 720,000 in the hands of southern civilians, although it noted that the latter figure may be an underestimate. Small Arms Survey, Supply and Demand: Arms Flows and Holdings in Sudan (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, December 2009). 83. Dorina A. Bekoe, Implementing Peace Agreements: Lessons from Mozambique, Angola, and Liberia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 38–40. 84. Richard Synge, Mozambique: UN Peacekeeping in Action 1992–94 (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1997), 66. 85. Carrie Manning, “Mozambique: RENAMO’s Electoral Success,” in From Soldiers to Politicians: Transforming Rebel Movements After Civil War, ed. Jeroen de Zeeuw (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2008), 68. 86. Jessica Schafer, Soldiers at Peace: Veterans and Society After the Civil War in Mozambique (New York: Pan Macmillan, 2007), 96. 87. Barbara F. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War: Demobilization, Democratization, and Commitments to Peace,” International Security 24, no. 1 (1999): 149; Mark Malan, “Peacebuilding in Southern Africa: Police Reform in Mozambique and South Africa,” International Peacekeeping 6, no. 4 (1999): 176. 88. Walter, “Designing Transitions from Civil War,” 149. 89. Alex Vines, “Disarmament in Mozambique,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 191–196. 90. Ibid., 193. 91. Ibid., 192. 92. Ibid., 191–196. 93. Ibid., 196. 94. Kirsten E. Schulze, “A Sensitive Mission: Monitoring Aceh’s Agreement,” in Reconfiguring Politics: The Indonesia-Aceh Peace Process, ed. Aguswandi and Judith Large (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008), 37; Edward Aspinall and Harold Crouch, The Aceh Peace Process: Why It Failed (Washington, DC: EastWest Center Washington, 2003), 37–40. 95. “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement,” August 15, 2005, sec. 4, http://peace maker.un.org/indonesia-memorandumaceh2005. 96. Schulze, “A Sensitive Mission,” 37–38. 97. Pieter Feith, The Aceh Peace Process, Nothing Less than Success, Special Report No. 184 (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, March 2007), 3– 4; For Cambodia, see Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 153–154. 98. Feith, The Aceh Peace Process, 2–3. 99. Schulze, “A Sensitive Mission,” 38. 100. Ibid. 101. “Bougainville Peace Agreement,” August 30, 2001, http://peacemaker.un.org /png-bougainville-agreement2001. 102. Scott S. Smith, “The Role of the United Nations Observer Mission,” in Accord: Weaving Consensus: The Papua New Guinea–Bougainville Peace Process, ed. Andy Carl and Sr. Lorraine Garasu (London: Conciliation Resources, 2002), 55.

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103. Anthony Regan, “The Bougainville Political Settlement and the Prospects for Sustainable Peace,” Pacific Economic Bulletin 17, no. 1 (2002): 123. 104. Edward P. Wolfers, “‘Joint Creation’: The Bougainville Peace Agreement— and Beyond,” in Accord: Weaving Consensus: The Papua New Guinea– Bougainville Peace Process, ed. Andy Carl and Sr. Lorraine Garasu (London: Conciliation Resources, 2002), 49. 105. Jan Borrie and Anthony Regan, “The Bougainville Peace Agreement,” Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Quarterly Bulletin 5, no. 4 (2004): 7– 10; Jim Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot: Ethnicity, Identity, and Separatism in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea,” in Fixing Fractured Nations: The Challenges of Ethnic Separatism in the Asia-Pacific, ed. Robert G. Wirsig and Ehsan Ahrari (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 239. 106. Volker Boege, A Promising Liaison: Kastom and State in Bougainville (Brisbane: Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, October 2008), 11. 107. Anthony Regan, “Bougainville: Conflict Deferred,” in Diminishing Conflicts in Asia and the Pacific: Why Some Subside and Others Don’t, ed. Edward Aspinall, Robin Jeffrey, and Anthony Regan (New York: Routledge, 2013), 126. 108. Catherine Wilson, “Gun Violence a Growing Concern in Papua New Guinea,” IPS News, February 9, 2013, www.ipsnews.net/2012/09/gun-violence-a -growing-concern-in-papua-new-guinea/. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Peter Sohia, “Early Interventions,” in Weaving Consensus: The Papua New Guinea–Bougainville Peace Process, ed. Andy Carl and Sr. Lorraine Garasu (London: Conciliation Resources, 2002), 20; Boege, A Promising Liaison, 11; Regan, “Bougainville: Conflict Deferred,” 126; A. J. Regan, Light Intervention: Lessons from Bougainville (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010), 121–126. 112. Regan, “Bougainville: Conflict Deferred,” 126. 113. Vrey, “United Nations Mission in Sudan,” 59. 114. Ibid., 63. 115. International Crisis Group, Aceh: Post-conflict Complications (Jakarta: International Crisis Group, October 2007), i, 8. 116. See ibid., 9; Edward Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? The Helsinki Peace Process in Aceh (Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2007), 22. 117. Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? 22. 118. Lina Frodin, “The Challenges of Reintegration in Aceh,” in Reconfiguring Politics: The Indonesia-Aceh Peace Process, ed. Aguswandi and Judith Large (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008), 55. 119. Small Arms Survey, Small Arms Survey 2009: Shadows of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 260. 120. World Bank, GAM Reintegration Needs Assessment: Enhancing Peace Through Community-level Development Programming (Banda Aceh: World Bank, 2006), 77–78. 121. International Crisis Group, Aceh: Post-conflict Complications, i. 122. Ibid., 9. 123. Patrick Barron and Adam Burke, Supporting Peace in Aceh: Development Agencies and International Involvement (Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2008), 37. 124. Small Arms Survey, Small Arms Survey 2009, 267–268. 125. Ibid., 268. 126. “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement,” sec. 3.2.

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127. Frodin, “The Challenges of Reintegration in Aceh,” 54–55. 128. Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? 23. 129. “An Uneasy Peace: Indonesia’s Aceh Province,” The Economist, April 28, 2007, 72. 130. Small Arms Survey, Small Arms Survey 2009, 275. 131. Ibid., 277. 132. International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend, 23. 133. Brethfeld, Unrealistic Expectations, 6–7. 134. Ibid. 135. Anicia Lalá, “Security Sector Reform as a Governance Issue: The Case of Mozambique,” Journal of Security Sector Management 1, no. 2 (2003): 13; Vines, “Disarmament in Mozambique,” 196. 136. Lalá, “Security Sector Reform as a Governance Issue,” 13. 137. World Bank, GAM Reintegration Needs Assessment, 16. 138. Aceh Reintegration and Livelihood Surveys (Washington, DC: Columbia University, Stanford University, Harvard University, and World Bank, 2008), 25–27. 139. Small Arms Survey, Small Arms Survey 2009, 264. 140. Sidney Jones, “Keeping the Peace: Security in Aceh,” in Reconfiguring Politics: The Indonesia-Aceh Peace Process, ed. Aguswandi and Judith Large (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008), 75. 141. International Crisis Group, Indonesia: Deep Distrust in Aceh as Elections Approach (Jakarta: International Crisis Group, March 2009), 8. It does highlight, however, that the KPA engages in extortion activities. 142. Malan, “Peacebuilding in Southern Africa,” 176; Helene Maria Kyed, “Community Policing in Post-war Mozambique,” Policing and Society 19, no. 4 (2009): 356–357. 143. Vines, “Disarmament in Mozambique,” 198–199. 144. Ibid., 199–200. 145. The overall objective was “to adapt the PRM structure with the aim of improving its technical capacity for guaranteeing public safety in strict observance of Human Rights, citizens’ freedoms, current laws and norms of behaviour towards citizens, as required by a multi-party democracy.” United Nations, “Support to the Police of the Republic of Mozambique (PRM),” UN Development Project, UN Doc. MOZ/95/015/F/01/31 (New York: United Nations, June 27, 1997), 7; Malan, “Peacebuilding in Southern Africa,” 177. 146. Lalá, “Security Sector Reform as a Governance Issue,” 14. 147. Kyed, “Community Policing in Post-war Mozambique,” 357. 148. Ibid. 149. Alexander Costy, “The Peace Dividend in Mozambique, 1987–1997,” in Durable Peace: Challenges for Peacebuilding in Africa, ed. Ali M. Taisier and Robert O. Matthews (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 142–182. 150. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 2010 Human Rights Report: Liberia (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2011). 151. Amnesty International, Mozambique: “I Can’t Believe in Justice Any More”: Obstacles to Justice for Unlawful Killings by Police in Mozambique (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2009). 152. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2010 Human Rights Report: Mozambique (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2011). 153. Ibid. 154. It is interesting to note that, because of the high national and international attention given to this case, a number of police officers were tried and convicted in

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relation to the deaths. Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Mozambique: Justice Sector and the Rule of Law (London: Open Society Foundation, 2006), 101–103. 155. Ibid., 101–102. 156. Ibid., 102. 157. Jones, “Keeping the Peace,” 71–73. 158. Paul Norton, “Press Briefing Notes: Netherlands and EU Support Aceh Peace Through Police Reform” (New York: International Organization for Migration, May 15, 2007). This program was part of a broader Netherlands-funded IOM national police reform program in Indonesia that provided similar training in a number of other regions. 159. Norton, “Press Briefing Notes.” 160. Jones, “Keeping the Peace,” 71–73. 161. Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Mozambique, 103–104. 162. Amnesty International, Annual Report: Mozambique (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2011); Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Mozambique. 163. Bruce Baker, “Policing and the Rule of Law in Mozambique,” Policing and Society 13, no. 2 (2003): 146. 164. Ibid.; Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Mozambique, 102. 165. “An Uneasy Peace,” 72; Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 2010 Human Rights Report: Indonesia (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2011); International Crisis Group, Aceh: Post-conflict Complications, 7–8. 166. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010: Events of 2009 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2010), 136. 167. Ibid. 168. United Nations Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, 12. 169. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2011: Events of 2010 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2011), 147. 170. Jones, “Keeping the Peace,” 75. 171. See ibid.; International Crisis Group, Aceh: Post-conflict Complications, 6. 172. Jones, “Keeping the Peace,” 71–75. 173. Boege, A Promising Liaison, 23. 174. Australian Agency for International Development, “Australian Aid to Bougainville,” June 2010, www.ausaid.gov.au/country/png/bougainville.cfm. 175. International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend, 23. 176. Christina Wille, “Stabilizing Cambodia: Small Arms Control and Security Sector Reform,” in Small Arms Survey 2006: Unfinished Business, ed. Small Arms Survey (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2006). 177. UN Secretary-General, Report of the Special Representative of the SecretaryGeneral on the Situation of Human Rights in Cambodia, UN Doc. A/56/209 (New York: UN General Assembly, July 26, 2001), 13; Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2010 Human Rights Report: Cambodia (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2011). 178. Wille, “Stabilizing Cambodia.” 179. Col. (ret.) David Mead, “Business by the Gun: Lethal Consequences of Failed Demobilisation,” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Change, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 57; International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend, ii. 180. Mead, “Business by the Gun,” 57. 181. North-South Institute, Police Reform in an Independent South Sudan, Policy Brief (Ottawa, ON: North-South Institute, 2012), 1–2.

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182. Lt. Gen. (ret.) Gebretsadkan Gebretensae, “SSR and DDR in Post-CPA Southern Sudan,” in Southern Sudan and DDR: Adopting an Integrated Approach to Stabilization (Workshop Papers, 25–26 June 2009), ed. Small Arms Survey (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2009), 73–74. 183. Mike Jobbins, “The CPA Implementation: Taking Stock (A Summary of Conference Proceedings from the September 11th, 2006, Symposium Entitled, Sudan’s Peace Settlement: Progress and Perils),” in Implementing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Prospects and Challenges, ed. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008), 9. 184. International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts, 2–3. 185. Ibid., 3; North-South Institute, Police Reform in an Independent South Sudan, 2. 186. International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts, 19–20. 187. North-South Institute, Police Reform in an Independent South Sudan, 2–3. 188. International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts, 19; North-South Institute, Police Reform in an Independent South Sudan, 2. 189. North-South Institute, Police Reform in an Independent South Sudan, 2, 4. 190. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? 15. 191. Vines, “Disarmament in Mozambique,” 195. 192. Ibid., 191–196. 193. For detailed descriptions of how weapons were trafficked into South Africa as well as broader discussion of this process, see ibid., 195–196. 194. Jobbins, “The CPA Implementation,” 8. 195. International Crisis Group, Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Beyond the Crisis (Nairobi: International Crisis Group, March 2008), 1, 5. 196. Mareike Schomerus, The Lord’s Resistance Army in Sudan: A History and Overview (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2007), 18–19. 197. Marieke Shomerus’s research found that a common saying in Eastern Equatoria is “Why is the UPDF in Sudan? To protect the LRA.” The implications are that the fight against the LRA has made the armed forces a powerful actor given the high level of military spending by the Ugandan government, and that the continuation and spread of the war has made the army a powerful economic actor through its engagement in illegal plundering. For a detailed discussion of the various Ugandan and Sudanese actors in this conflict as well as their motivations, see ibid., 29. 198. Ibid., 26. 199. Ibid., 34–40. 200. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010, 174. 201. International Crisis Group, South Sudan: Compounding Instability in Unity State (Juba: International Crisis Group, 2011). 202. See David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998); Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000); Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000); Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “On the Economic Causes of Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563–595. 203. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2010 Human Rights Report: Liberia (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2011). 204. International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform, 7.

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205. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, 3–4. 206. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? 15; African Elections Project, “Liberia 2011 Elections Violence Early Warning and Response”; “Liberia: Upcoming Elections Threaten Security.” 207. John Braithwaite, Hilary Charlesworth, Peter Reddy, and Leah Dunn, Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2010), chap. 6. 208. Boege, A Promising Liaison, 8, 36. 209. Ibid., 10–12. 210. For a detailed discussion of this, see ibid., 27. 211. Sohia, “Early Interventions,” 20. 212. Wolfers, “‘Joint Creation,’” 49; Smith, “The Role of the United Nations Observer Mission,” 55. 213. Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Global Burden of Armed Conflict (Geneva: Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2008), 53; Nathalie de Watteville, “Addressing Gender Issues in Demobilization and Reintegration Programs,” Africa Region Working Paper Series (New York: World Bank, 2002), 20. 214. UN Development Fund for Women, Case Study: Bougainville–Papua New Guinea (UN) (New York: UN Development Fund for Women, 2007); See also Michelle Tonissen, “The Relationship Between Development and Violence Against Women in Post-conflict Bougainville,” Development Bulletin 53 (2000): 26–28; Anthony Regan, “Bougainville: The Peace Process and Beyond,” Submission to the Foreign Affairs Sub-committee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Inquiry (Canberra: Australian National University, 1999), http://ips.cap.anu.edu.au/ssgm/resource_documents/bougainville/PDF/ajregan2.pdf. 215. Michelle Barron, “When the Soldiers Come Home: A Gender Analysis of the Reintegration of Demobilized Soldiers, Mozambique 1994–96,” MA thesis (School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, 1996); de Watteville, “Addressing Gender Issues in Demobilization and Reintegration Programs,” 20–21. 216. Megan Bastick, Karin Grimm, and Rahel Kunz, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Global Overview and Implications for the Security Sector (Geneva: Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2007), 183–188; de Watteville, “Addressing Gender Issues in Demobilization and Reintegration Programs,” 20. 217. Barron, “When the Soldiers Come Home,” 20. 218. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? 219. Lokuji, Overview of the Challenges to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, 19. 220. Ensign, “Arms Collection Begins in Southern Sudan,” 29. 221. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, 3. 222. See Lokuji, Overview of the Challenges to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, 20; UN Secretary-General, Report of the Secretary-General on the Sudan, UN Doc. S/2005/579 (New York: UN Security Council, September 12, 2005), 1–2, www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2005/579. 223. See Ensign, “Arms Collection Begins in Southern Sudan,” 27; International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010, 174. 224. International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts, 1.

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225. International Crisis Group, South Sudan: Compounding Instability in Unity State; International Crisis Group, South Sudan and Sudan’s Merging Conflicts (Addis Ababa: International Crisis Group, January 2015), i; Jeffrey Gettleman, “Born in Unity, South Sudan Is Torn Again,” New York Times, January 12, 2012, www.nytimes .com/2012/01/13/world/africa/south-sudan-massacres-follow-independence.html ?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=global-home; Minority Rights Group International, “Urgent Measures Needed to Protect All Ethnic Groups After Recent South Sudan Attacks, MRG,” press release, January 5, 2012, www.minorityrights.org/11147/press -releases/urgent-measures-needed-to-protect-all-ethnic-groups-after-recent-south -sudan-attacks-mrg.html. 226. Pan-African News Agency, “RENAMO Members Arrested by Mozambican Police,” May 2, 2000; Mozambique News Agency, “AIM Report No. 183,” May 16, 2000, www.poptel.org.uk/mozambique-news/newsletter/aim183.html. 227. David Harris, “Liberia 2005: An Unusual African Post-conflict Election,” Journal of Modern African Studies 44, no. 3 (2006): 377. 228. International Crisis Group, Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform, 5. 229. Essentially, the TNI remained convinced that GAM was still seeking independence from the Indonesian state despite GAM’s assertions to the contrary, and GAM continued to see the TNI as its primary opponent and fostered distrust of the TNI among the Acehnese. To help deescalate these tensions, the GOI took steps in early 2009 to reemphasize its commitment to the MOU and to remind all parties that there was no going back on the agreements contained therein. It did so by orchestrating visits from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Martti Ahtisaari and by appointing a widely respected new provincial police commander in February 2009. International Crisis Group, Indonesia: Deep Distrust in Aceh as Elections Approach. 230. Wang, Managing Arms in Peace Processes, 82; International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend, iii. 231. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, 3. 232. In Aceh, ongoing tensions over the uneven distribution of resources between GAM supporters and pro-Indonesia groups as well as rising criminality rates and concerns over the Indonesian government’s commitment to fully implement the governance reforms stipulated in the MOU remain a challenge. Thus, it is of particular concern that there is evidence that some pro-Indonesia militias have regrouped under the name of Forkrab and train in Aceh’s mountainous center. “An Uneasy Peace,” 72. 233. Jones, “Keeping the Peace,” 72. 234. Javier Solana, “A New Era of Peace for Aceh,” December 15, 2006, 1, www.aceh-mm.org/download/english/061215%20Aceh%20Article.pdf.

4 Governance Building as Peace Building

Addressing governance structures, processes, and cultures is one of the biggest issues in the aftermath of violent conflict, with the renegotiation of governance arrangements at the center of most peace settlements. Consequently, the restructuring or rebuilding of governance infrastructure is a fundamental element of peace consolidation processes, and “good governance” is a proclaimed goal of much international involvement. Unsurprisingly, given the complexity of governance institutions and their development, postwar governance-building processes are fraught with difficulties, not least the challenges of moving the resolution of conflict out of the violent arena and into the political one and getting parties to participate in good faith. Despite the international community’s ever increasing fluency in the theory and practice of “doing governance” in post–civil war contexts, many countries remain plagued by governance weaknesses and by the ongoing resort to violence as a means of conflict resolution. In this chapter, I examine how governance-building processes have been pursued in the aftermath of violent civil war and what impact they have had for peace consolidation in post–peace agreement societies. Postwar governance-building processes have three main components. First, they involve systems of representation which are, in most cases, electoral processes. Second, they involve institutional transformation, which includes the development of new laws or constitutions for the operation of the postwar state. These two components, although different, are inextricably linked in postwar contexts as they generally happen in tandem immediately after a peace settlement, although institutional development continues consistently while elections occur only periodically. I begin this analysis by considering what happened in both spheres in the aftermath of a peace agreement, exploring weaknesses that undermined the consolidation of peace. The third component that I consider is institutional capacity, which

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is the ability of the governance structures to carry out their core functions around service delivery. While this last component is clearly linked to the other two, and is often determined by institutional development and the functioning of electoral processes, it can be usefully analyzed on its own as its implications for understanding the stability of peace differ from those of the other components. A theme that is pervasive across these three components of governance-building processes is that of political culture, and it features prominently in my analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these processes. A survey of postwar governance-building processes in a range of civil war contexts suggests that, as was the case with security building, a set of common weaknesses undermines their effectiveness and their contribution to peace consolidation. A central issue is that bad faith, mutual mistrust, or a lack of commitment to peace building can undermine gains being achieved in more technical parts of the peace process—for instance, in institutional transformation or electoral reform. This means that formal political processes, the contestation of power and authority, and the ongoing peace process remain antagonistic exercises, characterized by a violent or conflictual political culture, whereby key actors use violence or threats of violence to shape political and governance processes. One factor that exacerbates this is that, just as the technical aspects of security-building processes are often separated from their political dimensions, postwar governance processes that focus on the technical aspects of governance reform tend to overlook the influence of existing power structures and dynamics on their effectiveness. Technically focused governancebuilding processes delink institutions from the everyday politics of the postwar society and the long-term development of a nonviolent political culture. They can also compound the institutionalization of wartime divisions rather than encourage the development of an alternative political order. Essentially, the focus on the organizational form and function of governance masks the political complexities of peace processes. Postwar governance institutions are also often plagued by an accountability deficit and weak capacity, and service delivery can be colored by political agendas. In this chapter I examine a range of geographically and contextually diverse postwar governance-building processes to explore their strengths and weaknesses. As in the previous chapter, I use the analysis of a single peace process, in this case Cambodia’s, as a launching point from which to examine the effectiveness of other processes. Cambodia’s peace process provides an illustrative opening to this chapter, as it demonstrates a number of the weaknesses that recur in the other peace processes considered in this book. It also represents the first time that the international community, through the UN, engaged in “transition assistance” rather than more traditional peacekeeping,1 and it set the mold for future multidimensional peace

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operations, which may explain the replication of weaknesses across diverse contexts. I survey the state of the peace postsettlement in Cambodia before exploring what happened in terms of electoral processes, institutional transformation, and institutional capacity in order to draw conclusions about why a violent political culture still dominates the country. Subsequently, I explore what happened in other postwar states, including Liberia, Mozambique, South Sudan, Aceh, and Bougainville, to determine whether there exist similarities in the patterns of weakness of governance reform. I first consider these cases in relation to the first two governance reforms described above—namely, electoral processes and institutional transformation—and I organize them thematically in terms of the main challenges to peace consolidation that each case has faced. I then look at the challenge of weak institutional capacity faced by nearly all postwar (and most developing) states, particularly in terms of the dynamic relationship between institutional capacity and peace consolidation. In doing so, I build a complex account of the way that the international community’s approach to governance building in the context of civil wars operates and how it has contributed to the establishment of “neither war, nor peace” situations in many of the cases studied. The analysis suggests that the anatomy of weakness is remarkably similar across contexts. Bad faith and an ongoing political culture of violence and antagonism form a common threat to the effectiveness of governance reform processes and, therefore, peace consolidation. The cases that I studied also suggest that the technical aspects of governance reform dominate many peace processes, which means that they do not engage with the realities of political culture and existing power structures and dynamics. Establishing electoral processes, supporting technocratic institutional development, and enshrining human rights into constitutions alone are not enough to establish or consolidate peace in a postwar state. While clearly important elements of peace building, without a more dynamic political response to the political challenges to peace consolidation, technocratic “fixes” are effectively hollow and embed instability in the new system.

The Peace Process in Cambodia Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953 and experienced very little peace before being drawn into the regional conflicts of the 1960s. The roots of the brutal civil war that plagued the country until 1991 lie in the 1960s, when Vietnamese communist guerrillas used Cambodian territory in their fight against South Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War. The presence of these guerrillas led the United States to conduct a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia in 1969, and eventually to incur-

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sions of US and Vietnamese troops into Cambodia to attack the rebels’ bases and supply lines.2 In 1970, the Cambodian military ousted ruling Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a coup and, in 1975, as the Vietnam War ended, the Khmer Rouge, who were Cambodian communist guerrillas, took control of the capital Phnom Penh, implementing a regime that over the following four years caused the deaths of more than a million Cambodians through forced labor, torture, execution, malnutrition, or disease.3 Its reign was brought to an end in December 1978 with the invasion of Vietnamese troops, which pushed the Khmer Rouge into the jungles bordering on Thailand, from where it launched a guerrilla war against the new Vietnamesebacked government. The Khmer Rouge, funded by China, was joined in its antigovernment struggle by Sihanouk’s FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF, led by former prime minister Son Sann. FUNCINPEC and KPNLF received support from Thailand and Western states, including the United States and United Kingdom. The civil war raged through the 1980s, although the roots of the peace process lie in Mikhail Gorbachev’s indication in 1985 that the Soviet Union would soon withdraw material support for Vietnam because of cuts to international spending, which led Vietnam to announce that it “might be willing to withdraw its troops from Cambodia.”4 Other factors such as internal political pressure and the probable no-win situation in Cambodia were also likely contributors to the Vietnamese policy shift.5 This led to a series of meetings between and among regional and international interest groups, such as ASEAN, and eventually to peace negotiations between the government and the Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC, and KPNLF, which culminated in the settlement of the conflict in the Paris Peace Agreement of October 1991.6 The peace agreement set out a detailed plan for Cambodia’s transformation into a peaceful and pluralistic liberal democratic state, including provisions for the future government system, DDR, return of refugees, and release of political prisoners. UNTAC was established to oversee the agreement’s implementation. The peace agreement also established an interim governing authority, the Supreme National Council, which embodied Cambodian sovereignty during the transition and was made up of six members from the Vietnamese backed State of Cambodia and two members each from the PDK, FUNCINPEC, and KPNLF, with Prince Sihanouk as the chairman.7 It is important to note that the SOC was a single-party socialist state run by the CPP and, as in many such socialist states, the party was fully integrated into state structures, making the SOC and CPP effectively the same actor in the peace process. Even a cursory look at the situation in Cambodia in the years after the peace agreement was signed makes it clear that the process of peace consolidation was stymied by ongoing conflict and violence between the different

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groups. To explore this, I briefly outline levels of postagreement political violence before looking at what happened in the governance-building processes that meant that such violence was not prevented and the resolution of political conflict was not moved into the nonviolent political arena. The Paris Peace Agreement established an immediate cease-fire. However, violent conflict ceased only briefly, with violence coordinated primarily by the Khmer Rouge’s Party of Democratic Kampuchea and the Vietnamese-backed incumbent CPP, led by Hun Sen. For instance, shortly after the agreements were signed in 1991, a CPP-organized mob almost lynched the Khmer Rouge president, Khieu Samphan, on his arrival in Phnom Penh.8 The CPP also systematically organized violence against opposition parties, killing around 100 FUNCINPEC and the KPLNF’s successor Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BDLP) members between 1992 and 1993.9 The PDK claimed that the peace agreements were not being implemented properly, particularly in terms of establishing a neutral political environment, and increased the intensity of its military struggle throughout 1992—by the end of that year, there had been many PDK violations of the cease-fire.10 Between 1992 and 1998, when the Khmer Rouge collapsed, there were an estimated 3,000 casualties as a result of ongoing conflict between the CPP-dominated government and the PDK, with an additional estimated 700 civilian casualties directly targeted by the PDK.11 Additionally, at least 90,000 people were displaced by fighting between the Khmer Rouge and the government forces in late 1994.12 There was widespread political violence in the lead-up to the 1993 UNTAC-facilitated elections, carried out largely by the incumbent Vietnamese-backed regime of Hun Sen against FUNCINPEC and KPNLF supporters and also by the Khmer Rouge against ethnic Vietnamese civilians and UNTAC officials. However, the Khmer Rouge did not ultimately launch the large-scale military offensive that it threatened when polling opened.13 Political violence peaked in 1997, starting with a grenade attack against a FUNCINPEC breakaway demonstration led by Sam Rainsy outside the parliament, which resulted in at least sixteen deaths and had been organized with the complicity of Hun Sen’s bodyguard, according to a UN investigation.14 Then, in July 1997, Hun Sen coordinated action to undermine FUNCINPEC in the parliament by fostering a revolt of FUNCINPEC members against Norodom Ranariddh, which failed, and he took control militarily. From July 2, 1997, CPP troops disarmed FUNCINPEC-aligned troops first around and then within Phnom Penh itself. The fighting in the capital, over the weekend of July 5–6, left an estimated 100 civilians dead and spread to Cambodia’s western provinces within a few days. 15 While the stated aim of the coup was to arrest Ranariddh on the false pretext that he had brought thousands of PDK soldiers back into Phnom Penh to reestablish the Khmer

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Rouge regime, Hun Sen’s real objective was to dismantle FUNCINPEC’s parallel authority structures and consolidate his power within parliament and over the judiciary by establishing a CPP majority in both the Supreme Council of the Magistracy and the Constitutional Council.16 So, why did violence remain such a key characteristic of the postwar political culture? It is possible to shed some light on why violence remains a pervasive characteristic of politics in Cambodia by exploring the implementation of the governance reforms stipulated in the peace agreement and looking at the extent to which they achieved the goal of moving the resolution of violent conflict into the political arena. In the following section, I discuss these issues in Cambodia, before turning my attention to other postconflict governance-building processes to determine whether there are similarities in their experiences.

Implementing Governance Reforms The Paris Peace Agreement established not only an end to armed conflict between the four warring Cambodian groups, but aspired to the establishment of something far greater; namely, a liberal democratic governance system that required the complete restructuring of the state.17 This involved broad institutional development, the establishment of an electoral system, and institutional capacity building. To this broad end, the UN took on its largest and most complex peace operation yet, which involved peacekeeping, conducting elections, and assuming formal administrative authority over much of the Cambodian government’s functions. UNTAC’s civilian component was mandated to assume control over all administrative agencies, bodies, and offices acting in the field of foreign affairs, national defense, finance, public security, and information; to supervise and control any of the warring parties’ administrative agencies, bodies, and offices that could directly influence election outcomes; to supervise any other administrative bodies needed to ensure normal day-to-day life; to install UN staff into all parts of the warring parties’ administrations with unrestricted access to administrative operations and information; to assume control and supervision of all civil police as well as supervision of other law enforcement and judicial processes; and to investigate complaints and take corrective action as necessary.18 However, while the four warring parties agreed to these operational tasks in the Paris Peace Agreement (also known as the Paris Accords), the Security Council never actually conferred such strong authority to UNTAC. Therefore, UNTAC was responsible for monitoring and reporting noncompliant behavior, but it never actually had the authority from the Security Council to thwart it, largely because the Council wanted UNTAC to work on a consensual rather than authoritative basis. 19 Further,

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despite this wide-ranging mandate, UNTAC’s core objective was much narrower; namely, to ensure the neutral political environment necessary for free and fair elections20 and, hence, the operational focus on stopping any bureaucratic processes or behavior that would undermine this. Such UN direct control was the first of its kind, and it required a significant influx of personnel into the country in the early stages of the peace implementation process, which was undermined by the lack of readily deployable personnel and the lack of specific expertise in a range of areas of government management, such as weapons procurement, public security, and finance.21 James A. Schear and Steven R. Ratner both argue that the impact of the resulting delays was that UNTAC’s civilian component did not establish its authority in the early stages of the mission when the parties were relatively amenable to it, which undermined UNTAC’s effectiveness later on, particularly when Hun Sen and the Khmer Rouge began backing away from their commitments under the peace agreement.22 Another major challenge was that administrative bureaucracies did not exist in the form that the concept of UNTAC’s oversight assumed, and some ministries barely functioned, with real power lying in the hands of local governors, party officials, military officers, and powerful individuals loyal to the various warring parties.23 Because the SOC was so entangled with the CPP in the socialist state system, the UN could not easily separate the bureaucracy from the CPP, especially as there was a tendency for decisions to be made by senior officials informally and conveyed to subordinates without any record.24 This undermined UNTAC’s capacity to keep the SOC and CPP from compromising the neutrality of the political environment. The principles of human rights and democracy were enshrined in the constitution adopted in 1993, and UNTAC conducted a highly successful public education program to ensure that the public understood that “in the future, they would be able to choose who would govern them, and would be freed from the threat of arbitrary exercise of state power.”25 In 1996, UNTAC force commander Lt. Gen. John Sanderson claimed that this voter education contributed to the massive voter registration turnout, which was a “true turning point” in the Cambodian peace process as it reflected a “shift in the balance of power to the Cambodian people.”26 The extent to which this was actually the case is cast into doubt by later political developments and the increasing move away from democracy as Hun Sen and the CPP monopolized power, as discussed shortly. The Paris Peace Agreement provided for a democratic election to be held at the end of the transitional period, which was to be organized, conducted, and supervised by UNTAC. While the agreement outlined principles for a new constitution, which included the strengthening of democracy and human rights, it did not outline the process for the transition to democracy in the longer term.27 Essentially, it did not address the question of how

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a new state structure would be formed after the elections were held, nor did it institutionalize the concept of political opposition in the postwar system.28 It also failed to anticipate the challenges inherent in attempting to move an authoritarian socialist state toward a model of liberal democratic pluralism, as discussed below. Despite these challenges, some aspects of the postwar governance reforms were relatively successful. By the end of 1992, the high levels of political conflict and violence between the warring parties made it clear that the path to peace outlined in the Paris Accords would not be implemented as imagined. UNTAC went ahead with the May 1993 elections anyway, in an attempt to keep the process on track.29 The elections happened peacefully and on schedule, despite the widespread violence in their lead-up and conditions not being “those anticipated in the Paris Agreements.”30 This may have been due in part to UNTAC’s surprise inspections of certain provinces, deployment of civilian police to deter attacks on vulnerable party offices, and issuance of a directive that prohibited the unauthorized possession of arms, which was enforced at checkpoints.31 This seemed to decrease violence in the short term; however, the resurgence of violence after the elections suggests that it did not address the fundamental problem of the CPP’s resistance to pluralism and the establishment of a democratic state, an issue I return to below. During the elections, more than 90 percent of registered voters cast ballots, delivering FUNCINPEC a victory with more than 45 percent of the votes, led by Sihanouk’s son Ranariddh, while Hun Sen’s incumbent CPP won around 38 percent of votes and the KPLNF won 3.8 percent.32 The CPP refused to accept its loss of power, with hard-liners led by Sihanouk’s son Chakrapong declaring the secession of a number of eastern provinces under its control and violently attacking UNTAC and FUNCINPEC offices.33 The SOC also appealed to Prince Sihanouk in the aftermath of the elections and, amid their allegations of electoral fraud (dismissed by UNTAC as insignificant or unfounded), hinted of a return to civil war if its concerns were not addressed.34 This forced Ranariddh to concede to a power-sharing arrangement, whereby he and Hun Sen would be co-premiers and all ministerial posts would be split evenly between FUNCINPEC and the CPP. This prompted the special representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) to Cambodia, Yasushi Akashi, to declare that the elections had established “an important basis for eventually consolidating peace and preparing for national reconciliation.”35 Akashi’s statement reflects the tendency for actors to claim success preemptively, as seen in Javier Solana’s similar declaration about the EU mission in Aceh, discussed in Chapter 3. John M. Sanderson and Michael Maley argue that the CPP’s refusal to accept the results of the elections, and by association the “new ground rules” established in the peace agreement, sent a “powerful and unambigu-

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ous signal that, from [the CPP’s] viewpoint, the ground rules would not be changing: while use might be made of parliamentary manoeuvres, power would still come, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun.”36 Schear argues that the SOC/CPP, as Cambodia’s de facto authority, stood to gain the most from a failure to properly implement the peace agreement, as they “could buy international acceptance over time with outwardly reformist policies” while refusing to cede power. Conversely, FUNCINPEC and KPNLF stood to gain the most from the agreement’s implementation as all of the main provisions around disarmament and economic and political liberalization would favor them, rather than the more heavily armed and authoritarian SOC and PDK.37 This may explain the tensions between the groups during the agreement’s implementation. Nevertheless, there was a period of relative peace after the 1993 elections, which the United States and UN utilized to declare victory and withdraw forces before chaos returned, according to Frederick H. Fleitz, who argues that the United States knew that the force was collapsing and that such a collapse would be “a public relations disaster that would doom its ambitious UN-based foreign policy.”38 It was also an opportune time for the UN to withdraw, as its civilian component had lost its capacity for political influence with the Supreme National Council (SNC) being replaced by the new Constituent Assembly, which was eager to minimize UNTAC’s involvement in drafting the new constitution.39 Despite these issues, UNTAC left Cambodia in September 1993 amid widespread applause from the international community for a successful operation, although the inherent instability of the situation that it left behind soon became clear. The inaccuracy of Akashi’s claim of success was laid bare as the postwar political dynamics became clear and the institutional development process unfolded. UNTAC’s quick withdrawal and the fragile power-sharing agreement left a fundamentally unstable situation.40 The unusual powersharing arrangement entailed a complete duplication of authority in all state systems and structures. Both parties maintained their own armies, police, media, and bureaucrats, and maintained dual command structures in all state bodies. Ostensibly, this was designed to ensure that all decisions would be made by consensus. However, the CPP manipulated itself into the dominant position within this coalition government, as it monopolized power at the regional civil administration level, including the courts, and headed the police, gendarmerie, and army, thereby undercutting FUNCINPEC’s capacity to exercise political authority.41 There is also evidence that the CPP forcefully intimidated political opponents to ensure its dominance.42 This caused significant tension between the two parties, leading them to compete for the support of other actors in the system and resulting in even greater fighting in the lead-up to the 1998 elections that culminated in the violent 1997 coup. Some suggest that the coup was a direct response by

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Hun Sen to rumors of an alliance among FUNCINPEC, BLDP, and a new party led by Sam Rainsy and potentially a FUNCINPEC–Khmer Rouge alliance, which could have challenged the CPP’s dominance.43 After the coup, the CPP reinforced its stranglehold on power by undermining the possibility of democratic opposition through the threat and use of violence against its opponents.44 Roland Paris recalls that Nate Thayer, a journalist in Cambodia at the time, told him “the only reason that there was a coup [in 1997] was that Hun Sen saw himself as being politically outflanked and realized that he would have lost the election [if he had not taken action].”45 This reinforces the suggestion that Hun Sen was not committed to the principles of democratization embedded in the peace agreement. Sanderson and Maley similarly argue that the series of attacks by CPP elements on their FUNCINPEC, KPNLF, and Khmer Rouge opponents, beginning with the attack on Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan in November 1991 and ending with the 1997 coup, “highlight not just a lack of commitment to good governance, liberal democracy and the rule of law . . . but a desire to work against those objectives.”46 They emphasize that this violence not only signaled the sources of power to opponents of the CPP, but also to those within the CPP who were inclined to uphold the principles and spirit of the Paris Accords. After the 1997 coup, the UN suspended Cambodia, ASEAN postponed its accession to the regional body, and many donor states and institutions including the United States, Germany, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank suspended aid.47 In the lead-up to the 1998 elections, Hun Sen responded to this isolation by intensifying relations with China and establishing the framework for credible elections in 1998, so as to regain the recognition of the international community.48 While the 1998 elections were held and declared free and fair by international observer groups, the complete marginalization of political opposition, the CPP’s monopolization of media access, and the severe voter intimidation in the lead-up to the election that included killings and torture of political opponents suggest that voters had no real options but to vote for the CPP. 49 Sanderson and Maley argue that by the time of the election many voters perceived the balance of power in Cambodia to be such that, if the CPP lost power, it would respond with the sort of violence that it used in the aftermath of the 1993 elections—indicating a major shift from Sanderson’s earlier claims that the UN mission had returned the balance of power in Cambodia to the people.50 The unusual duplicate system of government structures and institutions that was established after the 1993 elections meant that corruption was rife, the political elite became wealthier and more powerful, and “instead of much-needed reform, the state continued to grow in size and weaken in effectiveness, despite massive foreign aid.” 51 The long-standing and com-

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plex patronage networks for personal enrichment exacerbated this process and, while they operated at all levels of society, one of the most concerning was between the CPP and the armed forces, which resulted in the RCAF generals controlling much of Cambodia’s natural resource wealth and Hun Sen being able to credibly employ the threat of renewed violence as a political strategy.52 Hun Sen also ensured that the public was aware of their reliance on his patronage—for instance, by branding many public schools “Hun Sen schools,” and implicitly suggesting that if he was pushed from power the schools would go with him along with other CPP-funded infrastructure and national development.53 There was no room within the postwar political system for debate or dissent, and stability was seen to hinge on the denial or marginalization of political differences—as seen particularly after the 1997 coup when the country’s relative stability rested on Hun Sen’s complete monopolization of power. The first commune-level elections (local government) happened in 2003, with Cambodia’s first Senate elected in 2006. Until then all local chiefs had been appointed by the CPP, allowing the CPP to maintain its monopoly on power.54 The centralization of power has led to a culture of impunity where the rich and the powerful remain above the law and can manipulate the judicial institutions to their own ends.55 On the one hand, “the Senate’s core role relates to patronage and clientelism, rather than to an exercise in curbing possible excesses in the National Assembly,” highlighting again that the veneer of democracy has little substance behind it.56 On the other hand, the civil service did not operate as a neutral actor in the years after the peace agreement, with many staff turning to corruption to supplement their low salaries, which meant that civilians often had to pay bribes for basic services.57 Ratner argues that “the bureaucracy lacked the mentality of an entity dedicated to public service, and UNTAC had little hope of inculcating one” partly because “the SOC was an inherently corrupt institution. Many civil servants had no loyalty to anything but money, family, or party.”58 This culture does not seem to have shifted in the years after the Peace Accords, with corruption and ineffectiveness characterizing postwar government service provision. Much of this account hints at a fundamental problem within the Cambodian peace process, which is that the international community attempted to install a liberal democratic state system in a context in which few of the key actors were committed to such reforms.59 “Buy-in” was absent not only because of the high numbers of SOC/CPP officials, police, soldiers, and “party hacks” whose livelihoods depended on patronage networks rooted in their power, and threatened by political pluralism.60 It was absent also because the Paris Accords fundamentally did not represent a true commitment to and desire for peace on the part of the four warring groups, but rather intense pressure from the groups’ international supporters to bring

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the conflict to an end.61 As such, consent to the ongoing peace process and democratization of the state was largely illusory, which highlights the importance of peace agreements being seen as the initial steps in a much longer process of ongoing negotiation and peace consolidation. Perhaps the international community’s naïveté about the true motivations of the parties, its willingness to accept a good enough deal, or its unwillingness to remain actively involved in Cambodia in the longer run meant that it did not continue to build consensus for peace after the Paris Peace Agreement. The international community seemed to work on the assumption that international consensus on the peace agreement would be enough to keep the peace process on track, which it was not, and after UNTAC pulled out there was little sustained international political attention on Cambodia.62 So while Sanderson and Akashi tried to entrench habits of cooperation and pluralism between the groups through the SNC and other cooperative mechanisms like mixed working groups, this was undermined by the CPP’s fundamental resistance to pluralism, demonstrated by its perpetual undermining of democratic processes and refusal to accept the UNTAC administrative authority agreed to in the Paris Accords.63 The CPP signed the Paris Accords, but participated in the ongoing peace process in bad faith. Essentially, the international community was working on the unrealistic assumption that political pluralism could be established in Cambodia within eighteen months, largely through electoral processes and, while this was welcomed by large parts of the civilian population, it was not accepted by the SOC/CPP, and the push toward pluralism led to an upsurge in political violence and a backlash that ultimately resulted in the 1997 coup.64 Caroline Hughes argues that this political situation has been exacerbated by the fact that since 1991 international engagement has focused on “eliciting forms of political participation that are atomizing and heavily policed, rather than spontaneous and mass-based, and . . . the promotion of stability rather than empowered representation of the collective interests of the poor, has been the overriding concern.”65 A central problem of the approach to governance reforms in Cambodia is that the process has failed to change the underlying sources or modes of political and violent conflict. Violent political culture is a central part of this: Sorpong Peou shows that state leadership in Cambodia has always been most “interested in preserving or enhancing its hegemonic status quo”;66 and David Roberts emphasizes that “no Khmer leader since independence, whether regal, communist, republican or former peasant, has accepted without resistance a challenge to the absolutism of their authority.”67 The reality of this political culture and the local power dynamics were ignored by the international community involved in implementing the accords. The international community seems to have assumed that the establishment of liberal democratic state structures, as set out in the peace

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agreement, would ensure pluralism, respect for human rights, and a commitment to the nonviolent resolution of political conflict, despite the fact that Cambodia was “a vulnerable and poor country with primary ideals governed less by specific human rights and more by survival through patronage and loyalty.”68 After signing the peace agreement, political actors in Cambodia continued to interact with power and seek its consolidation as they always had, highlighting the need to be aware of existing power structures and not to “presume that conflict only happens between the ‘bad guys’ and the ‘good guys,’”69 but that it is a result of those complex power dynamics. The fact that the international community condemned existing power structures and modes of organization as problems that needed to be solved implicitly emphasized the “rightness” of democracy and meant that it could not respond to the existing power dynamics in Cambodia during the peace process.70 The international community was instead stuck peddling a particular set of liberal democratic structures and processes that were understood to be the foundation of a peaceful postwar state, but were at odds with the realities of social, economic, and political organization in Cambodia and therefore distanced from the realm of realistic outcomes. Roberts argues that the transition to democracy in Cambodia was undermined by the absence of an alternative to the system of patronage and by the elite’s views of absolutism.71 He posits that the right societal pillars must be in place to support an overall system, but that the old pillars of society in Cambodia were at odds with the system of democracy that was superimposed onto them.72 This goes some way toward explaining why the new system of plural democratic governance was effectively hollow, in that the substance of the system was characterized by a violent political culture, wartime divisions, and a rejection of the principles of pluralism and democracy.

Delinking Governance and Politics Through Peace Building The case of the Cambodian governance-building process demonstrates that, although there was some success in changing the systems and structures of governance, the process failed to change the violent political culture that still dominates the country. My survey of the electoral processes, institutional transformation, institutional capacity, and political culture highlights a number of weaknesses in the international community’s approach to establishing new governance systems in accordance with the peace agreement. Essentially, the failures of the electoral system contributed to severe weaknesses in the institutional development process, which were in turn a factor in the poor institutional capacity and the entrenchment of a violent political culture in postwar Cambodia.

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The first major weakness that this case seems to highlight is that the institutions of politics were effectively delinked from the dynamics and structures of power in the postwar state—or, in other words, significant political power operated outside of formalized political structures and institutions. Second, the process established a set of weak governance institutions that are incapable of being (or unwilling to be) responsive to the needs of the population or working within the pluralistic democratic framework stipulated in the accords. As a result of these weaknesses, wartime divisions and conflicts have continued to characterize the country’s politics and have, in effect, been embedded in the postwar system. In large part, these problems stemmed from what can now be recognized as the bad faith of particular actors in the negotiation process, which saw them signing agreements that they were not committed to respecting. This reflects the problems inherent in taking peace agreements as the final word on how peace will look in a postwar country, and highlights the need for ongoing negotiations and conflict resolution between parties as the peace consolidation process progresses. The weaknesses in the governancebuilding process meant that the resolution of political conflict in Cambodia did not move into the nonviolent arena of politics, but rather remained steeped in violence and antagonism between parties. This is not to suggest that Cambodia’s peace process has failed outright; a form of peace has clearly been established in the country and Cambodia is unlikely to descend again into civil war. However, it does suggest that the approach to rebuilding governance institutions, processes, and culture after the war was not very successful and was co-opted by Hun Sen and the CPP to ensure their continued dominance. Given that these weaknesses are systemic, in that they derive largely from flaws in the international community’s approach to building and consolidating peace through governance reform in the aftermath of the Paris Accords, the question arises as to whether governance-building processes elsewhere have suffered from similar weaknesses. In this section of the chapter, I explore governance reform in other postwar contexts to determine if and how these weaknesses are replicated across peace processes. I consider the context of the negotiations and the political history of the cases to capture a longitudinal understanding of the political trajectory in each state, which allows us to see whether the postwar dynamics and challenges are, in fact, a continuation of the earlier processes and political culture. Although I consider the cases individually to ensure a suitably thorough account of postwar governance processes that allows for comparisons to be drawn between contexts, I integrate a cumulative analysis into the discussions of individual cases in order to draw out those comparisons. These discussions revolve around the first two of the constituent components of postwar governance identified earlier; namely, electoral processes and institutional

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transformation. At the end of the chapter, I consider issues around the institutional capacity of postwar states and its impact on peace consolidation. Aceh: Bad Faith and Poor Intentions Aceh’s experience in implementing governance reforms and “building governance” mirrors Cambodia’s problems of parties’ bad faith involvement in peace negotiations and agreements, as well as the challenges of subsuming the less peace-oriented motivations of particular actors into technical reform processes. The political settlement of the conflict between the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia was central to the Memorandum of Understanding signed on August 15, 2005. The agreement was mediated by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari through his Crisis Management Initiative and took place over the seven months following the December 2004 Asian tsunami. The earlier peace process, which resulted in the 2002 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement broke down in mid-2003 because of the fundamental incompatibility of the two parties’ stance on Aceh’s political status, with GAM demanding independence and the GOI categorically ruling it out. Although the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD, also known as the Henri Dunant Centre) attempted to avoid this political stalemate by shifting the focus of negotiations away from the incompatible issue to more immediate ones, including a humanitarian pause in fighting and cease-fire, the approach was ultimately undermined by the unwillingness of each party to compromise on the political issue.73 In contrast, the 2005 process took a fundamentally different approach: it started by forging agreements on the broad outlines of a political settlement before working out the details of cease-fire and security arrangements.74 This was based on the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” which guided the chief facilitator, Ahtisaari, throughout the negotiations. This meant that the negotiation process leading up to the MOU was much more wide-ranging in its focus, and that there was more scope for dealing with a range of interlinked issues and promoting constructive compromise between the parties. Another critical factor in the success of the Helsinki process was that there was strong political will on both sides to make the process work: GAM abandoned its independence goal, and the democratically elected Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono government conceded that a military solution alone was not enough to secure peace and was committed to finding alternative solutions.75 The 2005 MOU contained provisions for governance reforms around the central issues of political participation, including the right to establish local political parties (which is illegal in the rest of Indonesia), provisions for holding elections, and the institutionalization of regional autonomy

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through the Law on Governing Aceh (LOGA).76 The right of Acehnese political parties to exist was a central issue for GAM in the peace negotiations and, while the GOI initially completely opposed this option, because it considered such parties a threat to national unity, it eventually conceded to GAM’s demand on the evening before the MOU was due to be signed when the issue was finally referred to President Yudhoyono.77 For GAM, this provision was a deal breaker, as the election of GAM representatives to both the legislature and the executive would give “both democratic and legal legitimacy to their aspirations and their relations with the central government.”78 The MOU committed the Indonesian government to allow and facilitate the establishment of local Acehnese parties as well as to creating the “political and legal conditions” for their establishment.79 In May 2008, GAM and eleven other local political parties were formally legalized and, importantly, GAM formalized its political structures within six months of the enabling legislation being enacted and ceased operating as a rebel movement.80 This was an important step in consolidating both parties’ confidence in the peace process. The first elections held in postwar Aceh in 2006 were declared free and fair by an international observer mission. GAM had not yet been officially politicized, so GAM members participated as independent candidates. GAM won overwhelmingly, despite predictions, with the leaders Irwandi Yusuf and Muhammad Nazar winning 38 percent of the total vote and carrying fifteen of the nineteen districts—and not just GAM strongholds.81 Yusuf also won the governorship of Aceh.82 The ICG concluded that this was because at the provincial level GAM benefited from deep dissatisfaction with the old parties and their candidates, who were seen as serving the interests of a narrow elite. The district elections, however, demonstrated the effectiveness of GAM’s network of former combatants and supporters, who got out the vote through an army of volunteer workers, appeals to Acehnese identity, a focus on poor and marginal areas that established parties ignored, and in some cases—but probably not enough to make a difference to the outcome—intimidation. Many Acehnese saw maintaining the momentum of the peace process as crucial and voting for GAM a way to guarantee it.83

Despite significant tensions between former GAM members and the TNI in the lead-up to the April 2009 national legislative elections, with numerous attacks on the Aceh Party (which represented the former rebels), the elections passed peacefully and fairly according Carter Center monitors.84 The Aceh Party ran primarily on the platform of ensuring the full implementation of the MOU, and there is evidence that it used varying levels of intimidation to shore up its support in some regions.85 As with the 2006 elections, the Aceh Party shocked observers with a landslide win of

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47 percent of the total vote and more than a third of all district and municipal assembly seats.86 Only one of Aceh’s five other local parties won a seat and, while opponents claimed that this was because of the Aceh Party’s aggressive campaigning techniques, a large study conducted by the Centre for Democratic Institutions found that that the result accurately reflected Acehnese voter preferences.87 The first section of the MOU stipulated that “a new Law on the Governing of Aceh will be promulgated and will enter into force as soon as possible and not later than 31 March 2006.”88 The key principles on which the LOGA was to be based were not reflected accurately in the LOGA passed by the parliament in mid-2006. A central challenge in the development of the LOGA was the MOU’s ambiguity, which caused significantly different understandings between GAM and the GOI about what they had agreed to and general confusion about what the MOU’s implementation entailed, as shown in the previous chapter with regard to reintegration. As Edward Aspinall outlines, one key problem with the political agreement within the MOU is that it may in fact be much narrower than a cursory reading would suggest. . . . GAM members view provisions on Aceh’s government as being wide in scope and as giving Aceh almost unfettered powers to determine its own affairs. On the other side, some in the government view the MOU as providing at best for only minimal extensions of arrangements provided in a 2001 Special Autonomy Law.89

An unusually high number of stakeholders were involved in drafting the LOGA, which led to many compromises and also reduced the law’s clarity and consistency. Further, some of the principles stipulated in the MOU were understood by parliamentarians to be “constitutionally problematic”—for instance, the consultation and required consent of Aceh over decisions made by the national legislature regarding it and international treaties affecting it—and were overruled.90 Essentially, the new law does not enshrine a fundamentally changed relationship between Aceh and the central government. Moreover, the earlier relationship seems to have been entrenched through other laws, including the government’s regulation of its own national functions, which does not distinguish between its relationship with and responsibilities to Aceh and any other Indonesian provinces except Papua.91 This caused significant tension between the GOI and former GAM members who continued to push for full implementation of the provisions agreed to within the MOU.92 GAM requested a review of the LOGA, but, while this would be a good way to build trust between the parties and reemphasize the commitment to peace, Bernhard May argues that the GOI’s “readiness to grant even greater concessions to Aceh will . . . diminish as time goes by.”93

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The question of why the Indonesian negotiators at Helsinki agreed to provisions that they knew would raise serious constitutional issues is paramount, and it has been suggested that this was a deliberate tactic to get GAM to sign the MOU.94 This suggests an element of bad faith in Indonesia’s participation in the negotiations. Whether or how this point of contention is resolved in the future will shed light on the extent to which the GOI is actually committed to a peaceful and lasting political solution to the Aceh conflict. The stalemate over the political status of Aceh suggests a deep problem in the peace process; namely, that the successes in terms of politicizing GAM and establishing an electoral system in the province were technocratic achievements that masked the underlying political conflict over the long-term relationship of the province to the State of Indonesia. The successes also obscured the mistrust and antagonism between key parties that continued to characterize political dynamics. Confusion over the specific implications of the MOU was an obstacle to the implementation of effective reintegration programs and transitional justice, which are discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. Sudan: Conflictual Relationships and the Temptation of Technical Goals The peace process in Sudan demonstrates challenges similar to those in Aceh, whereby governance reform processes have been undermined by key actors’ unwillingness to uphold a commitment to the peace they agreed to while also diverting attention from broader goals of changing the conflict dynamic to smaller more technical ones. This example also highlights the complexities of reforming governance structures and processes when different groups remain locked in a web of overlapping conflict relationships and power struggles, despite the peace process. The North-South war, which began in 1955, was just one of a much broader web of conflicts in Sudan, which were based on “competing claims by various, shifting groups, to land, water, natural resources, political power or cultural identity.”95 The discovery of oil in South Sudan in 1978 by Chevron complicated these existing conflicts by adding a further economic dimension to the question of territorial control. The 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement ended seventeen years of war between the North and South by granting the South a level of autonomy over its own affairs. However, problems around the integration of guerrilla forces into the national army, support for the South’s economic development, and the maintenance of the political balance between the central government and the semiautonomous South were not effectively addressed, which led to high levels of mistrust and tension between the two parties and

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eventually to the resumption of full-scale civil war.96 The second civil war was complicated by internal feuding within the Sudan People’s Liberation Army—later also known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement— over the control, direction, and goals of the liberation movement. This meant that a great deal of violent conflict did not occur between the government forces and the SPLA but between different tribal factions within the SPLA, although the northern government was implicated in funding and arming particular groups in order to undermine the overarching liberation struggle.97 The government was successful in doing this, at one point entering into a peace agreement with the Nuer southern faction led by Riek Machar, which bought him into the central government while leaving John Garang’s faction of the SPLA out. This alliance soon collapsed because the National Congress Party—Omar al-Bashir’s dominant northern party— failed to follow through on many promises and agreements, and Machar soon rejoined Garang in the peace talks that eventually led to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The CPA was made up of six agreements that addressed different facets of the conflict, including the South’s right to hold a referendum on secession, power sharing, wealth sharing, security, and the resolution of the Abeyi, Southern Kordofan, and Blue Nile state conflicts.98 The interim period before the referendum provided for by the Machakos Protocol was initially planned to last only eighteen months, but was extended to ensure that the option of unity was given enough time to prove itself. A high-level minister in the GOSS who was part of the SPLM’s negotiation team argues that this was because the general response to the option of secession at the time of the CPA was highly emotional, and those involved in the negotiations felt that “there needed to be time to allow the referendum to have a practical, economic, technical, infrastructural, political and socio-cultural rather than an emotional basis.”99 In the same way that the Cambodian peace process aimed to establish a governance system based on pluralism, democracy, and human rights, one of the central principles on which the CPA was based was the decentralization and democratization of governmental functions and power in Sudan and, in this way, the agreement had implications for many of the conflicts beyond the North-South conflict. The CPA also had a detailed implementation modalities mechanism as well as numerous built-in guarantees. The SPLM argued that these meant that “it would be extremely difficult for any party to the CPA to dishonour or abrogate it and if it happens it will be tantamount to constitutional disorder with dire repercussions for the unity of the Sudan.”100 External commentators and diplomats involved in the negotiations disagree, arguing that the extremely high level of technical detail and the multiplicity of new institutions established by the CPA resulted in delayed implementation and raised questions about both the capacity and the will of the two par-

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ties to actually implement the CPA.101 The SPLM position stated above also suggests that it knew that it would be difficult for the NCP to fully implement the CPA, which would give weight to the SPLM claim that the NCP had not made unity an attractive option to the South and that the South needed independence to ensure the security of its inhabitants. This increasingly became the position taken by SPLM leaders.102 This was not the position of Garang, commander-in-chief of the SPLA and chairman of the SPLM, who, unlike many others in the SPLA/SPLM, was committed to the ideal of a united secular and democratic “New Sudan,” rather than an independent South. Garang was a charismatic and strong leader who was able to mobilize the population around the prospect of peace (evidenced in the broad and overwhelming support for the CPA within the southern communities just before the final agreement was signed103) and also maintain a strong partnership with his negotiating counterparts, which led many to see him as the lynchpin in ensuring the CPA’s implementation.104 Garang died in a helicopter crash three weeks after the Government of National Unity was formed and was succeeded by his deputy, Salva Kiir. Subsequently, the South moved away from the unity option, and many argued that the SPLM’s weak commitment to the implementation of the CPA indicated a strategy of “biding time” until the referendum, when the region opted for secession.105 Conversely, the NCP also had an interest in the nonimplementation of the CPA, given that free and fair national elections jeopardized its political dominance (although this was avoided by corruption and manipulation during the electoral process, which ensured the NCP’s victory), and also that the deliberations over the demarcation of the North-South border would likely result in the North’s loss of access to oil revenue. As such, the two parties were selective in their commitment to various aspects of the CPA’s implementation. The CPA not only attempted to resolve the North-South conflict, but also had broad implications for the whole Sudanese political system—entailing broad political and civil service reform, democratization, and decentralization. In this way, it was similar to but went much further than the peace agreements in Aceh and Bougainville, which were also dealing with secessionist conflicts, in that it fundamentally redefined the central government’s relationships with the regions. It was seen as a way toward wholesale regime change, or the reorganization of the Sudanese state, if implemented fully, and also as one step on the larger process of addressing all violent conflicts in Sudan, including in Darfur and on the Eastern Front.106 Although democratic reform of the central government was key to the full implementation of the CPA, it has clearly not been pursued in good faith by President al-Bashir, who is now subject to two International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and

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genocide in Darfur. Nevertheless, some governance reforms were made in accordance with the terms of the CPA: the Interim National Constitution was adopted, the president of the GOSS was made first vice president of the GNU, the National Assembly was formed, the Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly was established, the Interim Constitution of Southern Sudan was approved, state governments were established in all states except Khartoum and Southern Kordofan, and the Constitutional Court was established.107 Aside from the establishment of these institutions, the CPA stipulated three main areas of governance reform that are relevant to this analysis: power sharing, wealth sharing, and the referendum. While power sharing was initially embodied in the establishment of the GOSS and GNU, the SPLM withdrew from the GNU on October 11, 2007, because it claimed that the NCP was not implementing key aspects of the CPA. In particular, the NCP marginalized the SPLM in decisionmaking processes, refused to reorganize the cabinet, and blocked the integration of southern civil servants into the government, even though under the CPA they were supposed to constitute 28 percent of the civil service.108 After months of negotiations and the reorganization of the cabinet, the SPLM rejoined the GNU on December 27, 2007. After that, problems with implementation timelines continued, with tension rising particularly about the time line for the independence referendum. This tension within the GNU was largely due to the parties’ divergent goals in relation to CPA implementation. After Garang’s death, his negotiating partner from the NCP, Vice President Ali Osman Taha, who had hoped that an electoral partnership with the SPLM could lead the NCP to a democratic victory, was sidelined by al-Bashir, who, reminiscent of Hun Sen’s tactics in Cambodia, moved instead to consolidate his control over the state and economy, in part by delaying the national elections and manipulating the electoral process.109 The ICG argued that the NCP wanted to maintain a partnership with the SPLM, but only one in which the SPLM was a purely southern-based junior partner, not an equal force on the national stage. The SPLM was also divided between those who favored Garang’s New Sudan vision and wanted to play a role in national politics, and those who favored a southern-first strategy and wanted to bide their time until the referendum delivered the vote for secession.110 Progress in implementing the wealth-sharing accords and the decisions on the North-South borders significantly influenced people’s allegiance to either of these positions on the South’s future. The wealth-sharing accords have not been implemented in any concerted manner. The continued border disputes around the oil fields were in large part responsible for the nonimplementation of the accords, which divided oil revenue between the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the Government of South Sudan (GOSS) and set up a system for dividing revenue from other sources between the two,

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among other provisions.111 The vested interests of both parties in maintaining the status quo, discussed earlier, was also a contributing factor. The demarcation of the North-South border, in particular around Abeyi, was a particular source of contention between the NCP and SPLM, consolidating the South’s mistrust of the North and preference for secession rather than unity. According to the CPA, border demarcation was to happen between January and July 2005. In the case of Abeyi, the border was to be based on a 1905 map, while the remainder of the border was to be based on a 1956 map, demonstrating where the borders lay at the time of decolonization. However, when the Abeyi Border Commission (ABC) and the NorthSouth Border Demarcation Commission (NSBDC) began their investigations, they found that those maps did not exist.112 So the ABC referred to a 1965 map, while the NSBDC, which found no map that clearly demarcated the border, reconstructed the boundaries by drawing on legal, sociological, and historical methods. The Abeyi case was particularly difficult to resolve because of the oil fields in the contested border area. When the ABC reported on its findings, which were based on the 1965 map, the NCP rejected them outright, exacerbating tensions between the North and South. This was not surprising, given the NCP’s and SPLM’s unwillingness to negotiate during the commission’s deliberations. The ABC was made up of fifteen members—five each from the NCP and SPLM, and five external and impartial experts. The chairman of the ABC, Donald Petterson, recounts that from the start of the commission’s investigations, it was obvious that neither the NCP nor the SPLM was willing to negotiate on the border issue, despite their agreement in the CPA to do so.113 Given that that the deferral of a decision on Abeyi was a central part of getting the NCP and SPLA to agree to the CPA, their ultimate unwillingness to negotiate during the ABC indicates a serious flaw in the peace settlement, an element of bad faith in the parties’ participation in peace negotiations, and a lack of commitment to building peace. Petterson recalls that “when I suggested privately to Ambassador Dirdeiry [head of the GOS/NCP delegation] that an equitable decision based on compromise would be a good outcome, he told me flat out that there could be no compromise on a land issue. Later that same day, Deng Alor [head of the SPLM side] agreed with him.”114 When the NCP rejected the ABC’s decision, which favored the South, the matter was referred to the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which returned much the same decision as the ABC and awarded the bulk of the area to the southern Dinka Ngok community rather than the northern Misseriya community. While both communities publicly accepted this decision, some Misseriya leaders later rejected the demarcation and, at the time of the referendum, the GOSS and GOS still had not implemented the terms of the Abeyi Protocol and the arbitration decision.115 The continued refusal of the GOS to recognize the borders set by the

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PCA fueled mistrust between the North and the South, stalled negotiations on the Abeyi referendum, and led to heightened insecurity along the border, which resulted in the displacement of people.116 Violence in the region escalated after the independence referendum of January 2011, involving not just civilians, informal militias, and police as clashes had in the past, but members of both the North and South’s formal military forces in breach of the CPA.117 These clashes displaced more than 100,000 people, which signaled a severe deterioration of the fragile North-South relationship. The negotiations of the North-South boundary were similarly drawn out. While most of the border had been agreed on, there remained a number of highly contested areas, and the political decision to actually implement the demarcation and establish a border regime was not made before the 2011 referendum.118 The status of Abeyi remains undecided and, although a referendum whereby Abeyi could decide to join the South or remain part of the North was supposed to happen in tandem with the independence referendum, it has repeatedly been delayed. Despite South Sudan’s independence on July 9, 2011, the region remained occupied the by SAF, the oil export and border management issues were unresolved, and the refugees who left the region during the 2011 clashes are unable to return, although an agreement was reached in March 2013 for both armies to withdraw from the border region while a final demarcation is negotiated.119 The first election in Sudan post-CPA took place in April 2010, after significant delays. These were the first multiparty presidential elections in twenty-four years and there were concerns about their credibility and legitimacy, with the ICG declaring them to have been rigged, based on the NCP’s manipulation of the 2008 census, drafting of election laws in its own favor, gerrymandering of electoral districts, co-option of traditional leaders, and buying of tribal loyalties.120 Further, while the polling was generally peaceful, the Carter Center election monitors expressed concern about widespread irregularities. It reported that, based on its direct observations, Sudan’s vote tabulation process was highly chaotic, non-transparent, and vulnerable to electoral manipulation. As a result, the Center is concerned about the accuracy of the preliminary results announced by the National Elections Commission (NEC), as procedures and safeguards intended to ensure accuracy and transparency have not been systematically applied and in some areas have been routinely bypassed. The Center also noted serious concerns about election-related violence and intimidation in several states, especially Northern Bahr al Ghazal, Unity, and Western Equatoria.121

The census data on which the electoral rolls were based were highly controversial, and a number of major parties withdrew from the race because they claimed it would not be free and fair, which puts the legiti-

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macy of the result (which returned al-Bashir and his NCP to power) even further in doubt.122 Another issue is that the GOSS is dominated by the two major ethnic groups, the Nuer and Dinka. While this is not surprising— given that the Nuer and Dinka controlled the SPLM, dominated the South’s engagement in the peace process, and had the capacity and finances to formalize their involvement in the new political structures—it has meant that there is no real opposition in the new state, despite the many smaller ethnic groups not represented by the GOSS. Overall, although some governance reforms were implemented as per the CPA, many were not, and there was serious inertia on the part of both the GOS and GOSS to implement certain reforms. This may have been compounded by the fact that, as in Cambodia and numerous other cases, engagement by the international community in the process diminished significantly after the CPA was signed, and the international political consensus on the agreement was not enough to keep its implementation on track. As was seen between conflicting actors in Aceh and Cambodia, the North-South relationship in Sudan remained characterized by mistrust and political brinkmanship rather than by cooperation and good faith, and this colored post-CPA negotiations and the peace consolidation process.123 In further similarities, the absence of a cooperative and collaborative postagreement relationship undermined many of the technical efforts to implement governance reforms and put the state on a path to stable governance. This highlights the importance of giving adequate attention to the realities of political conflict and competition in postwar contexts, and reinforces that the ongoing commitment of parties to the peace established through a peace agreement cannot be assumed. The adage that peace agreements are little more than scraps of paper rings true in this regard. The Sudanese case reinforces the conclusion drawn from the Acehnese and Cambodian cases that, when the primary focus of postwar governancebuilding processes is on the technical aspects of reform, new institutions and processes can fail to recognize and respond to the realities of political dynamics and competition between different groups. In other words, the structures of power, the dynamics of conflict, and the underlying political culture in postwar contexts can be overlooked when attention is put on the reconstitution of institutions and formal reform processes. Effectively, this delinks institutions from the everyday politics that define the context in which they are expected to operate and, in doing so, diminishes the capacity of those institutions to contribute to peace consolidation. This conclusion is compounded by the interclan violence that has long defined the war in South Sudan, but which has been escalating to dangerously destabilizing levels since independence. A cycle of revenge attacks between the Nuer and Murle clans in the Pibor region stemmed from longstanding bitter ethnic tensions that were largely put aside after the CPA for

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the sake of achieving independence. These attacks left thousands dead or displaced, hundreds of children abducted, and thousands of cattle stolen. While on the surface they appeared to be cattle raids, their deeper causes included poverty, the competition for scarce resources, a security vacuum, the availability of small arms left over from the war, and the marginalization of ethnic minorities in the new South Sudanese political system. 124 In this violence, heavily armed and large militias, including the reconstituted Nuer White Army, have become locked in a cycle of revenge attacks. In 2012, Lou Nuer (a subgroup of the Nuer) militias attacked Murle villages, with a Seattle-based fund-raising arm issuing a public statement that “we have decided to invade Murleland and wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth.”125 The GOSS has not intervened to protect the Murle because the Nuerdominated government could not marshal its forces against Nuer militias without sparking even more severe internal conflict.126 That the levels of intertribal conflict escalated to this degree suggests that the system of governance established in South Sudan was not based on a common acceptance of its authority or a will to work together within the new independent state framework. It also reflects the problem raised earlier that, as with GAM in Aceh, the SPLM’s assumption of a large amount of authority through the new government infrastructure left little space for a political opposition to occupy, and minority groups felt that their interests are not adequately represented in the new frameworks. This disenfranchisement of weaker groups undermined the stability of peace in southern Sudan, especially given the long history of intraclan violence and the highly enabling conditions for such violence to occur, and contributed to the resurgence of civil war in 2013. This challenge is not limited to newly autonomous or independent postwar regions: the Cambodian case similarly shows the problems that arise when the concept of a political opposition is not embedded in a nascent political system, even though the narrowing of the political space did not contribute to levels of violence as high as in South Sudan. Liberia: Shifting Political Culture The Cambodian, Acehnese, and Sudanese experiences of postwar governance reforms highlight the challenges inherent in transitional arrangements where neither electoral processes nor institutional development reflect the real balance of power between actors or their commitment to ongoing peace building. In contrast, the Liberian transitional political arrangements, albeit inadvertently, reflected the political realities of power and economic interests and effectively moved political competition beyond such wartime politics by effectively buying off or satisfying the self-interests of key actors in the interim period. However, Liberia’s governance reform process has been

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faced with other challenges, stemming in part from the high levels of postwar violence and criminality, as discussed in Chapter 3. Before looking at the implementation of the governance reforms stipulated in the Accra CPA, it is useful to briefly consider the way in which the implementation (or nonimplementation) of governance reforms of previous peace agreements and the inability to move beyond wartime political dynamics contributed to the earlier resurgence of civil war in Liberia. The last major peace settlement prior to Accra was the Abuja Accords of 1995, which resulted in internationally observed elections being held in July 1997. Those elections were declared generally free and fair by observers, but that declaration obscured the reality of the situation, which was that many voters felt they had no choice but to elect Charles Taylor because a victory for anyone else would have almost certainly resulted in Taylor’s army resuming their armed struggle. Taylor successfully campaigned under the slogan “He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him,”127 indicating how desperate the population was for an end to the brutally violent civil war. Although to a different degree, this is reminiscent of Hun Sen’s veiled threats to end the CPP’s largess in Cambodia if he was voted out of office. After Taylor took power, the process of political liberalization mandated by the Abuja Accords was superficial, and he soon began to suppress all political opposition, which quickly led to a relapse into civil war.128 A repeat of this course of events was avoided in the implementation of the Accra CPA in part because the main political goal of both LURD and MODEL was to remove Taylor from power, which was achieved in the lead-up to the CPA and meant that the groups were less inclined to take up violence when there were snags in the peace process. In addition to this, the way that the interim governance arrangements inadvertently played out also helped avoid major electoral conflict. The CPA provided for the National Transitional Government of Liberia to be established for a two-year period in order to oversee the implementation of the CPA and lead the country to elections. Members of the NTGL were appointed by the parties to the peace talks and the warring parties were allowed to dominate key ministries and positions, which led to widespread corruption.129 The CPA precluded any senior NTGL appointees from standing for elections in 2005, which meant that there was no incumbent party with an unfair advantage in those elections. David Harris argues that this approach effectively bought off rebel leaders, by not threatening them with war crimes tribunals and “rightly or wrongly, [presenting] them with opportunities to join the elite and take a slice of the pie without even the need for political participation in the election.” 130 He further argues that “perhaps because of the realpolitik nature of the CPA and the barely disguised gross corruption of members of the coalition government, the protagonists in the second Liberian civil war (2000–03) complied with the

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agreement and the peace process held.”131 Consequently, the 2005 elections were very different from many other postconflict elections, such as those in Cambodia, Aceh, and South Sudan, in that rebel forces were virtually absent from the political process. This opened up space for other participants, and for the election to be contested on the basis of policy platforms rather than party, regional, or ethnic affiliations. Further, violence was largely absent from the electoral campaign and process, which Harris attributes to the dismantling of armed forces, the presence of 15,000 peacekeepers, and the unusual level of cordiality between competing parties.132 The Liberian experience demonstrates the benefits of a longer time frame between signing a peace agreement and holding elections—especially in this case, where the DDRR program took much longer than expected and where holding elections while the warring groups were still armed could have resulted in a fast return to civil war.133 It also highlights that political realities and power dynamics shift as actors’ interests change. In this case, the interim government provided key actors with an opportunity to satisfy their interests before elections introduced open political competition. This diminished the push factors for violent competition. Although this is not something that is easily fabricated, partly because of the problematic ethics of buying off potential spoilers by granting them interim power, it does show the difference in outcomes when power realities are not overlooked or underestimated during governance reform processes. The successful election process showcases the benefits of the Liberian interim arrangements. During the elections, the National Electoral Commission “demonstrated an impartiality that would be the envy of most African states.” 134 However, there were still serious issues around voter disenfranchisement, with an estimated 150,000 eligible voters from the estimated 300,000–400,000 refugees not included on the electoral roll, and the twenty-year lapse since the last census making an accurate electoral roll even more difficult.135 On the positive side, almost 50 percent of enrolled voters were women, which demonstrated a genuine commitment to institutionalizing gender equality in postwar Liberia.136 There were no major parties representing large clan, ethnic, or tribal groups in the elections; in fact, Harris argues that politics were extremely localized, signaling the “relative death of party loyalty” at the time.137 This appears to have shifted since then. In contrast to Aceh and South Sudan, the proliferation of candidates and parties in the elections as well as the lack of major parties meant that the elections put many different groups into the various houses of government and the executive, with no one party holding an outright majority. This meant that the party that led in the House of Representatives was not even the main opposition party in the Senate and that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s party led in neither body, which embed-

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ded a level of vulnerability and the need for political compromise and cooperation in the new government bodies, which was beneficial to relationship building and reconciliation.138 While there was initial concern that this situation could lead to political deadlock, it did not eventuate to any significant extent, and President Sirleaf adapted to governing without a majority in the legislature and achieved significant reforms. For instance, there has been significant progress in reforming the legislative framework to incorporate respect for human rights and good governance, and a Constitutional Review Task Force has been established as well as a Law Reform Commission, tasked with reviewing the country’s outdated laws, and a Land Commission, tasked with addressing land disputes.139 Most of the governance reform process in Liberia have been locally driven, and the reforms have enjoyed high levels of local ownership. The second round of postwar presidential elections in October–November 2011 indicated that some of these issues around party proliferation and competition became more prominent challenges to the stability and effectiveness of Liberia’s government. Although Sirleaf won a second term in government, the elections were marred by violence and an opposition boycott of runoff elections based on claims of electoral fraud. Her main challenger, Winston Tubman, rejected her victory, arguing that the elections were rigged in her favor, calling for a boycott of the runoff elections, and pledging not to cooperate with her government in the legislature.140 Tubman’s claims seem unsubstantiated—the Carter Center’s electoral observers monitored “the tally and the tabulation of final results in Liberia [and reported] a largely transparent process with no evidence of systematic fraud or manipulation of results.” 141 Nevertheless, Tubman’s boycott was enacted and, although Sirleaf won 90.6 percent in the ballot, voter turnout was only 38.6 percent in contrast with the 71.6 percent turnout in the first round of voting.142 The boycott’s success was especially concerning because many of Tubman’s supporters who followed his call for a boycott were unemployed former combatants, who, as seen in Chapter 3, have the means and capacity to regroup into active militias.143 As a result of these electoral results, Sirleaf faced challenges not only from the opposition within the legislature as a result of Tubman’s pledge not to cooperate with her, but from her constituency with many disenfranchised by the runoff elections and a large portion disenchanted with her first-term achievements, particularly her weak or failed anticorruption, decentralization, and national reconciliation campaigns.144 Although the transitional arrangements were successful and common vulnerability characterized the governance process and thereby prevented any single party from monopolizing power and necessitated cooperative relationships, the combativeness demonstrated in response to electoral results suggests that some actors may not have been as committed to due political process as they seemed. Although technical governance

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reforms have had some successes—for instance, in facilitating largely free and fair elections and reconstituting a democratic government—their contribution to peace consolidation has been undermined by the sustained political culture of mistrust, antagonism, and corruption. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Côte d’Ivoire: Challenges of Elections and Electoral Results in Postwar States That key actors refuse to accept electoral results and threaten, either implicitly or explicitly, a return to conflict is a problem common across many postwar contexts. In some cases, it is because elections are rigged in favor of the incumbent or most powerful party; in others, it is because actors refuse to accept results despite their procedural legitimacy, suggesting the existence of deeper problems within the political culture and a lack of commitment to newly established systems and processes. The former situation was demonstrated in Sudan by the NCP’s rigging of electoral processes and results to ensure its continued political dominance. In Cambodia, this was seen in 1998 when opposition parties were effectively excluded from the electoral space through violence and intimidation and voters were pressured into reelecting the CPP. It was also a problem in the 2011 elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which were marred by violence, corruption, and intimidation. Although the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and African Union electoral observers declared that the elections were conducted in accordance with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Electoral Law, the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections, and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Declaration on the Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections in Africa,145 the EU and Carter Center observer missions rejected the results as “[lacking] credibility.” 146 The EU mission specifically declared that it “[deplored] the lack of transparency and irregularities in the collection, compilation and publication of results.”147 Not only were constitutional laws changed to remove the presidential runoff poll requirement, but electoral commission and Supreme Court posts were filled with incumbent president Joseph Kabila’s supporters, which undermined the likelihood that any challenges to the results would be fairly considered. There were discrepancies with voter registration figures; unequal media support was granted to Kabila’s campaign from state-run media; reports of localized violence and rigging of votes were common, including through intimidation and premarked ballots; and the tallying of results was declared “as unruly as voting, and dangerously opaque.”148 The Carter Center observer mission detailed significant problems with the tabulation process, including lost polling station results accounting for up to 850,000 votes.149

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As a result, Kabila’s declared win was rejected by the opposition and its supporters, leading to violent clashes between opposition supporters and security forces, although these did not escalate into the widespread violence some analysts predicted.150 Some analysts suggest that this was because the ICC declared that it was monitoring the Congolese situation. The president of the ICC recounted being told by the Democratic Republic of Congo’s justice minister that Congolese actors had closely watched the ICC’s involvement in Kenya and prosecution of Congolese nationals and that the ICC was a “constant topic of discussion” during the elections and acted as a deterrent to escalating violence.151 Etienne Tshisekedi, the main opposition leader, unilaterally declared himself president after the polling and was sworn in at a mass rally on December 23, 2011, cementing a stalemate between his Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) and Kabila’s People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD). Tshisekedi used a campaign of peaceful protests to continue to contest Kabila’s authority, but given the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo there was genuine concern that the situation would deteriorate into civil war, although it did not. In addition to the power struggle at the heart of the postelection tensions, another central issue was that the elections were not free and fair and, on the basis of their illegitimacy, the results were rejected by a large portion of the population. The situation mimicked the experiences in Cambodia in 1998 and Sudan in 2010, with similar results in terms of power holders consolidating their authority by subverting the democratic process and entrenching instability and mistrust between key actors, parties, and the general population. In contrast, it is the cases where electoral processes are largely free of fraud yet their results are rejected nonetheless that are particularly interesting, as they suggest not simply technical procedural problems or corruption but that political competition is not regulated by a commitment to due political process. As discussed earlier, Hun Sen and the CPP’s refusal to accept defeat in Cambodia’s 1993 elections led to the establishment of a powersharing government with Ranariddh’s FUNCINPEC, and the CPP manipulated this arrangement to ensure its own eventual dominance of power and authority. Similarly, in Liberia, the losing opposition party refused to recognize the legitimacy of its loss and the political process that led to it, despite the process being generally free and fair. The 2010 postelection crisis in Côte d’Ivoire demonstrates the more threatening end of this spectrum of parties refusing to accept electoral results that are legitimate but unfavorable to them. It was similar to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s electoral crisis, except that violence erupted between incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo’s troops and supporters and those of Alassane Ouattara, who won the runoff presidential poll by a 350,000 vote margin in a credible election certified by the UN.152

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Gbagbo’s refusal to relinquish authority is perhaps unsurprising given that he campaigned under the slogan “we win or we win,”153 reminiscent of Taylor’s violent campaign cry of the 1997 Liberian elections. The crisis led to a four-month civil war that left some 3,000 people dead, involved widespread rape, displaced more than a million people, and resulted in Gbagbo appearing before the ICC on charges of crimes against humanity.154 The issue raised by these examples is that political interest and power seeking do not necessarily submit to the dictates of due political process in postwar states, despite technical progress in electoral or governance reform. Rather, wartime political cultures of “might is right” can continue to dominate the political sphere, influencing the way that powerful actors engage in newly reformed governance processes. When governance reform processes do not recognize this, but focus instead on the technical aspects of reforming electoral institutions and processes, they risk overlooking a significant challenge to peace process sustainability. I revisit this issue below. Mozambique and Bougainville: Building Collaborative Relationships Through Elections and Governance Reform In contrast to the experiences of Cambodia, Sudan, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Côte d’Ivoire, where elections triggered insecurity and conflict over results, postwar elections in Aceh, Mozambique, and Bougainville passed without such challenges, and governance reform processes in the latter two were particularly characterized by collaborative relationships and trust building. As discussed earlier, although there was violence in the lead-up to elections in Aceh in 2006 and 2009, primarily due to tensions between the TNI and former GAM members, the elections themselves occurred successfully and key actors have remained engaged with official processes rather than challenging their fundamental legitimacy. A key aspect of the negotiated process to move many states out of civil war and into a nonviolent system of political competition is the politicization of rebel forces, which enables their participation in formal political processes. In Mozambique, the way that this process played out contributed significantly to the consolidation of peace and commitment to the newly agreed governance reforms. In many instances, the formalization of rebel groups into political parties is funded through international support to the peace process, although interestingly in Mozambique it was also supported by RENAMO opponent FRELIMO.155 The good faith implied by this likely helped build confidence between the parties, which in turn contributed to the fact that the political processes established for the transfer of authority have been largely respected in the postwar state. As scheduled by Mozambique’s 1992 General Peace Agreement, presidential and parliamentary elections were held in 1994, followed by munic-

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ipal elections in 1998, and the five-year terms have been respected as has the limitation that presidents serve a maximum of two terms. A system of proportional representation was used in the 1994 elections, as stipulated in the GPA, which resulted in three parties entering parliament: FRELIMO won 129 seats, RENAMO won 112, and the Democratic Union won 9.156 FRELIMO has maintained power ever since. Harris draws links between this situation and that of the interim government in Liberia, arguing that through this process RENAMO was effectively bought off through their internationally funded participation in the 1994 elections.157 The decentralization of power in Mozambique began in 1998 with the municipal elections, which for RENAMO meant that it had the potential to govern locally even if it did not win the parliamentary majority.158 There were significant disagreements over electoral rules in the lead-up to the election, which resulted in RENAMO’s boycott of the elections and a subsequent 15 percent voter turnout compared with the 88 percent turnout at the 1994 elections.159 However, changes were made to rectify this situation before the 1999 elections in which transparency was emphasized; consequently, RENAMO participated and there was a 68 percent voter turnout. 160 The Carter Center reported technical problems and a lack of transparency with the tabulation of votes, which undermined the credibility of the process and final results. RENAMO then challenged FRELIMO’s win in the Supreme Court, but the results were eventually validated by the court.161 However, tensions over the electoral process did not escalate into high levels of violence, as it did in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Côte d’Ivoire. Carrie Manning argues that the consolidation of democratic institutions in Mozambique postconflict was due in large part to the continual bargaining between FRELIMO and RENAMO, which meant that a set of rules was established that were no more beneficial to one party than the other.162 Essentially this resulted in the creation of mutual vulnerabilities in the peace process—and, because both were vulnerable, there was a significant level of credibility and commitment to the peace process, which contributed to the stability of the peace.163 Although there have been some challenges, such as RENAMO’s maintenance of armed militias in response to the police force being disproportionately made up of FRELIMO supporters, which was discussed in Chapter 3, Mozambique’s peace process has been generally successful in moving the resolution of political conflicts into the political arena. It has established relatively strong institutions that have prevented the resurgence of violence between FRELIMO and RENAMO, and Dorina A. Bekoe argues that “since Mozambique’s first election, political instability and resolution have found their roots in the electoral institutions’ rules that prevented dominance by one party and made the process more transparent.” 164 There were significant disagreements over the 1999 and 2004 electoral results, which RENAMO claimed were fraudulent, but inter-

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national observers assessed them to be relatively free and fair. Although there was some sporadic communal violence after the 1999 elections, in both 1999 and 2004 the disagreements were resolved through official institutions, like the National Electoral Commission and the Constitutional Court, whose decisions the parties accepted, unlike in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Liberia.165 One worrying development in 2000 was the statement by RENAMO’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama, that he was prepared to regroup and rearm the demobilized RENAMO troops to address what he claimed was the “harassment” of RENAMO supporters in Mozambique’s north and center.166 There were also reports in 2000 that former RENAMO combatants had rebanded and mounted offensives against police and government posts in the north and center of the country; however, this does not appear to have been part of a broader policy.167 Ultimately though, this case suggests that the mutual vulnerabilities built into the peace process helped maintain the parties’ confidence in each other’s commitment to peace in the period after the peace settlement. This has meant that electoral disputes did not escalate into the sort of violence seen in the cases discussed above. However, the governance-building process cannot be considered a broader success in that it has entrenched what Andrea E. Ostheimer calls “democratic minimalism,” or a fragile status quo based on a minimal electoral democracy, instead of the movement toward a more consolidated liberal democracy.168 Rather than opening up a plural political space, the democratization process was “controlled and directed largely by the ruling (FRELIMO) political elite” and consolidated its position of dominance, despite the opportunity for electoral competition.169 This is reminiscent of Hun Sen’s monopolization of political space in Cambodia. Nevertheless, mutual vulnerabilities contributed to confidence building after the GPA, which was an important part of preventing the country from slipping back into war. Similarly, Bougainville’s peace process benefited from a strong and collaborative relationship between newly autonomous Bougainville and the central Papua New Guinea government, which has meant that conflicts that have arisen during the peace implementation phase of governance reform have been resolved within established political frameworks rather than violence. This case provides a contrast to the highly antagonistic and conflictual relationships that defined the peace processes in Cambodia, Sudan, and Aceh discussed earlier. The Bougainville Peace Agreement included governance provisions in three main areas: the referendum on independence, autonomy arrangements, and political arrangements for Bougainville. The agreement provided for Bougainville to have a high level of autonomy but remain a part of Papua New Guinea, and it allowed for the Autonomous Bougainville Government to ask for a referendum on independence between ten and fif-

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teen years after the election of the first ABG. The referendum does not need to happen if Bougainville decides that it does not want one and, if it does happen, the Papua New Guinea government can demand that certain specified conditions around weapons disposal and the establishment and maintenance of good governance are met. “Good governance” was here defined in relation to internationally accepted standards as they are applicable and implemented in the circumstances of Bougainville and the rest of Papua New Guinea. These benchmarks include democracy and opportunities for participation by Bougainvilleans, transparency and accountability, as well as respect for human rights and the rule of law, including the Constitution of Papua New Guinea.170

The outcome of Bougainville’s independence referendum would not be binding but rather subject to ratification of the National Parliament, which could be a source of conflict if the parliament refuses to ratify the result. Wolfers argues that this may not be the most serious source of tension, and that the issue of whether Bougainvilleans peacefully accept the results of the referendum and the outcome of deliberations in the National Parliament will be more critical.171 This is especially so because it is not clear that an independence referendum will succeed at the expense of a working autonomous relationship with Papua New Guinea, yet some hard-line separatist elements likely will not accept anything short of independence.172 Nevertheless, unlike in South Sudan, the referendum on independence has not been the central issue around which all other parts of the peace process have revolved and significant effort has been put into making the autonomy arrangement work. The BPA’s autonomy provisions have been largely implemented since the agreement, and remain different from all existing or previous provincial government arrangements in Papua New Guinea. They gave Bougainville the freedom to choose its own government structures and constitution; the authority to exercise a wide range of powers and functions (including foreign relations powers); the authority to establish Bougainville’s own police, judicial, correctional, and public services; and a guarantee of partial grant funding for the region while it develops fiscal self-reliance through a wide range of taxation measures. The agreement also established a system for Bougainville–Papua New Guinea relations designed to foster cooperation and understanding.173 While these arrangements are far-reaching, they implied a far greater financial burden for the ABG to shoulder than it has been able to manage, given the state of the region’s economy. There were no guarantees of funding from the national government beyond a few grants to cover the expanded regional government functions, and the human resources necessary to main-

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tain such high-level functions were also lacking.174 While there has been some progress in devolving power from the central government to the ABG on issues such as police, justice systems, correctional facilities, public services, and taxation, the extent to which the ABG has been able to develop its capacity in those areas is in question and there are some serious deficiencies. After the BPA was signed, constitutional laws had to be written and passed by the National Parliament to implement the agreement, and this was done quickly and successfully despite the complexity of the agreement. The bills were combined as “Peace-building in Bougainville—Autonomous Bougainville Government and Bougainville Referendum”—one bill was a constitutional amendment and the other was for the adoption of the Organic Law on peace building in the region. Interestingly, the combined bills were titled as such to highlight that the primary point of the arrangements was not constitutional reform, but securing peace in Bougainville.175 Both Anthony Regan and Edward P. Wolfers argue that the way in which the national government acted to develop and lobby for bipartisan support of the bills highlighted its commitment to peace in Bougainville and acted as a confidence-building measure with the Bougainvillean parties, just as the fast implementation of the weapons disposal plan discussed in the last chapter built confidence between parties.176 Apart from the three main elements of the BPA—namely, the deferred referendum, the autonomy arrangements, and the weapons disposal plan— the agreement also provided for an amnesty and pardon in relation to criminal offenses committed in connection with the conflict and provided unusual arrangements that protected the key elements of the political settlement from unilateral change by the national government. These were also enshrined in the constitutional laws implementing the agreement.177 Under the new constitutional laws and autonomy arrangements, Bougainville had the right to decide on its own governance arrangements. The Constitution of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville was adopted on November 12, 2004, establishing the ABG, which was to be an effectively independent government when powers were devolved to it by the national government.178 In May 2005, the UN Observer Mission in Bougainville (UNOMB) declared the weapons disposal program complete and the situation in Bougainville suitable for holding elections. Elections for the ABG were held in late May, with 294 candidates standing for election, many belonging to or allied with one of four major parties.179 An international election observer mission monitored the election and concluded that it was “competently and transparently conducted in all respects,” although it did note that there were some problems with the electoral roll and during polling, issues that were quickly and effectively resolved by electoral officials.180 Joseph Kabui won the presidency with 55 percent to John Momis’s 35 percent, attributed by many to Kabui’s strong efforts to build a coalition

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and establish the Bougainville People’s Congress Party (BPCP) before the AGB election campaigning started.181 The BPCP won twenty-seven seats in the legislature while John Momis’s New Bougainville Party won eleven and the New Labour Party won one. Kabui’s efforts postelection to put together a “Grand Coalition,” appointing former Bougainville Transitional Government and BPCP member Joseph Watawi as vice president and forming a government across former faction and party lines was clearly intended to promote political reconciliation among Bougainvillean parties, unlike the power-sharing arrangement in Cambodia.182 This new governance system seems to have been implemented successfully in Bougainville, with elections in 2010 also taking place smoothly and Momis winning against the incumbent president James Tanis.183 This suggests that the governance reform process in Bougainville has quite successfully moved the resolution of conflict into the nonviolent political arena. This is a significant achievement, given that the civil war had descended into a free-for-all that gave rise to a culture of violence as the main dispute resolution mechanism across Bougainville, with tensions between villages, districts, the wealthy and poor, those with power and those seeking it escalating into cycles of brutal violence.184 As discussed in Chapter 3, while violence within communities, especially violence against women and criminality, remain a serious challenge in Bougainville, there is a general sense that people are less likely to resort to violence to resolve political conflicts, which is distinctly different from the political cultures that characterized postwar Cambodia, Sudan, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Regan argues that far from PNG being a collapsing State, as some people suggest, my feeling is that out of this conflict in Bougainville have come many, many positive things, including a common understanding that violence is not an acceptable way of dealing with problems. That doesn’t mean that violence doesn’t occur—it does occur, but when it does there are all sorts of community responses to try to bring it under control as quickly as possible. And what we’re seeing is the emergence of the beginnings of commonly accepted limits and restrictions, which are part of what a modern State is, and what human rights and the rule of law are about.185

Perhaps most importantly, the inevitable tensions and conflicts between Bougainville and the Papua New Guinea national government, particularly around the implementation of the BPA, have not escalated into violence but have instead been resolved within the political frameworks established, including the Joint Supervisory Body established by the BPA as the main mechanism for consultation, cooperation, and prevention and resolution of disputes.186 Tensions have arisen over the delegation of certain police functions and powers to Bougainville and the decision on how the BPF would

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relate to the national police force as well as the issues of national grants for which Bougainville is eligible. In these cases, the tensions were diffused by deferring final decisions and mutually acceptable ad hoc arrangements while the details of the issues were worked through.187 This demonstrates goodwill on the part of both parties and indicates their reluctance to resort to violence, confirmed in statements by both the Bougainvilleans and national government assuring their strong commitment to “lasting peace by peaceful means.”188 Further, the national government of Papua New Guinea has an obvious interest in fostering a constructive relationship with the ABG and making autonomy work for the region ahead of the referendum on independence and in light of the potential for other regions in Papua New Guinea to demand greater autonomy. This contrasts with the Sudanese peace process where the South moved in the opposite direction during an interim period of autonomy, toward secession, even though there were clear benefits to both sides in remaining a single united Sudan. Bougainville also provides a contrast to the bad faith and lack of trust that has characterized postwar political relationships in many of the other states considered in this chapter. Another example of the parties’ commitment to resolve political conflicts nonviolently is the issue of the rightful ownership of natural mineral resources in Bougainville, which arose in February 2008 when Bougainville’s politicians started looking toward mining revenues as a way to build the region’s economy and taxation base in order to fund essential infrastructure and development projects. The dispute centered on the devolution of powers to the ABG, particularly resource ownership; however, the national government insisted that the state should maintain ownership of natural resources.189 The conflict was resolved through negotiations, which was a positive indication of the parties’ commitment to peace, but it indicates the potential for ambiguities in peace agreements to pose significant challenges to their implementation. The issue also raises questions about how communities will respond to the reopening of mines, with many communities reluctant to see them reopened, given that they sparked the civil war.190 President Momis has promised that the independence referendum will happen between 2015 and 2020, depending on the resolution of outstanding issues around weapons disposal and good governance.191 Although the way that it plays out will give a definitive answer to the question of the levels of commitment to the nonviolent resolution of conflicts, my analysis suggests that the governance reform process has been responsive to the political dynamics of the postwar region in that it has been pursued in a way that not only achieved electoral and institutional reform, but built confidence between conflicting actors while doing so. The process appears to have successfully moved the resolution of conflict into the political realm, with actors using collaborative mechanisms to resolve tensions as they arose.

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This is markedly different to many of the other postwar states discussed in this chapter.

Building Institutional Capacity in the Aftermath of Civil War So far in this chapter, I have examined post–peace agreement electoral processes and institutional transformation, asking whether and how those processes contributed to either peace consolidation or its erosion. The cases analyzed suggest that, when these processes focused largely on technical goals such as electoral system reform and reconstituting government structures, they were often not responsive to the existing dynamics and structures of power within a society. This left them open to being undermined by parties’ mistrust of each other, lack of commitment to ongoing peace building, or self-interested manipulation of reform processes. These issues manifested in various ways, including the establishment of informal systems of authority that overshadow formal ones; the resistance to participate in good faith in ongoing dialogue for peace consolidation; the refusal to submit political interests to the dictates of due political or electoral processes; the absence of a space for political opposition to occupy; and the dominance of a violent political culture, whereby the use or threat of violence characterizes political negotiations and processes. Governance reform not only encompasses governance systems and processes, but also the establishment of infrastructure for basic service provision, which is necessary so that the general population experiences the benefits of peace, or has a share of the peace dividend. On a basic level, if people do not perceive their lives to be better in peacetime, they will question the legitimacy of the peace established and its concomitant processes and structures. In many postwar states, institutions are weak and suffer an accountability deficit, and they are either incapable of or unwilling to be responsive to the needs of their citizens and to work within the political framework agreed to in a peace settlement, which can contribute to renewed instability. This may stem partly from the focus on high-level political reforms, such as electoral systems, which means that capacity building for service provision is not afforded the same amount of attention in the immediate aftermath to war. It may also stem from the challenges inherent in building governance infrastructure and effectiveness, particularly in places where such infrastructure has never really existed. Whatever the cause, the impact is often that the capacity of governance institutions to function effectively is severely undermined, and this can significantly impact the stability and consolidation of peace.

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With this in mind, it is important to have reasonable expectations of how long it takes to build effective governance and service provision infrastructure. For instance, in South Sudan, the new government had little capacity to provide even basic services to its citizens due to a lack of resources and infrastructure as well as the difficult geographic terrain. The low rates of formal education and low technical capacity after the war made staffing southern institutions and ministries very difficult.192 This had the dual impact of hamstringing the effectiveness of the GOSS and deterring the Sudanese diaspora from returning to participate in the new system. It shows that building governance infrastructure and effectiveness in service provision takes a long time, especially in war-ravaged countries. Nevertheless, it is important to explore why governance institutions in so many postwar states are plagued by weakness and often imbued with ongoing political conflict. A common problem in postwar states is the weak capacity of governance infrastructure for basic service provision, which can compound people’s dissatisfaction with the benefits of the peace established and lead to conflict between formerly warring groups or among the general population over scarce resources, thereby contributing to destabilization. Poor service provision is not unique to postwar states, but rather a challenge facing many low-income developing countries, as are the interlinked challenges of criminality, poverty, violence, resource competition, and instability. But institutional weakness and accountability deficits in postwar states are linked to the way that peace processes played out in the governance sphere and often highlight broader problems with approaches to postwar governance building. In other words, peace processes can either diminish or exacerbate these problems. The Liberian experience of building postwar institutional capacity showcases a range of these issues, particularly around the difficulty of developing institutions nearly from scratch, building community confidence in the government’s legitimacy, and addressing corruption. In Liberia, while a great deal of attention was given to the establishment of the system and structures of electoral politics and to economic recovery, the capital of Monrovia continued to have extremely limited electric service, a limited piped water system, no landline telephone service, and poor roads six years after the war ended. The situation in the rest of the country was similar. 193 Given that postwar Liberia had very little infrastructure left after the war, it is unsurprising that public infrastructure and services remain in this state more than a decade after peace was established and that the government’s focus has been on rebuilding the economy, which will give it an increased capacity to improve facilities and services. The government’s legitimacy in the eyes of many citizens has decreased as service provision has not

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improved, particularly in the face of the 2014 Ebola crisis. Economic recovery has been challenged by endemic corruption, which has itself undermined the government’s capacity to address poverty, economic development, and provide basic education and health care services. For example, in 2010, the auditor general found over $50 million unaccounted for in several ministries.194 This is just one of many examples showcasing the ongoing challenge that corruption presents to the government, and particularly to the president’s capacity to govern effectively. Immediately after the Accra Peace Agreement was signed, there was pessimism about the chances of establishing lasting peace in Liberia, with analysts predicting that money would continue to determine political power, which might lead to resurgent war. Thomas Jaye argues that those who continue to marginalise the vast majority of Liberians have assumed the helm of state power [in the transitional government]. These elements have never shown interest in the security of the Liberian people; rather, they have always been interested in getting rich quick, building mansions, lavishing money on concubines, travelling abroad, sending their children and families abroad on vacations while the other half dies slowly in abject poverty. In the long run, this is a recipe for renewed fighting and this means that the issues of governance, distributive justice and security need to be taken seriously within the context of building a secure post-conflict society.195

As discussed earlier, the nature of the transitional government meant that those who assumed power initially did not really participate in or influence politics after the 2005 election. However, part of Jaye’s prediction was accurate: government corruption was widespread. Consequently, President Sirleaf made fighting corruption one of her highest priorities, firing and referring for investigation “scores of public officials, including high-level ministry personnel, county superintendents, and senior central bank officials.”196 Sirleaf’s efforts were not particularly successful, largely due to weaknesses in the judicial system, which made it difficult to hold perpetrators accountable. The Liberian Anti-Corruption Commission made some progress in investigations, recommending four high-level civil servants for prosecution, including the former inspector general of the Liberian National Police and several Ministry of Finance employees. The first guilty verdict in a major corruption case was delivered in July 2010, which involved the illegal transfer of Central Bank of Liberia funds.197 So, while corruption remains a serious obstacle to government effectiveness, there are positive signs that steps have been taken to address it. Nevertheless, the high levels of government corruption contributed to community dissatisfaction with Liberia’s peace, particularly among former combatants who received little support and enjoyed few opportunities in the new postwar Liberia. This manifested during the 2011 election in growing opposition to Sirleaf, in

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addition to support for her opposition and vows not to cooperate with her government. Corruption in Aceh has similarly undermined the legitimacy of governance institutions, with high levels of corruption in local and provincial structures contributing to poor service delivery. A Transparency International survey in 2010 found that 75 percent of respondents perceived the government to have been ineffective in eradicating corruption from within governance institutions, including the executive, police, and judiciary.198 Further, in 2007 the ICG argued that, at a local government level, GAM had simply replaced the old Jakartan political elite and was not providing for the population’s basic needs.199 This may undermine the stability of the peace established, particularly if those who remain disenfranchised in peacetime become frustrated with the balance of power. The Cambodian experience exemplifies some of these challenges and highlights their links to broader problems in processes of governance reform. The unusual duplicate system of government structures and institutions that was established after the 1993 elections meant that corruption was rife, the political elite became wealthier and more powerful, and “instead of much-needed reform, the state continued to grow in size and weaken in effectiveness, despite massive foreign aid.”200 As discussed earlier, power was centralized, there was no room within the political system for debate or dissent, and stability hinged on the denial or marginalization of political differences—as seen clearly after the 1997 coup, when the country’s relative stability rested on Hun Sen’s complete monopolization of power. The centralization of power has led to a culture of impunity where the rich and the powerful remain above the law and manipulate the judicial institutions to their own ends.201 One consequence was that the civil service did not operate as a neutral actor in the years after the peace agreement, with many staff turning to corruption to supplement their low salaries, which meant that civilians often had to pay bribes for basic services.202 This undermined the legitimacy of the central government in the eyes of many civilians and compounded a culture of impunity. Bougainville again provides an interesting contrast to these examples of corruption-based ineffectiveness, with corruption less of a challenge than resource scarcity, and suggests that government effectiveness is likely to be higher if governance systems are rooted in traditional and customary governance mechanisms. Bougainville’s levels of social service provision were once among the highest in Papua New Guinea, but they deteriorated during the civil war and have not been fully restored, with varying levels of effectiveness across sectors and geographical areas. The health and education systems in Bougainville remain under the national system and are relatively good, with the region’s capacities in those sectors no worse than in other parts of Papua New Guinea or the Pacific. Given the context, Volker Boege

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argues that the “effectiveness of [health and education] service provision is remarkably strong.”203 In contrast, the state’s effectiveness in terms of managing the formal economy in Bougainville is poor, due to a lack of legitimacy and capacity. Boege’s survey of public and official opinion in Bougainville shows that, on the other hand, the customary institutions are strong in terms of managing food and natural resources effectively and enjoy legitimacy in the communities.204 Bougainville’s low institutional capacity is largely due to a lack of resources, particularly financial resources, to “make a state” or, in other words, to build up the region’s capability to take on the new responsibilities and authority accorded to it by autonomy. Although the Papua New Guinea government is responsible for covering the costs of providing basic government services to the level they are provided throughout Papua New Guinea, Bougainville develops fiscal self-reliance. The costs of establishing new institutions are Bougainville’s own responsibility.205 The biggest challenge to the establishment of modern state structures in Bougainville is that the island’s subsistence and exchange economy cannot sustain such structures in the absence of alternative revenue sources such as mining and commercial agriculture.206 The issue of mining is obviously a sensitive one, given that it was the mining industry that sparked the civil war. This has, as discussed earlier, led to tension between the ABG and national government as well as between and among local communities. The Bougainville tax system is very weak and in tension with local customary forms of taxation, which also limits the government’s effectiveness. Boege argues that the ABG is in a quagmire in this regard because, as in other postconflict states, the long-term stability of the new state system is based on the state’s performance and effectiveness in delivering core services in order to gain legitimacy. To do this, it requires an economic base, which needs to be provided through taxation. But people are unwilling to pay taxes or recognize the government’s authority to collect them if they do not perceive the government’s provision of services as effective. 207 This is complicated by the fact that communities are apparently more satisfied with the customary taxation system.208 Given these challenges, it is unlikely that Bougainville will become fiscally self-reliant in the near future, and consequently the ABG’s capacity to provide basic services likely will remain limited. However, as this path of economic development is pursued, the pressure stemming from the formal economy and the use of land for mining and other commercial activities may lead to a resurgence of conflicts, given the incompatibilities between the formal and subsistence economies. 209 Just as the peace process was based on the complex interaction of state-based, civil society, and customary institutions and instruments, so too must the process of developing effective governance institutions integrate these various elements. Boege argues that Bougainville is by no means a weak or failing

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state, but a hybrid political order in the process of state formation.210 This complicates the establishment of effective governance institutions, but also offers many opportunities for those institutions to be established in a way responsive to the local context. To date there has been some progress in doing this in Bougainville, but much remains to be done as governance institutions remain weak in some key areas. This discussion suggests that, although weak institutional capacity is a problem faced by most developing states, its existence in postwar states can pose particular challenges to the stability and consolidation of peace, especially where governance institutions are being completely reconstituted or established where they have never really existed previously. Corruption presents a serious obstacle to the development of the legitimacy and capacity of nascent governance institutions, and the cases of Liberia, Aceh, and Cambodia suggest that it can stem from political and personal motivations that are rooted in conflict dynamics. When such motivations obstruct the impartial or effective functioning of governance institutions, the legitimacy of those institutions is further undermined and, by extension, so is the legitimacy of the government, especially in the eyes of those outside the national elite. This analysis also suggests that a lack of resources enabling such institutions to deliver services can undermine the stability of peace in a similar way, by compounding tension and mistrust between groups competing for scarce resources such as in South Sudan and Bougainville. The economic dimensions of building and sustaining postwar governance institutions clearly also play a role in ensuring that institutional transformation contributes to peace consolidation rather than undermines it.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that many governance reform processes in postwar states face similar challenges despite significant contextual differences. My analysis of the three constituent components of governancebuilding processes—namely, electoral processes, institutional transformation, and institutional capacity—identified a number of factors that contribute to the ineffectiveness of these processes in consolidating peace in the aftermath of peace agreements. One recurrent theme was that, despite the establishment of new institutions and processes, a violent political culture remained more or less unchanged in most of the cases. This meant that relationships between different groups often continued to be defined by mistrust and conflictual behavior dominated the peace agreement implementation process. As a result, wartime divisions and modes of interaction became embedded in

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some postwar systems. In some cases, such as Cambodia and Sudan, this meant that there was no real opportunity for a political opposition to play a role in governance processes, with the ruling elite narrowing the political space to exclude competing groups. In some cases, such as Mozambique, South Sudan, and Côte d’Ivoire, it meant that militancy remained a central characteristic of political parties. In almost all the cases that I examined, with the notable exception of Aceh and Bougainville, violence continued to be a key characteristic of political culture, with the use or threat of force common in the negotiation of political power or outcomes. In contrast, in cases where parties demonstrated a commitment to ongoing cooperation and negotiation after the initial peace agreement was signed, the political culture was more likely to shift away from violent confrontation. For instance, in Bougainville, the national Papua New Guinea and autonomous Bougainville governments each took confidence-building steps to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to peacemaking and peacebuilding, which has fundamentally changed the conflict dynamic in the province. Building compromise and mutual vulnerability into a peace agreement was not necessarily enough to support the shift away from a violent political culture toward a more collaborative one. In Cambodia, compromise was intricately woven into the Paris Accords through the interlinking of political and military aspects of the peace process: the rebel groups agreed to accept military demobilization only if the CPP regime would accept political demobilization.211 Despite this initial cooperation, Hun Sen’s CPP consistently acted against the principles of cooperation by strategically sidelining opponents and monopolizing authority and power. Mutual vulnerability was similarly built into the peace agreement in Mozambique, which successfully functioned to keep the process on a track of ongoing dialogue and cooperation and meant that significant progress was made in reforming electoral systems and processes. But while FRELIMO supported the formal politicization of its opponent RENAMO, it has ensured that subsequent governance reforms have consolidated its elite position in the state, including by narrowing the space for a viable political opposition and filling the security forces, especially the elite branches, with FRELIMO supporters. Bad faith and a lack of commitment to peace building lie at the heart of many of these problems. This has manifested in various ways in the cases that I studied. In some cases, it meant that agreements were signed without the parties’ full commitment to implementing them. For instance, the Government of Indonesia agreed to principles of Acehnese autonomy that are in tension with the national constitution, and North and South Sudan have not engaged in the CPA-agreed border demarcation negotiations with the intention of collaboratively resolving the dispute. Nor have they implemented a range of provisions around wealth sharing and the border regions, provisions that were central to the peace settlement.

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In other cases, bad faith has manifested in a weak commitment to the principles and processes of political competition agreed to in peace settlements. This was the case most clearly in Cambodia, where Hun Sen and the CPP manipulated governance reforms to ensure that their continued authority went largely unchallenged by democratic processes. In Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the weak commitment to agreed-to processes and democratic principles was demonstrated either by elite manipulation of elections to guarantee their win or by the refusal of opposition groups to accept the results of largely technically successful elections. Bougainville provides the most interesting contrast to this phenomenon of bad faith engagement in peace processes, with both parties taking pains to build confidence with each other and work collaboratively to consolidate and maintain peace. Although it is somewhat inevitable that the relationships between formerly warring groups remain colored by mistrust and antagonism in the years after brutal civil warfare, the consolidation of peace is dependent on parties moving beyond those dynamics to work cooperatively, or at least under the auspices of due political process, in the interests of security and stability. My analysis suggests that the political structures and dynamics of postwar societies play defining roles in the success of governance-building processes. The cases examined show that, when such processes focus primarily on the technical aspects of governance reform, they can overlook the structures of power, dynamics of conflict, and underlying political culture in the postwar society. In doing so, they risk delinking the institutions established during the peace process from the politics and dynamics of power that will dictate how they function. Discrete technical goals were central to all of the processes studied, particularly around establishing electoral systems, facilitating elections, and building the frameworks of governance institutions. In Bougainville, these goals were codependent on the achievement of political goals and this contributed to the robustness of the peace process. In other cases, the technical aspects of governance reform were pursued with less sensitivity to the political dynamics of the postwar society. For instance, in Cambodia, UNTAC and the international community involved in the peace processes pushed ahead with the electoral process and the constitution of a new government even when key actors, particularly Hun Sen and the CPP, refused to honor the democratic principles agreed to in the Paris Peace Agreement. In Liberia, although the government system was overhauled, elite-level corruption remained endemic, disenfranchising large parts of the population, with some groups reverting to the threat of violence in political processes. In Sudan, international attention focused on implementing the formal requirements of the CPA, including stopping open conflict between the North and South, holding the referendum, and establishing state structures for the newly inde-

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pendent South, but the ongoing communal conflict between southern groups threatens to destabilize the new institutions and the fragile peace. In Mozambique, although an electoral democracy has been somewhat effectively established, its maturation has been blocked by FRELIMO’s manipulation of ongoing governance reforms to minimize the chance of RENAMO challenging its authority. While technical mechanisms are clearly important elements of postwar governance-building processes, these cases suggest that, when they become the central focus, those processes risk being disconnected from a postwar society’s political structures and insensitive to the political culture that defines how actors participate in them. The result is that the institutions and processes of governance are hollow and not respected by actors who can exercise their power or authority outside of formal channels—for instance, through corruption, patronage networks, or violence. As Roberts argues, in such cases the pillars of society are at odds with the new systems that stand on them, which embeds instability in the system despite the technical or theoretical “correctness” of the new systems.212 Consequently, the resolution of political conflict is not moved into the nonviolent political arena, but remains determined by violent political cultures characterized by mistrust and conflictual behaviors, and these forces may operate outside of formal channels and systems of governance and act in ways that undermine them. Essentially, if postwar governance reform focuses on technocratic goals without considering the broader political dynamics and power structures that are expected to submit to new institutions and systems, reform processes risk failing to change the underlying sources and modes of conflict and political competition in the postwar state. Rather than developing an alternative governance order, wartime divisions and instability risk becoming embedded in the postwar system. The cases that I discussed in this chapter suggest that the conflicts that plague postwar peace consolidation processes are essentially Clausewitzian political conflicts: they are fundamentally contests about power and authority. As such, technocratic responses are not enough to consolidate peace: focusing on structures and technical mechanisms ignores political complexity. Peace processes in these conflicts must pursue technical goals while being responsive to the political and social context of the specific postwar society in which they are being implemented. They cannot simply replicate a predetermined governance model through technocratic reforms.

Notes 1. James A. Schear, “Riding the Tiger: The United Nations and Cambodia’s Struggle for Peace,” in UN Peacekeeping, American Politics and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s, ed. William J. Durch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 151.

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2. For a more detailed discussion of this history, see Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79–81; Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 136–138. 3. Paris, At War’s End, 80; Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 136. 4. Paris, At War’s End, 80. 5. Douglas Pike, “The Cambodian Peace Process: Summer of 1989,” Asian Survey 29, no. 9 (1989): 845. 6. For a more detailed discussion of the lead-up to the peace settlement, see Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 137–139. 7. Ibid., 139. 8. David Ashley, “Between War and Peace: Cambodia 1991–1998,” in Safeguarding Peace: Constitutional Change in Cambodia, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 22. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Frederick Z. Brown, “Cambodia in 1992: Peace at Peril,” Asian Survey 33, no. 1 (1993): 85. 11. Uppsala Conflict Data Program, “UCDP Database,” n.d., www.ucdp.uu.se /database. 12. Carl Bergquist, “Chronology,” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 90. 13. Paris, At War’s End, 85. 14. Ashley, “Between War and Peace,” 28. 15. Ibid.; Sorpong Peou, “Diplomatic Pragmatism: ASEAN’s Response to the July 1997 Coup,” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 32. 16. Ashley, “Between War and Peace,” 28–29. 17. This was especially set out in the Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, which held that Cambodians had the “right to determine their own political future through the free and fair election of a constituent assembly” (Article 12), that the principles on which the new Cambodian Constitution would be based included respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms (Article 23), and that the system would be a liberal democracy based on pluralism (Annex 5, Article 4). See “Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict,” October 23, 1991, http://peacemaker.un.org /cambodiaparisagreement91. 18. Ibid., Annex 1. For a detailed discussion of UNTAC’s mandate and undertakings, see Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 147–153. 19. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 143. 20. “Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict,” sec. 3, art. 6. 21. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 155; Steven R. Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conflict After the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 166–168. 22. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 155–156; Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping, 168. 23. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 159. 24. Ibid.; Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping, 173. 25. John M. Sanderson and Michael Maley, “Elections and Liberal Democracy in Cambodia,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 52, no. 3 (1998): 242. 26. Ibid. 27. See “Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict,” par. 12, Annexes 1, 3. 28. David Ashley, “The Undoing of UNTAC’s Elections: No Mechanism for a

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Transfer of Power,” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 61; David Roberts, “Finishing What UNTAC Started: The Political Economy of Peace in Cambodia,” Peacekeeping and International Relations 28, no. 1 (1999): 14–15. 29. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 161–163. 30. UN Secretary-General, Report of the Secretary-General in Pursuance of Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 810 (1993) on Preparations for the Election for the Constituent Assembly in Cambodia, UN Doc. S/25784 (New York: United Nations, May 15, 1995), 5. 31. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 167. 32. United Nations, The United Nations and Cambodia, 1991–1995 (New York: United Nations, 1995), 46. 33. Yasushi Akashi, “The Challenge of Peacekeeping in Cambodia,” International Peacekeeping 1, no. 2 (1994): 207. 34. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 170. 35. Interestingly, Akashi recognizes the unorthodoxy of this power-sharing solution by democratic principles, but argues that it was based on practical wisdom: while FUNCINPEC won the election, the CPP had fourteen years of administrative experience and controlled most of the army and the police. Akashi, “The Challenge of Peacekeeping in Cambodia,” 207–208. 36. Sanderson and Maley, “Elections and Liberal Democracy in Cambodia,” 243. 37. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 139, see pp. 139–140 for a fuller analysis of local parties’ motivations for signing the Paris Accords. See also Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping, 158–160. 38. Frederick H. Fleitz, Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions and US Interests (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 129. 39. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 171. 40. Paris, At War’s End, 86. 41. Roberts, “Finishing What UNTAC Started,” 15; Paris, At War’s End, 87; Ashley, “Between War and Peace,” 24. 42. Sanderson and Maley, “Elections and Liberal Democracy in Cambodia.” 43. Evan Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 353–354. 44. Paris, At War’s End, 89. 45. Ibid., 87. 46. Sanderson and Maley, “Elections and Liberal Democracy in Cambodia,” 244. 47. Ashley, “Between War and Peace,” 29. 48. Ibid. 49. Sue Downie, “Cambodia’s 1998 Election: Understanding Why It Was Not a ‘Miracle on the Mekong,’” Australian Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 1 (2000): 43–62; International Crisis Group, Cambodia’s Flawed Elections: Why Cambodia Will Not Be Ready for Free and Fair Elections on 26 July 1998 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, June 1998); International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend (Phnom Penh: International Crisis Group, August 2000), 1. 50. Sanderson and Maley, “Elections and Liberal Democracy in Cambodia,” 246–250. 51. Ashley, “Between War and Peace,” 25–26. 52. Shahar Hameiri, Regulating Statehood: State Building and the Transformation of the Global Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 183.

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53. Neou Vannarin, “Hun Sen Says CPP Largess Will End if Election Is Lost,” Cambodia Daily, March 7, 2013, www.cambodiadaily.com/news/hun-sen-says-cpp -largess-will-end-if-election-is-lost-12645/. 54. International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend, 24. The establishment of a liberal democratic system was emphasized in the Paris Peace Agreement, see “Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict,” Annex 5. 55. Lao Mong Hay, “Cambodia’s Agonising Quest: Political Progress Amidst Institutional Backwardness,” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 39. 56. David Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia 1991–99: Power, Elitism and Democracy (Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), 203. 57. Ibid. 58. Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping, 174. 59. Yasushi Akashi recounts that he told colleagues within UNTAC that “real democracy takes decades and even centuries to develop,” and argues that UNTAC was just trying to sow “some of the essential seeds for the growth of democracy which the Cambodian people themselves had to nurture after our departure.” Akashi, “The Challenge of Peacekeeping in Cambodia,” 206. 60. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 173. 61. Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping, 158. 62. See ibid., 161; Fleitz, Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s, 128; Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 175–176. 63. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 156, 174. 64. For a discussion of the impact of injecting pluralism into the Cambodian system, see ibid., 174. 65. Caroline Hughes, “Transnational Networks, International Organizations and Political Participation in Cambodia: Human Rights, Labour Rights and Common Rights,” Democratization 14, no. 5 (2007): 836. 66. Sorpong Peou, Intervention and Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy? (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), 427. 67. Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia 1991–99, 171. 68. Ibid. 69. Peou, Intervention and Change in Cambodia, 429. 70. For a discussion of this “deploring” and its consequences, see Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia 1991–99, 204. 71. Ibid., 205. 72. Ibid., 210. 73. Edward Aspinall and Harold Crouch, The Aceh Peace Process: Why It Failed (Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2003). 74. Edward Aspinall, The Helsinki Agreement: A More Promising Basis for Peace in Aceh? (Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2005), 11. 75. Pieter Feith, The Aceh Peace Process, Nothing Less than Success, Special Report No. 184 (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, March 2007), 1– 2. Interestingly, both of these peace processes were facilitated by NGOs—the Henri Dunant Centre in Geneva and the Crisis Management Initiative in Finland. However, while the Henri Dunant Centre cultivated a role for Acehnese civil society organizations in the peace process, there was only marginal civil society organization involvement in the CMI-led process and subsequent implementation of the MOU. See Konrad Huber, The HDC in Aceh: Promises and Pitfalls of NGO Media-

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tion and Implementation (Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004), viii; Edward Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? The Helsinki Peace Process in Aceh (Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2007), 11. 76. “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement,” August 15, 2005, secs. 1.1, 1.2, http://peacemaker.un.org/indonesia-memorandumaceh2005. 77. Scott Cunliffe, Eddie Riyadi, Raimondus Arwalembun, and Hendrik Boli Tobi, Negotiating Peace in Indonesia: Prospects for Building Peace and Upholding Justice in Maluku and Aceh (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, June 2009), 19. 78. Ibid. 79. “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement,” sec. 1.2.1. 80. Aguswandi, “The Political Process in Aceh: A New Beginning?” in Reconfiguring Politics: The Indonesia-Aceh Peace Process, ed. Aguswandi and Judith Large (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008), 53; Feith, The Aceh Peace Process, 7. 81. International Crisis Group, Indonesia: How GAM Won in Aceh (Jakarta: International Crisis Group, March 2007), 1. 82. Feith, The Aceh Peace Process, 7. 83. International Crisis Group, Indonesia: How GAM Won in Aceh, 1. 84. Carter Center, Final Report of the Carter Center Limited Observation Mission to the April 9, 2009, Legislative Elections in Indonesia (Atlanta: Carter Center, April 9, 2009), 6, www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/peace_publications /election_reports/FinalReportIndonesia2009.pdf. 85. Ben Hillman, Political Parties and Post-conflict Transition: The Results and Implications of the 2009 Parliamentary Elections in Aceh (Canberra: Centre for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University, January 2010), 4. 86. Ibid., 5. 87. Ibid., 5–10. 88. “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement,” sec. 1.1.1. 89. Aspinall, The Helsinki Agreement, ix. 90. Bernhard May, “The Law on the Governing of Aceh: The Way Forward or a Source of Conflicts?” in Reconfiguring Politics: The Indonesia-Aceh Peace Process, ed. Aguswandi and Judith Large (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008), 43–45. 91. Ibid., 44. 92. Hillman, Political Parties and Post-conflict Transition, 4. 93. May, “The Law on the Governing of Aceh,” 45. 94. Ibid. 95. Mark Simmons and Peter Dixon, “Introduction,” in Peace by Piece: Addressing Sudan’s Conflicts, ed. Mark Simmons and Peter Dixon (London: Conciliation Resources, 2006), 6. 96. For a discussion of this, see Taisier M. Ali, Robert O. Matthews, and Ian S. Spears, “Failures in Peacebuilding: Sudan (1972–1983) and Angola (1991–1998),” in Durable Peace: Challenges for Peacebuilding in Africa, ed. Taisier M. Ali and Robert O. Matthews (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 285. 97. For an account of the dynamics of this internal feuding, see Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002). 98. These were the 2002 Machakos Protocol, which dealt with the referendum, the 2004 Power Sharing Accord, the 2004 Wealth Sharing Accord; the 2004 Accord

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on the Resolution of the Abeyi Conflict; the 2004 Accord on the Resolution of Conflict in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile States; and the 2003 and 2004 Security Arrangements Accords. 99. Cirino Hiteng Ofuho, “Negotiating Peace: Restarting a Moribund Process,” in Peace by Piece: Addressing Sudan’s Conflicts, ed. Mark Simmons and Peter Dixon (London: Conciliation Resources, 2006), 21. 100. For a discussion of this, see Luka Biong Deng, “The Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Will It Be Sustained?” Civil Wars 7, no. 3 (2005): 244. 101. See, for instance, Mike Jobbins, “The CPA Implementation: Taking Stock (A Summary of Conference Proceedings from the September 11th, 2006, Symposium Entitled, Sudan’s Peace Settlement: Progress and Perils),” in Implementing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Prospects and Challenges, ed. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008), 6–7. 102. BBC News, “South Sudan ‘Reneging on Peace Deal’—President Bashir,” October 10, 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11510109. 103. Biong Deng, “The Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement,” 247–248. 104. Jobbins, “The CPA Implementation,” 8. 105. Ibid., 11. 106. See ibid., 14; Sara Pantuliano, “Comprehensive Peace? An Analysis of the Evolving Tension in Eastern Sudan,” Review of African Political Economy 33, no. 110 (2006): 713. 107. For a detailed discussion of governance reforms, see Legiwaila Joseph Legiwaila, “More than North-South: The CPA and the Greater Conflict(s) in the Sudan,” in Implementing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Prospects and Challenges, ed. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008), 33–36. 108. International Crisis Group, Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Beyond the Crisis (Nairobi: International Crisis Group, March 2008), 1. 109. For a discussion of the dynamics of the NCP-SPLM relationship, see ibid., 1–8. 110. Ibid., 1. 111. David L. Goldwyn, “Implementation of the Wealth Sharing Accords: Oil, Energy and Political Implications,” in Implementing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Prospects and Challenges (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008), 15–21. 112. See James Gatdek Dak, “Sudan’s 1956 North-South Border Map Is Nonexistent—Committee,” Sudan Tribune, June 28, 2008, www.sudantribune.com/spip .php?article27683; Donald Petterson, “Abeyi Unresolved: A Threat to the NorthSouth Agreement,” in Implementing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Prospects and Challenges (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008), 26. 113. Petterson, “Abeyi Unresolved,” 24–25. 114. Ibid. 115. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010: Events of 2009 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2010), 173–174. 116. See ibid., 174; International Crisis Group, Sudan: Defining the North-South Border (Juba: International Crisis Group, September 2, 2010), 1. 117. International Crisis Group, Sudan: Abeyi at a Dangerous Tipping Point (Washington, DC: International Crisis Group, May 8, 2011). 118. International Crisis Group, Sudan: Defining the North-South Border, 4.

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119. Melinda Young, “A Brighter Future Still a Long Way Off for South Sudan,” The Age, January 6, 2012, www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/a-brighter-future -still-a-long-way-off-for-south-sudan-20120106-1pnll.html; Reuters, “South Sudan Army Says to Pull Out of Border Buffer Zone,” March 11, 2013, www.reuters.com /article/2013/03/11/us-sudan-south-border-idUSBRE92A0JH20130311. 120. International Crisis Group, Sudan’s Rigged Elections (Nairobi: International Crisis Group, March 30, 2010). 121. Carter Center, “Carter Center Reports Widespread Irregularities in Sudan’s Vote Tabulation and Strongly Urges Steps to Increase Transparency,” press release, May 10, 2010, www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/sudan-051010.html. 122. Ibid. 123. International Crisis Group, Negotiating Sudan’s North-South Future (Juba: International Crisis Group, November 23, 2010). 124. Minority Rights Group International, “Urgent Measures Needed to Protect All Ethnic Groups After Recent South Sudan Attacks, MRG,” press release, January 5, 2012, www.minorityrights.org/11147/press-releases/urgent-measures-needed-to -protect-all-ethnic-groups-after-recent-south-sudan-attacks-mrg.html. 125. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Born in Unity, South Sudan Is Torn Again,” New York Times, January 12, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/africa/south-sudan -massacres-follow-independence.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=global-home. 126. Ibid. 127. Sarah Left, “War in Liberia,” The Guardian, August 4, 2003. 128. For a discussion of this, see Paris, At War’s End, 93–95. 129. For a discussion of this, see Gerry Cleaver and Simon Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” in Ending Africa’s Wars: Progressing to Peace, ed. Oliver Furley and Roy May (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 194–195. 130. David Harris, “Liberia 2005: An Unusual African Post-conflict Election,” Journal of Modern African Studies 44, no. 3 (2006): 393–395. 131. Ibid., 375. 132. Ibid., 377. 133. For an investigation of this issue, see Dawn Brancati and Jack L. Snyder, “Rushing to the Polls: The Causes of Premature Postconflict Elections,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 3 (2011): 469–492. 134. Harris, “Liberia 2005,” 378. 135. Cleaver and Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” 195. 136. Ibid. 137. Harris, “Liberia 2005,” 385. 138. For a full discussion of electoral results, see ibid., 375–395. 139. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010, 139. 140. Richard Valdmanis, “Troubled Liberia Poll Could Slow Sirleaf Agenda,” Reuters Africa, November 13, 2011, http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE 7AC08720111113?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&sp=true. 141. Carter Center, Carter Center Statement on Liberia’s Tally Process (Atlanta: Carter Center, October 20, 2011), www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/liberia-102011.html. 142. National Elections Commission, National Tally Center Tally Report for the Run-off Election of the President and Vice President on 8 November 2011 (Monrovia: Republic of Liberia, November 15, 2011), 3, http://necliberia.org/admin/pg _img/20111115_NationalProgressiveResultsHandouts%20pdf.pdf; National Elections Commission, National Tally Center Tally Report for the Presidential and Legislative Elections on 11 October 2011 (Monrovia: Republic of Liberia, October 25, 2011), 3, www.necliberia.org/admin/pg_img/20111025_NationalProgressiveResults Handouts.pdf.PDF.

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143. Valdmanis, “Troubled Liberia Poll Could Slow Sirleaf Agenda.” 144. For a discussion of community dissatisfaction with these campaigns, see International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? (Dakar: International Crisis Group, August 19, 2011). 145. “South Africa: President Jacob Zuma Commends DRC on Elections,” BuaNews, All Africa.com, 2011, http://allafrica.com/stories/201112051379.html. 146. Carter Center, “DRC Presidential Election Results Lack Credibility,” press release, December 10, 2011, www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/drc-121011.html. 147. EU Election Observation Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo, “The Election Observation Mission of the European Union Deplores the Lack of Transparency and Irregularities in the Collection, Compilation and Publication of Results,” press release, December 13, 2011, www.eueom.eu/files/pressreleases /english/eueom-rdc2011-press-release-13122011_en.pdf. 148. For a detailed discussion of the problems with the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, see International Crisis Group, “DR Congo: Saving the Elections,” press release, December 8, 2011. 149. Carter Center, “DRC Presidential Election Results Lack Credibility.” 150. See, for instance, International Crisis Group, “DR Congo: Saving the Elections.” 151. Theodore Trefon, “Analysis: DR Congo Elections Open Wounds,” BBC News, December 20, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16251401; SangHyun Song, “From Punishment to Prevention: Reflections on the Future of International Criminal Justice,” Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture, University of New South Wales, Australia, February 14, 2012, 7, http://uniken.unsw.edu.au/sites /default/files/uploads/2012WallaceWurth_memoriallecture.pdf. 152. International Crisis Group, Cote d’Ivoire: Is War the Only Option? (Dakar: International Crisis Group, March 3, 2011), 1. 153. Ibid., i. 154. Sarah Webb, “Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo Appears Before ICC,” Reuters, 2011, www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/05/us-ivorycoast-gbagbo-icc-idUSTRE7B40WY 20111205; BBC News, “Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo Appears at ICC in Hague,” 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16027845. 155. Dorina A. Bekoe, Implementing Peace Agreements: Lessons from Mozambique, Angola, and Liberia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 32–33. 156. Ibid., 25. 157. Harris, “Liberia 2005,” 394. 158. Bekoe, Implementing Peace Agreements, 48. 159. Ibid., 51–53. 160. Andrea E. Ostheimer, “Mozambique: The Permanent Entrenchment of Democratic Minimalism?” African Security Review 10, no. 1 (2001): 28; Carter Center, Observing the 1999 Elections in Mozambique: Final Report (Atlanta: Carter Center, 2000), 18, www.cartercenter.org/documents/280.pdf. 161. Carter Center, Observing the 1999 Elections in Mozambique, 2. 162. Carrie Manning, The Politics of Peace in Mozambique: Post-Conflict Democratization (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 18. 163. Bekoe, Implementing Peace Agreements, 26–42. 164. Ibid., 42. 165. Carrie Manning, “Mozambique: RENAMO’s Electoral Success,” in From Soldiers to Politicians: Transforming Rebel Movements After Civil War, ed. Jeroen de Zeeuw (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2008), 73. 166. Mozambique News Agency, “AIM Report No. 183,” May 16, 2000, www.poptel.org.uk/mozambique-news/newsletter/aim183.html.

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167. Pan-African News Agency, “RENAMO Members Arrested by Mozambican Police,” May 2, 2000. 168. Ostheimer, “Mozambique,” 34. 169. Ibid., 28. 170. “Bougainville Peace Agreement,” August 30, 2001, par. 314(a), http://peace maker.un.org/png-bougainville-agreement2001. 171. Edward P. Wolfers, Bougainville Autonomy: Implications for Governance and Decentralisation (Canberra: Australian National University, 2006), 3. 172. See Jim Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot: Ethnicity, Identity, and Separatism in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea,” in Fixing Fractured Nations: The Challenges of Ethnic Separatism in the Asia-Pacific, ed. Robert G. Wirsig and Ehsan Ahrari (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 239. 173. “Bougainville Peace Agreement,” Part B; See also Anthony Regan, “The Bougainville Political Settlement and the Prospects for Sustainable Peace,” Pacific Economic Bulletin 17, no. 1 (2002): 120; Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot,” 238; Edward P. Wolfers, “Challenges of Autonomy in Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville,” Journal of Pacific Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 9–11. 174. Wolfers, Bougainville Autonomy, 7. 175. Ibid., 2. 176. Edward P. Wolfers, “‘Joint Creation’: The Bougainville Peace Agreement— and Beyond,” in Accord: Weaving Consensus: The Papua New Guinea– Bougainville Peace Process, ed. Andy Carl and Sr. Lorraine Garasu (London: Conciliation Resources, 2002), 49; Regan, “The Bougainville Political Settlement and the Prospects for Sustainable Peace,” 119. 177. Regan, “The Bougainville Political Settlement and the Prospects for Sustainable Peace,” 119. 178. Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot,” 231. 179. Wolfers, “Challenges of Autonomy in Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville,” 14. 180. “Statement by the President of the Security Council,” S/PRST/2005/23 (New York: UN Security Council, June 15, 2005), 1, www.unhcr.org/refworld /pdfid/42bac5d44.pdf. See also General Election for the Autonomous Bougainville Government: Report of the Commonwealth–Pacific Islands Forum Expert Team (Bougainville: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2005), 8–13, www.thecommonwealth .org/shared_asp_files/uploadedfiles/E26ADF45-79D9-4638-83F7-A687 F743F0CB_BougainvilleReportFinal.pdf. 181. Wolfers, “Challenges of Autonomy in Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville,” 15–16. 182. Ibid., 16. 183. Liam Fox, “Bougainville Elects New Leader,” ABC News, June 8, 2010, www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/09/2922485.htm. 184. Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot,” 237. 185. Jan Borrie and Anthony Regan, “The Bougainville Peace Agreement,” Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Quarterly Bulletin 5, no. 4 (2004): 10. 186. Wolfers, Bougainville Autonomy, 8; Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot,” 239. 187. Wolfers, Bougainville Autonomy, 8. 188. Ibid., 11. 189. “Explosive Mines,” The Economist, February 7, 2008, www.economist.com /node/10651803.

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190. “Bougainville Landowners Irate over Rio Tinto’s Possible Return,” Postcourier, August 13, 2012; Patrick Talu, “Landowners Irate over BCL Talks,” Postcourier, June 8, 2012. 191. ABC News, “Bougainville Told to Solve Issues Before Referendum,” January 24, 2012, www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-24/an-bougainville-referendum-confirmed /4482558. 192. Jobbins, “The CPA Implementation,” 9–10. 193. Overseas Security Advisory Council, Liberia 2009 Crime and Safety Report (Washington, DC: Bureau of Diplomatic Security, US Department of State, January 17, 2009), https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=116969. 194. “Auditor General Challenges Government to Account for US$50 Million,” New Democrat, May 19, 2010, http://unmil.org/1article.asp?id=3852&zdoc=1. 195. Thomas Jaye, “An Analysis of Post-Taylor Politics,” Review of African Political Economy 30, no. 98 (2003): 645. 196. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010, 138. 197. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, UN Doc. S/2010/429 (UN Security Council, August 11, 2010), 3, www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2011/497. 198. Transparency International Indonesia, Corruption Barometer Survey in Aceh (Jakarta: Transparency International, June 2010). 199. International Crisis Group, Aceh: Post-conflict Complications (Jakarta: International Crisis Group, October 2007). 200. Ashley, “Between War and Peace,” 25–26. 201. Mong Hay, “Cambodia’s Agonising Quest,” 39. 202. Ibid. 203. Volker Boege, A Promising Liaison: Kastom and State in Bougainville (Brisbane: Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, October 2008), 21. 204. Ibid., 10. 205. Anthony Regan, “The Bougainville Conflict: Political and Economic Agendas,” in The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, ed. Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 152–153. 206. John Connell, “Bougainville: The Future of an Island Microstate,” Journal of Pacific Studies 28, no. 2 (2005): 192–217. 207. Boege, A Promising Liaison, 8. 208. Ibid., 9. 209. Ibid., 10. 210. Ibid., 16. 211. Schear, “Riding the Tiger,” 150–151. 212. Roberts, Political Transition in Cambodia 1991–99, 210.

5 Transitional Justice and Reconciliation

Transitional justice is the third main sphere in which the international community operates in post–peace agreement contexts in the attempt to consolidate peace and prevent further violence. Although an ever widening set of processes and tasks is included under the transitional justice banner, identifying and upholding responsibility for wartime crimes remains at the heart of postwar transitional justice. In contrast to the governance- and security-building spheres, this is the primary arena in which the international community engages with the social dynamics of postwar societies as part of the peace process. As shown in the previous chapters, postwar peace consolidation processes in the governance and security spheres have often been characterized by their focus on technical reform processes. The heavy focus on institutions has meant that these processes have often overlooked the importance of existing power structures and dynamics in postwar societies, which define the conditions in which peace must be built and the ways that societies interact with new state structures. The sphere of transitional justice would appear to demand engagement with local dynamics and power structures as a cornerstone of action. In this chapter, I explore the extent to which transitional justice has contributed to peace consolidation. I examine why many postconflict contexts remain colored by the perception and experience of injustice for wartime crimes despite transitional justice processes that are designed to hold to account the perpetrators of wartime crimes. I also explore why processes designed to facilitate reconciliation in divided societies often leave in their wake unresolved cleavages between communities and sometimes deepened divisions between the elite and the public. Transitional justice is a sweeping and widening field of action. The term is used to encompass everything from the war crimes tribunals of the

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former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to the truth commissions of many Latin American transitional states; to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); to work in the areas of justice reform, police reform, grassroots healing process, formal apologies and memorialization ceremonies, reparations, and indigenous or religious ceremonies of forgiveness, among other things. Many who work in the area understand transitional justice to play a central role in rebuilding society and the state by contributing to the reconstruction of the social fabric of war-torn societies through processes that hold to account the perpetrators of wartime crimes. Its ends are seen as both political and social. The nebulous nature of transitional justice creates challenges not just in transitional justice processes, but in attempts to describe and analyze them. Justice is an inherently political concept and conceptions of it inevitably differ, reflecting the particular contexts, approaches, moralities, and politics of those describing them. Consequently, the literature and policy around transitional justice vary greatly in terms of the activities that are considered within the purview of transitional justice—from the classic legal focus on war crimes trials and truth-telling, to the much broader processes of renegotiating the relationship between the state, society, and justice. The balance between backward-looking and forward-looking transitional justice is particularly tricky, opening up questions of how broadly transitional justice can reasonably be conceived. A key issue for those engaged in the sphere is whether it should be about the long-term development of judicial processes and institutions and the way individuals within a society relate to ideas of justice, or limited to providing some explanation and redress for the crimes committed during the war as a way to help cauterize the wounds of war and lay the foundations for the postwar society. Transitional justice is conceived variously as a special, limited type of justice, or as no different from justice more broadly conceived, apart from being implemented in a postwar transitional context. Rather than going into a detailed exploration of transitional justice itself,1 in this analysis I initially focus on what transitional justice is supposed to achieve in postconflict societies, specifically in the context of peace agreements that set out the major transitional justice mechanisms to be used. I explore some of the challenges inherent both in the often lofty goals set for transitional justice processes and in the way the processes are then implemented. Ultimately, though transitional justice is an ever broadening arena of action in postconflict contexts, my discussion of it is limited to the legal procedural aspect of transitional justice, primarily embodied in war crimes prosecutions and truth commissions, for three reasons. First, these have become the most common transitional justice mechanisms appearing in peace settlements. Second, these tend to be the mechanisms that receive the most attention by the international community. And third,

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the myriad transitional justice mechanisms beyond these are diffuse, messy, and deal with a slightly different concern than that of this investigation, which is less about the complete reorganization of a society and more about the way that peace consolidation happens on the basis of agreed-to processes in peace agreements. I then turn to a number of cases in which transitional justice has been pursued through formal mechanisms—namely, war crimes prosecutions and truth and reconciliation commissions—in order to examine its relationship to peace consolidation in those contexts. I explore the Liberian transitional justice process in detail, focusing on how the TRC functioned and what its impact was. The process in Liberia exemplifies recent approaches to formal transitional justice mechanisms and it drew on the “lessons learned” from transitional justice processes elsewhere, particularly in Sierra Leone. This process encountered numerous setbacks, which demonstrates the way that elites can capture legalistic transitional justice processes to serve their interests and political ends, rather than the social ends they are generally supposed to serve, as well as other weaknesses. Liberia’s experience suggests that formal transitional justice processes can become processes of elite bargaining, rather than accountability for past crimes. I develop this analysis of formal transitional justice mechanisms by looking at the experience of the war crimes tribunal in Cambodia, which was established ten years after the peace agreement was signed and which has become the most expensive war crimes tribunal in history. Finally, I turn my attention to the Indonesian archipelago, briefly examining the formal processes established to respond to the war in East Timor and the inability to establish such mechanisms in Aceh. Having considered the various merits and shortcomings associated with the formal legal approach to transitional justice embodied by these cases, I contrast them with the experience of Bougainville, where grassroots processes promoting social healing were used to pursue transitional justice, rather than formal mechanisms. Although transitional justice was not included in the Bougainville Peace Agreement, mechanisms emerged from within the society to deal with communities’ needs for recognition of their suffering, truthtelling, and reconciliation. These processes delivered more substantive outcomes in terms of peace consolidation than the formal mechanisms examined in this chapter and shed light on the shortcomings of formal legal processes as means of promoting accountability for past crimes. I suggest that while transitional justice processes are very diverse and adaptable to different contexts, they have, in the cases that I examined, become more about achieving political outcomes than social outcomes. These political outcomes include the international need for there to be some process of accountability for wartime crimes as well as elite interests in consolidating power and authority more generally. As a result, the truth

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commissions and war crimes tribunals studied reflect processes of elite bargaining rather than social processes of accountability and some form of healing. They also reflect deeper problems with the way that peace agreements attempt to incorporate justice mechanisms to deal with past wrongs, which are drawn out in the conclusion to this chapter.

A Brief History of Transitional Justice Although the concept of transitional justice has roots in the post–World War II war crimes prosecutions, the term was not coined until 1991 when Ruti G. Teitel used it to describe the “distinctive conception of justice associated with periods of radical political change following past oppressive rule.”2 Despite the various points of contention in terms of what transitional justice actually entails, this initial definition has become widely accepted and somewhat broadened: transitional justice is understood to refer to the various mechanisms used to deal with the legacy of massive human rights abuses in states transitioning out of authoritarian rule or, more recently, out of civil wars. The first phase of transitional justice after World War II was based on the conviction of the importance of “an international legal response governed by the law of conflict.”3 Although such tribunals were not an invention of the time, they did reflect the establishment of international human rights norms against which the wrongs of past regimes could be judged.4 This legalistic approach, rooted in international norms, has remained central to the transitional justice framework ever since, although there was little practical or theoretical concern with transitional justice between the initial postwar prosecutions after 1945 and the waves of democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s. With these transitions, the mechanisms of transitional justice became consolidated as core business in the theory and practice of engaging in and supporting states transitioning out of authoritarian regimes and, later, civil wars. The perceived importance of transitional justice has been confirmed through its institutionalization since the end of the Cold War in legal edifices including the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Criminal Court.5 With this has come a diversification of the goals and mediums for transitional justice, with a shift away from a largely juridical focus, or the “punish and pardon” model of justice, to a broader concern with postwar nation building.6 In addition to holding pretransition regimes accountable for human rights violations, transitional justice became concerned with questions of peace, reconciliation, and healing that had previously been considered external to the project.7 Consequently, restorative, rather than retribu-

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tive, justice became the dominant paradigm and, with it, the rise of truthtelling as a mechanism to construct an alternative history of past abuses and a more victim-focused transitional justice program. The first truth commission to be established post–Cold War was the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which was established because prosecuting the former regime for past crimes was made impossible by a 1978 amnesty law issued by Augusto Pinochet that covered most crimes perpetrated after the military coup in which he assumed power.8 President Patricio Aylwin assumed power in 1990, after Pinochet lost a 1988 plebiscite on his continued rule and was forced to go to an election. Six weeks after his inauguration, Aylwin launched the commission, mandating it to “establish as complete a picture as possible of [the most serious human rights violations of recent years], as well as their antecedents and circumstances,” and to gather the evidence necessary to identify victims and their fate.9 The commission was, however, “expressly prohibited from making pronouncements on whether and to what extent particular persons might be responsible for the events it investigated” and prosecutions were ruled out.10 This use of truth-telling as a substitute for criminal prosecutions influenced the design of the South African TRC, which similarly envisaged truth-telling as a “method of social reconciliation . . . [and] set a new standard for the aspirations of transitional institutions as resources not only for redressing past injustices but also as laying the foundations for forwardlooking or restorative justice in a renewed democratic community.” 11 This also moved the transitional justice paradigm into the arena of postconflict states, with the widely praised South African TRC greatly influencing the way that the discourse and practice of postwar peace building dealt with justice, truth, and reconciliation from then on. As a result of the South African TRC, the linking of truth-telling with reconciliation became pervasive and has evolved into one of the central tensions of the transitional justice project. Priscilla Hayner argues that because “the goal of reconciliation has been so closely associated with some past truth commissions . . . many casual observers assume that reconciliation is an integral, or even primary, purpose of creating a truth commission, which is not always true.”12 The discussion of Liberia below shows how these assumptions have informed participants in peace negotiations and sometimes resulted in participants agreeing to mechanisms of which they do not fully understand the purpose or implications. That truth and reconciliation have come to be understood as complementary is particularly problematic given the tension between the two, which may mean that truth can actually obstruct reconciliation and that reconciliation may be more affected by other factors than knowing or telling the truth about wartime violence. Knowing the truth, especially if a long time has passed since the violence

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occurred, may reopen wounds, and truth-telling in that context may retraumatize victims.13 Despite these tensions, which I explore further in the case studies below, truth commissions and postwar criminal tribunals have proliferated in the past decade, with twenty-one new truth commissions established since 2001.14 The new whole-of-society approach has led not only to an increase in the actions considered integral to the transitional justice “toolkit,” but also to a proliferation of nonstate and civil society actors involved in their implementation, which Teitel argues “illustrates the wider politics of transitional justice.”15 This has also meant that approaches to transitional justice in each context are a “source of interplay” between new governments and a plethora of external actors, ranging from states to multinational organizations and issue-based NGOs.16 Despite or perhaps because of the rapid growth of this field of work, there remains little consensus on what transitional justice should actually entail, how its goals should be conceived, what its relationship is to other aspects of peace building, and how the sometimes competing demands of transitional justice and peace building can be balanced.17 The diverse understandings of the activities included in the transitional justice toolkit illustrate this lack of consensus well. On one end of the spectrum, there are the relatively narrow legalistic accounts of the toolkit—for instance, Melissa S. Williams and Rosemary Nagy limit it to international or domestic criminal trials, truth commissions, and reparations.18 The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), one of the driving forces behind the transitional justice project internationally, adds institutional reform to this list of “core elements,” but emphasizes that this is not a closed list. The ICTJ argues that, “despite the fact that transitional justice measures rest on solid legal and moral obligations, there is wide latitude as to how these obligations can be satisfied, and therefore there is no formula to fit all contexts.”19 It also acknowledges that memorialization has become a common addition to its quartet of elements, in an attempt to preserve the memory of war crimes, establish the record beyond denial, and thereby prevent repetition.20 This can be done through the establishment of museums and monuments that serve educational purposes, the transformation of spaces that mark the site of significant human rights violations, and activities of remembrance. Others have emphasized the centrality of criminal justice reform.21 The UN Secretary-General’s report The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies defines “transitional justice” as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice, and achieve reconciliation,” and describes the main elements of this holistic process as being criminal justice, truth-telling, reparations, and vetting.22

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Some, however, go much further. They problematize the historical focus on individual civil and political rights in transitional justice processes and call instead for issues of social justice, economic and social rights, economic crimes, and corruption to be addressed.23 Pierre Hazan argues that transitional justice processes should aim to foster redress, truth-telling, and ultimately reconciliation, primarily through the use of international or hybrid criminal courts and truth commissions, but also through the rewriting of history books, individual or collective reparations, public apologies, reconciliation processes, and commemorative ceremonies and laws.24 This suggests that with the proliferation of actors and actions in the transitional justice arena has come a diversification in terms of the accepted goals of transitional justice programming. While a number of actions seem to be understood as central to the project, particularly the backward-looking legal accountability processes, the appropriate reach and expectations of the project are contested. Typically, even those who advocate a relatively limited toolkit have high expectations of what transitional justice can and should achieve, which reflects the high expectations of peace processes more generally, as discussed in Chapter 2. As becomes clear below, these expectations can be unrealistic, and there are often conflicts between the various goals set. In one of the first major texts on transitional justice, published in 1995, José Zalaquett outlines two central goals for a transitional justice process attempting to deal with the past: to prevent the recurrence of massive human rights abuses and to repair the damage they caused, as far as is possible. He argues that the overarching objectives of any human rights policy should be the promotion of national unity and reconciliation, the building or reconstruction of institutions “conducive to a stable and fair political system,” and the procurement of the necessary economic resources to reach these ends.25 The twofold character of these goals highlights the different concerns of transitional justice as a part of peace processes: on the one hand, there is the deterrent aspect of transitional justice, which is the notion that the prosecution of war crimes will deter others from perpetrating similar crimes in the future both nationally and internationally. On the other hand, there is the aspirational aspect of transitional justice, which revolves around building a future peaceful society or the conditions on which such a society can be based. Given this dual imagined purpose of transitional justice, its mechanisms can broadly be divided into the legal procedural ones (trials and truth commissions) and those with much broader and more diverse social and political purposes. The way that the aspirational goals are articulated varies significantly between analysts and actors. These goals are identified variously as “[creating] the conditions for a stable political society whose members have confidence that they will be treated fairly”;26 justice, truth, and peace;27 and

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reconciliation, closure, the end of impunity, and the radical transformation of society.28 Pablo de Greiff takes a particularly interesting approach to this, arguing for four overarching goals of transitional justice mechanisms. Two mediate goals are the provision of recognition to victims and fostering civic trust, or “the capacity of citizens to rely on public institutions to act in accordance with shared values and norms, including the rule of law”; the two final goals are reconciliation and democratization.29 He argues that, while the mediate goals are not directly caused by particular institutions, they are partially caused by them as well as other measures. The final goals depend on the contribution of a large number of factors, but are beyond the impact of individual mechanisms, suggesting the importance of a holistic approach to transitional justice.30 The broad conceptions of transitional justice raise the question of whether extensive goals are realistic or reasonable, leaving aside the question of how their achievement can be measured.31 Jon Elster argues that there is a “natural tendency to assume that all good things go together” because of both “trade-off aversion” and “wishful thinking,” and this means that the inherent tension between some of the goals outlined above is overlooked.32 He identifies the primary goals of transitional institutions as justice, truth, and peace, and contests the assumption in much of the literature that they are mutually supportive, thus raising the classic truth versus justice debate that has been a centerpiece of the transitional justice discourse. Elster suggests that while truth and justice have instrumental value as goods, peace has intrinsic value as an end, which means that transitional justice efforts must balance the former two as necessary in order to achieve the latter.33 The tension between reconciliation and truth commissions or criminal trials is also often overlooked and the two sets of tasks are often conflated. In addition to these internal tensions among the various goals is the question of reasonable expectations: is it realistic to expect that a transitional justice process will achieve the radical transformation of a society in the aftermath of a war? Many of those who advocate the broad goals acknowledge that this is unlikely, and that transitional justice may always be an incomplete and imperfect type of justice,34 its mechanisms just a “noble lie” necessary to “mollify the victims enough that they will participate in the normal political life of their country.”35 Indeed, Williams and Nagy suggest that justice can never be done “because real-world conditions mean that too many sacrifices would have to be made to other public ends, including other claims of justice.” 36 This highlights one of the main challenges when dealing with transitional justice in postwar conflicts, which is that realpolitik will always shape the way that a transitional justice process plays out: leaders’ initiation, support of, and engagement in such processes will be determined by their political, economic, and social interests, and

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these may not always sit comfortably with the moral foundations of the transitional justice paradigm. Transitions are times during which the new rules of the game are established and, consequently, they are also times of deep contestation over how new systems develop. These issues are explored below, in the context of the case studies. This discussion of the goals, mechanisms, and challenges of the transitional justice project suggests that it is not only a complex area of study, but an unruly one, with nebulous boundaries between what can be called transitional justice, and what might fall more broadly into the arena of governance or nation building. The sheer breadth and diversity of actions variously considered part of the transitional justice toolkit make it difficult to discuss the international approach to transitional justice broadly. One of the greatest challenges when discussing justice in postwar contexts is maintaining analytical clarity when analyzing processes that are the result of a complex and dynamic set of national and international agendas and pressures, which come from a range of suprastate, state, and nonstate actors. This book is primarily concerned with the question of why peace processes often fail to consolidate peace in the aftermath of a peace settlement, and it is largely concerned therefore with the frameworks established in agreements for the “new” postconflict state and society, their implementation, and the contributions they make to the success or failure of peace consolidation. While transitional justice is a broad area of action, it is the backward-looking mechanisms that remain the favorites in the toolkit. These receive the most attention from those who negotiate peace agreements: truth commissions and war crimes tribunals are the most common transitional justice mechanisms established in peace agreements, contributing what Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling call the “justice cascade,” or the dramatically increasing trend of states holding perpetrators of past human rights abuses accountable for their actions. 37 This is likely because they have come to represent transitional justice as a result of their institutionalization and prominence in a number of high-profile peace processes. Truth commissions and war crimes tribunals are also the mechanisms that receive the most attention from the international community, as indicated by their proliferation over the past decade, the rapidly growing academic literature on them, and the significant amounts of donor money funneled into them.38 I limit my analysis to these legal procedural mechanisms because the myriad transitional justice mechanisms beyond them are diffuse, messy, and deal with a slightly different concern than that of this investigation. My interest is not in the complete renegotiation of the statesociety-justice relationship, but rather in the initial steps of laying the foundation for a peaceful postwar society and the international community’s role in, and approach to, this process. So, while national judicial reform is

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often a central component of postwar peace-building processes, it is difficult to examine in the context of this analysis of the international community’s approach to postconflict peace consolidation and it is part of a much broader justice process than that which is most relevant to this analysis. Similarly, while processes of memorialization and reparations are often important, they are rarely central to the transitional justice process envisaged in a peace settlement or to the immediate aftermath of a war—rather, they operate subsequent to processes of truth-telling and prosecutions. By limiting my analysis of transitional justice accordingly, I do not mean to suggest that the broader goals of social reconstruction and judicial reform are less worthy than the legal procedural goals of truth and justice, but only that the initial steps in a transitional justice process are those most relevant to this study because, without them, the second tier of measures can hardly be pursued. Unlike national judicial reform processes, the international community is inextricably tied up in war crimes prosecutions and truth-telling processes because of the historical and normative foundations of such processes, which are grounded in the internationalist human rights agendas stemming from the immediate post–World War II period and in the principles of rights underpinning the Western liberal democratic model of governance. The international community has also been, and remains, the primary sponsor of prosecutions and other accountability processes since the end of World War II. It is possible to base an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the international approach to transitional justice on a discussion of a range of cases where transitional justice was used to support the restoration of order, promote reconciliation, and deal with human rights violators. Such an analysis can also shed light on the relationship between these processes and the ongoing dynamics of peace or conflict. In light of these investigative parameters, I now turn to the formal transitional justice processes in Liberia and Cambodia.

Formal Transitional Justice Mechanisms Liberia: A Truth and Reconciliation Commission As discussed in Chapter 3, Liberia’s civil war was a long and brutal conflict during which a range of rebel groups fought against each other and the Liberian government, with widespread human rights violations perpetrated against civilians. A central task in the peace process was to promote some level of reconciliation between the formerly warring communities and between those communities and the Liberian state. Another task was to build

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citizens’ trust in the justice system, which was in tatters as a result of the war.39 While the former was embodied at least in part in the provisions for a TRC, the needs of the justice sector were not discussed in the negotiations and have received little attention since.40 In the negotiations that led to the Accra CPA of August 2003, the idea of establishing a war crimes tribunal had been rejected by the armed factions that dominated the talks that instead favored a truth commission. Many seemed to equate such a commission with a general amnesty, partly because the South African TRC process was their sole reference point for such commissions.41 An amnesty was not formally included in the peace agreement because of significant civil society pressure and because warlords at the negotiating table were too embarrassed to push for one lest it be seen as an admission for wartime crimes.42 No one feared prosecution because assurances had been made by all armed factions and various foreign governments that prosecutions would not be pursued, and some parties even assumed that an amnesty had been included in the final text.43 While the actors at the negotiating table saw the TRC as an alternative to criminal justice, many civilians saw it as a precursor to such justice.44 The principal goal of the TRC established in the CPA was to foster truth, justice, and reconciliation by identifying the root causes of the conflict and determining those who were responsible for committing domestic and international crimes against the Liberian people.45 The TRC was also tasked with documenting wartime human rights violations, identifying victims and perpetrators, establishing a forum for dialogue between victims and perpetrators to foster healing and reconciliation, reviewing Liberia’s history of conflict to “correct historical falsehood,” and making “recommendations to the Government of Liberia . . . for prosecution, reparation, amnesty, reconciliation and institutional reforms where appropriate to promote the rule of law and combat impunity.”46 The GOL provided more than 58 percent of the funding for the TRC’s operation, with additional funding from the UNDP (10.5 percent), Sweden (7.6 percent), the United States (5.8 percent), and a number of other state and nonstate actors.47 There was immediate political controversy when the head of the transitional government appointed commissioners without consultation and before a government act formally established the commission and defined its terms. The commissioners were eventually convinced to undergo a vetting process and, after extensive civil society involvement, legislation established the TRC in June 2005. Only two of the original appointees remained among the membership of nine.48 Despite the signatories’ assumption that establishing a TRC would avoid prosecutions and effectively implement a general amnesty, the act establishing the commission prohibited it from granting amnesties for violations of international humanitarian

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law and crimes against humanity, gave it authority to recommend both prosecutions and censure, and granted near-mandatory force to its recommendations.49 The commission suffered from numerous weaknesses while in operation: insufficient funds, poor technical and legal skills, staffing problems, poorly coordinated programming, and hostility from both warlords and officials. There was also serious infighting among commissioners that led to a fistfight between two commissioners, and allegations that three commissioners were personally involved in the war and that two of them were systematically undermining the TRC’s work (these two did not endorse the final report).50 Many criticized the commission for interrogating victims far more than perpetrators of violence, and providing a platform for perpetrators to either lie or boast about their crimes, rather than atone for them, with little interrogation by the commissioners.51 Some commissioners giggled at victims’ accounts of particularly unusual and creative violence, particularly rape, while barely questioning warlords at all.52 Lasana Gberie argues that it is as though, after over a decade of near-universal experience of distress and pain, the sense of a moral universe had been obliterated in the country; as though, because of a long history of injustice and casual violence, notions of justice are no longer contemplated or easily grasped; and as though ideas of truth and memory are simply meaningless. Cruelty, of course, had long ceased to have any meaning; it had been a part of life for so long.53

This suggests something quite profound about the state of the society and its relationship to violence in the aftermath of the war that the procedural approach to justice and reconciliation failed to capture: when violence becomes such a pervasive element of individuals’ lives, the formal establishment of peace through a negotiated settlement and the pursuit of justice through formal processes is not enough to reestablish a prewar relationship with violence. Protracted civil wars fundamentally shift the way that communities interact with violence, and a culture of violence can continue to characterize social and political interactions long after the formal end of the war. Legal or technical responses alone are not enough to address these deeper dimensions of violence and its role in the postwar society. The TRC had little capacity to compel warlords and officials to testify before it and so was forced to cajole them. In March 2008, the commission promised immunity to those who chose to testify, after which many prominent alleged perpetrators came forward, although none of them actually asked for immunity again lest it suggest guilt.54 This raises the issue of trust, or the lack of trust, that pervaded the postwar context in Liberia and which was “papered over” by the legal formalism that characterized the transitional justice process. Later that year, in November 2008, the TRC published a list of alleged perpetrators and persons of interest that also

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compelled more people to testify.55 Gberie argues that this fact meant that “truth itself . . . [was] being held hostage to the whims of those who started the problem that led to the setting up of the Commission in the first place.”56 Because of the weaknesses and problems, many officials, including President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, lost confidence in the commission and criticized it harshly, which also undermined its legitimacy. In December 2009, the TRC published its final report. Significant controversy arose around its recommendations to establish a criminal tribunal to prosecute 124 people and to bar from office 49 former supporters of armed factions, including President Sirleaf and other prominent politicians. It was also controversial in that it named 38 people it had found responsible for gross human rights violations, but recommended that they not be prosecuted because of their cooperation with the commission and their remorse for crimes committed. This list included General Butt Naked, who claimed responsibility for personally killing 20,000 people and gave graphic accounts of massacres and cannibalism in testimony during which he “behaved less like a contrite sinner than a hero seeking a national platform,” according to witnesses.57 It was particularly shocking that he was included on this list while Sirleaf, who, according to prominent analyst Jonny Steinberg, was guilty of an “error of judgement” in her early and quite minor support of Charles Taylor during the war, was recommended for censure.58 Sirleaf admitted and apologized for her early support of Taylor when he led the struggle against Samuel Doe’s dictatorship, and it has been widely accepted that she, along with the many others who initially supported Taylor, withdrew their support when his intentions and approach became apparent.59 That these lists were based on no apparent criteria, were often not linked to evidence included in the final report, and appeared “utterly arbitrary”60 undermined the commission’s legitimacy and long-term impact on transitional justice and reconciliation in Liberia. TRC staff later suggested privately that they included the list in the final report in an effort to salvage the commission’s credibility.61 Although Sirleaf’s government received the report fairly well, given its recommendations, the president noted that she did not agree with all of its findings and was committed to implementing those that were within the TRC’s mandate and conformed to the constitution.62 Unsurprisingly, it was rejected by a group representing most of the former warring factions—showing rare unity among former enemies. The UN and international diplomatic community refused to take a position on the final report because of the controversy surrounding it; Amnesty International, which had been a loud commentator on the transitional justice process, did not comment on the report;63 and the ICTJ expressed “serious reservations” about the recommendations because of the lack of transparency and respect for due process in the TRC’s procedures.64

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As a result of this general rejection of the TRC’s legitimacy and findings, few of its recommendations were implemented. Thus, its more constructive recommendations were ignored along with the clearly problematic recommendations around prosecutions and censuring. These included recommendations for community-level truth-telling and reconciliation processes through a traditional Palava Hut system, in which communities come together in an open walled hut to discuss the crimes committed and collectively determine a punishment; memorials, apologies, and reparations; inclusive national dialogue; and combating divisionary and derogatory language and ethnic stereotyping.65 The debate about granting amnesties for war crimes is an ongoing source of tension in Liberia, with a main source of contention being the question of whether or not people implicated by the TRC report in human rights violations should be barred from inclusion in the Liberian government. Some parliamentarians have had UN Security Council sanctions levied against them due to close ties to Taylor during the wars.66 Others, like Sirleaf, are less personally implicated in the war, but their exclusion from office is still demanded. The government is unwilling to push for their colleagues to be brought to justice—this may be due to a fear that the exclusion of those powerful members at this stage of the consolidation of peace in Liberia could destabilize the country and lead to a resurgence of violence. Steinberg argues that this should be understood as a class issue: those with money and connections in Liberia have been free to reinvent themselves in the aftermath of the war despite their wartime crimes.67 The fact that the report was rejected by officials, but welcomed and celebrated by the public, demonstrates the deep cleavage between the elite and the public. Steinberg describes the degree of contempt in which many ordinary Liberians hold the educated and the wealthy: not just the Americo-Liberian elite of old, but also the so-called progressive intelligentsia that challenged Americo-Liberian rule in the 1970s and came to occupy powerful places in government after the old regime was overthrown in 1980. Public office in Liberia is understood as a mask concealing the quest for private gain. The war itself is widely believed to have been prosecuted by a handful of highly educated people lured by wealth and power. As one Atai member said to me: “The leaders of the various warring factions have the following in common: one, they have graduate degrees from America; two, they were all friends in the early 1980s, friends who fell out.”68

Because of this cleavage, the final report represented to the public a brief moment of accountability in Liberia’s history of impunity, not the least because it recognized that many people embedded in the postwar government structures had committed war crimes. Despite the disjuncture between the report’s narrative and findings and its negligible contribution

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to transitional justice, it provides for the public who suffered the most during the war, what Aaron Weah calls a “people’s record of those who brought war to Liberia.”69 That the report’s recommendations have gone largely unimplemented is likely to reinforce this division between those who govern and those who are governed. Steinberg’s analysis raises an important issue: the use of political power for personal enrichment. There has been significant corruption in the Liberian government since the peace agreement. As discussed in earlier chapters, the transitional government was dominated by the warring parties who were signatories to the peace agreement and who acquired key ministries and positions, which led to widespread corruption.70 Because the CPA precluded any senior NTGL appointees from standing for election in 2005, this approach effectively bought off rebel leaders by not threatening them with war crimes tribunals and by “[providing] them with opportunities to join the elite and take a slice of the pie without even the need for political participation in the election.”71 David Harris argues that the peace process may have held because of this unusual arrangement.72 In 2003, Thomas Jaye predicted that money would continue to determine political power in Liberia, arguing that “those who continue to marginalise the vast majority of Liberians have assumed the helm of state power” and that they “have never shown interest in the security of the Liberian people; rather, they have always been interested in getting rich quick, building mansions, lavishing money on concubines, travelling abroad, sending their children and families abroad on vacations while the other half dies slowly in abject poverty.”73 As Jaye predicted, corruption has remained endemic since the end of the transitional period, and personal enrichment has appeared to be central to the political motivations of many politicians and bureaucrats.74 Although President Sirleaf made fighting corruption one of her highest priorities, she herself has been implicated in it, appointing three of her sons to several senior government positions, including deputy governor of the Central Bank of Liberia, chairman of the National Oil Company of Liberia, senior adviser to the president, and head of the National Security Agency. In August 2012, Sirleaf suspended one of her sons in relation to corruption allegations, along with forty-five other officials.75 Although the Anti-Corruption Commission has had some successes, corruption and neopatrimonialism remain serious problems and indicate the way that the pursuit of power is not just about political influence, but deeply enmeshed with issues of personal enrichment. These high levels of corruption contribute to entrenching the divide between the Liberian elite and the rest of the population, which the transitional justice process has also compounded. Two issues that were central to peace building but remained unaddressed in postwar Liberia were the continued disputes over land ownership, which

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continually reopened rifts between formerly warring groups and highlighted some of the deepest conflicts between communities,76 and the widespread use of SGBV during the conflict. The latter is really at the heart of a society’s relationship to violence, especially in a context like Liberia where SGBV was used so widely and deliberately as a tactic during the war. The failure to include this form of violence on the spectrum of wartime violence addressed by the transitional justice process not only devalued the experiences of those who suffered it during the war, but also created a fundamentally imbalanced “justice” on which the future society was to be based. During the commission’s hearings, the mocking of women who had suffered wartime SGBV reinforced the message that not all suffering is equal and that women’s experiences of violence were less relevant to discussions of wartime crimes and culpability than men’s. As Ruthie Ackerman argues, if women are not properly engaged in reconciliation and peace processes (which they were not in Liberia) and if SGBV is not explicitly addressed, then amnesties and TRCs are a case of “men with guns [forgiving] other men with guns for crimes committed against women.”77 It also alienates women and their wartime experiences from the narratives and foundations of the postwar state and society. The weaknesses in the transitional justice process embodied in the TRC were compounded by the chronic shortcomings of Liberia’s justice system more broadly. Liberia’s justice institutions suffer a serious lack of capacity, infrastructure, and resources, which has undermined the right to due process and efforts to end widespread impunity. It also compounded community distrust in the justice system and contributed to a fundamental absence of the rule of law.78 As a result of these various factors, impunity remained common, especially for SGBV, which in the aftermath of a war in which it was used so widely is a clear hangover from wartime gender dynamics. The international community was initially hesitant to invest in projects in this sector, waiting for the government to commit to a long-term judicial reform strategy, but the transitional government was disinterested in this area.79 When Sirleaf took office she attempted to address these weaknesses, making sweeping changes to leadership in the justice and security systems by replacing the ministers of justice and national security, the solicitorgeneral, and the director of the LNP in 2009.80 Sirleaf also hosted a national conference to enhance access to justice and harmonize formal and customary justice systems, and the Ministry of Justice has started to address trial backlogs.81 This demonstrates that effective justice infrastructure depends in large part on effective local governance and security infrastructure: although it is an important component of a stable society, it cannot function in the absence of governance and security structures. Perhaps the most important structure responsible for supporting the ongoing transitional justice process in Liberia is the Independent National

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Commission on Human Rights (INCHR), which was a product of the CPA alongside the TRC. While the TRC was responsible for past human rights violations, the INCHR was forward-looking in its responsibility for promoting and protecting human rights in postwar Liberia. Much like the TRC, the INCHR faced numerous political setbacks to its establishment and therefore its effectiveness as a mechanism for implementing the TRC’s recommendations. First, although it was established in 2005 after four years of delays, it was not constituted until October 2010 when the Senate finally approved the nominated commissioners. President Sirleaf initially nominated commissioners in February 2010 but the Senate rejected them, deliberately blocking the implementation of TRC recommendations.82 Since the commission was established, there have been delays in developing a national reconciliation strategy and launching the Palava Huts, due in part to a lack of funding and government delays in providing necessary mandates.83 Its work currently centers on healing and reparations, purportedly “to build the cohesion necessary to repel possible attempts by former warlords to avoid prosecution by manipulating divisions among different groups.”84 Although as of this writing there has been no official support for the establishment of the war crimes tribunal recommended by the TRC, the 2011 conviction of Taylor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone has set a precedent for holding to account those responsible for war crimes and has reinvigorated the debate on accountability for war crimes in Liberia, which has led to numerous INCHR statements promising action there.85 After Sirleaf’s re-election in 2011, she announced two new processes to foster reconciliation, which is a particularly poignant issue given the violence around the elections and the growing resentment of many youth toward the enrichment of the political elite who were their leaders in the conflict, contrasted by their own unemployment and poverty.86 These two new processes include an inquiry into the electoral violence and a national peace and reconciliation initiative led by Sirleaf’s Nobel co-laureate, Leymah Gobwee, to “cement the false divides,” although its relationship to the TRC process remains unclear.87 *** This account of the Liberian transitional justice process suggests a number of things that shed light on why it has contributed little to reconciliation and a sense of justice in the postwar society. First, the formal TRC process was essentially about elite bargaining and the pursuit of elite interests—the wartime elite, including the Americo-Liberian elite and key warlords, largely controlled how the process unfolded and manipulated it to serve their own interests. Although it reflected a narrative that was consistent

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with that of the majority of Liberians, it did nothing to alter the elite’s hold on power, or their use of formal office to mask their continued exploitation of the country’s resources. On the basis of interviews with many non– Americo-Liberians, Steinberg describes this narrative: “Although they began settling there in the 1820s . . . Liberia was not their home, but their farm. They harvested what they could on African soil in order to build houses, educate their children, and seek healthcare treatment in the United States. The notion that they are not of Liberia, but settled there simply to milk it, runs deep in the Liberian consciousness.”88 Despite the flaws in the TRC process, the fact that many of the ruling elite were implicated in wartime crimes and the report’s recommendations for their prosecution and censure have not been implemented confirms this narrative, and has deepened the cleavage between the elite and the Liberian public, including perhaps most dangerously the disenfranchised youth and former child soldiers, rather than contributed to reconciliation and healing in the country. That many powerful actors did not cooperate or tell the truth to the commission, and have emerged with their power and status unscathed by the process, further indicates the gap between the apparatus of state and the public who bore and continue to suffer the consequences of the war. This rift between the people and the state goes a way toward explaining some of the broader challenges in postwar Liberia identified in Chapters 3 and 4, such as widespread violence, criminality, and weak governance institutions. What is perhaps most striking about Liberia’s transitional justice process is that it has achieved largely political outcomes rather than social ones. It satisfied the international community and the Liberian public’s political need for some form of a truth-telling mechanism. It narrated a history of the causes and trajectory of the conflict, which can be used as the basis for putting to rest conflicts over different interpretations and experiences of the past. It defined, albeit without credibility, who was responsible for the war and the crimes committed during it. In doing so, it legitimized the ongoing role of certain well-known war criminals in the new Liberian establishment—by not including them on lists of perpetrators. It made broad political recommendations about a way to advance reconciliation as a political program, albeit with little detail. Essentially, it provided the political cover that something had been done to attain justice for wartime human rights violations. What it patently did not do was achieve the social outcome of rebuilding relationships between formerly warring groups and between the citizenry and the state, or fostering a sense of justice. It instead deepened divisions, especially between the elite and the public. Rather than promoting reconciliation and truth-telling, the process and its aftermath consolidated the lack of trust that is a pervasive feature of the postwar society. This is not an uncommon situation in postconflict societies in the wake of transi-

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tional justice and reconciliation processes, as the following discussion of the Cambodian transitional justice process shows. Cambodia: War Crimes Tribunals and Justice Unlike in Liberia, where transitional justice was a relatively central component of the postwar peace consolidation process albeit with little impact, it was absent from the initial peace consolidation process in Cambodia and has largely been limited to the war crimes tribunal established in 2003. Although the promotion of national reconciliation was a key objective of the Paris Peace Agreements, which ended the long-running Cambodian civil war, the agreements did not stipulate how it would be pursued and it was not central to the peace process that followed the settlement.89 The Cambodian process has largely been a staged politico-judicial process, rather than a social one, which has further undermined justice and reconciliation outcomes. The initial power-sharing arrangement between the CPP and FUNCINPEC after the 1993 elections is seen by some as an attempt at fostering political reconciliation.90 However, the fact that it stemmed from the CPP’s refusal to cede power to the winning party in the election indicates that it was less about reconciliation than about the CPP maintaining power. The Supreme National Council, which was established as part of the peace process, and in which Cambodia’s sovereignty, independence, and unity was enshrined for the duration of the transitional period,91 was the main institution designed to foster reconciliation between the four warring parties, but the parties’ unwillingness to reconcile hamstrung the SNC’s capacity to fulfill its mandate. No national reconciliation program was pursued in the decade after the peace agreements, probably because of the ongoing conflict between FUNCINPEC and the CPP. As in Liberia, the peace agreements did not include provisions for tribunals to prosecute Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide, even though the CPP strongly advocated for them, because it was understood that the PDK would not sign the agreement if tribunals were included and the international community was deeply committed to keeping the PDK engaged in the peace process. 92 In fact, for this reason, justice was pushed off the peace agreement altogether, primarily by the United States but also by China on account of its support for the Khmer Rouge.93 In 1996, amnesty was granted to senior PDK official Ieng Sary who was the Khmer Rouge’s foreign minister from 1975–1978 and Pol Pot’s brother-in-law. His defection came as a result of the political maneuvering by both the CPP and FUNCINPEC for the upper hand in the power-sharing arrangement, and was seen as one way of dismantling the PDK.94 This amnesty raised concerns nationally and internationally about accountability for past crimes in Cambodia, with the SRSG pushing for UN involvement

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in dealing with Khmer Rouge era crimes and the UN Human Rights Commission recommending in 1997 the establishment of a panel of experts to advise on “bringing about national reconciliation, strengthening democracy and addressing the issue of individual accountability.”95 The panel was established, but before it could report its findings, a number of key PDK officials defected to the CPP and the government refused to prosecute them, arguing that doing so might reignite violence.96 The government did, however, arrest two PDK officials who did not surrender, including Comrade Duch, director of the Tuol Sleng prison, who eventually became the first former Khmer Rouge official convicted in the transitional justice process. Despite this, the government remained reluctant to establish a tribunal and, although the suggestions that it might reignite civil war were unconvincing given that the Khmer Rouge had by then completely collapsed, there was legitimate concern that it would cause tension within the CPP between those who were and were not formerly involved in the Khmer Rouge and would undermine the CPP’s legitimacy. After eight years of negotiations between the government and the international community, during which Hun Sen strongly resisted the proposals for a criminal process, a tribunal was agreed to in June 2003 to try Khmer Rouge leaders, although it did not become operational until 2006.97 The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed During the Period of Democratic Kampuchea is a hybrid national-international body that has the authority to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders and “those most responsible” for the regime’s crimes. As of this writing, it has launched investigations and prosecutions into the cases of five key Khmer Rouge figures and reached one conviction. Although the UN initially wanted the court to be an international body, like the ICTY and ICTR, Hun Sen insisted that it be a Cambodian court, which has meant that decisions about the court’s ambit rest ultimately with the Cambodian government. The ECCC combines retributive justice with some elements of truth and reconciliation commissions, which focus on the participation of victims and fostering reconciliation.98 However, the relationship between these prosecutions and national reconciliation remains unclear, with some cautioning that trials risk retraumatizing victims of the Khmer Rouge reign99 and with a sense that the so-called truth-telling has been dominated by the perpetrators rather than victims of the regime. For instance, during the first case, Duch exerted significant control over the way that his trial played out, dominating the truth-telling, intimidating witnesses, and manipulating the narratives that were constructed about his crimes at the expense of more truthful narratives.100 The significant overlap between those formerly involved in the Khmer Rouge power structures and those currently holding political power in Cambodia has made the process of deciding who to investigate and prose-

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cute a highly political task, particularly in terms of drawing a line between members of Pol Pot’s “genocidal clique” and mid-level members like many in the CPP and Hun Sen himself. This demarcation of responsibility has been a complex and politically charged process, one that has led to the court’s recent crisis and the likelihood that the court’s work will cease after the second trial is complete. The initial cases have been against Duch who oversaw the torture and deaths of 12,000 at the Tuol Sleng prison, and against three former leaders in the regime, former head of state Khieu Samphan, former chairman of the National Assembly Nuon Chea, and former foreign affairs minister Ieng Sary (who died of natural causes in March 2013).101 The first case concluded with Duch’s life imprisonment in 2012, and the second case is ongoing. The third and fourth cases have caused significant controversy, with Hun Sen immediately declaring that they might spark renewed civil war and the national prosecutor effectively blocking the investigations, a process that the newly appointed foreign investigating judge, Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, became a part of and which contributed to his eventual resignation.102 These cases push the line further than the first two in identifying current power holders as responsible for the genocide: Case 003 involves the Khmer Rouge’s army and navy chiefs, Meas Mut and Sou Met, who are now influential two-star generals; Case 004 involves three regional leaders who, although not currently powerful, had as much authority during the regime as some influential current members of the CPP.103 These cases raise the potential for members of Hun Sen’s government to be pursued in the future—a more credible threat than that of renewed civil war and potentially the basis for the political maneuvering that has stalled the progress of these investigations. Judge Kasper-Ansermet resigned after attempting to revive the investigations and being faced with sustained actions by his Cambodian counterpart to prevent him from doing so, even though each of the five mid-level officials being investigated were thought to be responsible for between 40,000 and 100,000 deaths, in contrast to the 12,000 for which Duch was responsible.104 Kasper-Ansermet’s resignation statement was a strong indictment of the Cambodian government’s attempts to undermine the ECCC’s work. The reluctance to pursue any further trials suggests that Duch has been made a scapegoat in the transitional justice process, to represent those most responsible for the Khmer Rouge’s crimes, even though he clearly was not responsible for as many deaths as others, whose prosecutions have not been pursued for political reasons. Similarly, the second trial will illuminate the inner workings of the regime by prosecuting a select few members while avoiding undermining the current political elite’s hold on power and perceived legitimacy. Stephanie Giry recounts an international adviser to Hun Sen describing this scapegoating as a political necessity, arguing that “one

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cannot afford the luxury of proceeding on the basis of justice alone.” 105 This statement encapsulates the pragmatic political, rather than social, purpose of the ECCC in the eyes of some power holders. The international community’s response to the stymying of the judicial process has been weak and has appeared to accept Hun Sen’s position that further trials may destabilize the peace. Caitlin Reiger, an expert adviser from the ICTJ to the ECCC, argues that while it is common knowledge that the trials pose little threat to peace, especially as most police are aligned with the CPP, the international community is unwilling to call Hun Sen’s bluff on this issue and insist on ongoing trials, largely because it is concerned about bearing the high costs of the ongoing tribunal, which have exceeded $160 million since 2006.106 However, if the tribunal does not proceed, it not only will be the most expensive war crimes tribunal ever, given the small number of prosecutions, but Hun Sen’s monopoly on power will likely be consolidated through the effective exoneration of his party’s members from being “those most responsible” for the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. Giry argues that Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander, “knew that formally prosecuting top members of [the] Khmer Rouge would be a chance to cast himself as a savior-statesman, the leader who would pacify Cambodia after decades of conflict. It would also be an opportunity to burnish his credentials with Cambodia’s foreign aid donors.”107 The ECCC represents some attempt to come to terms with the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and hold responsible actors accountable, but it has been undermined by the political maneuvering of Hun Sen and Cambodia’s political elite. The small contribution that it did make to the peace process is consequently seen occurring as by accident, rather than design, in that it created a spotlight for international attention in Cambodia’s peace process after attention dropped post-UNTAC and a focal point for discussion about the state of the peace process and conversations within the Cambodian public about what happened during the Khmer Rouge years, which were previously taboo.108 Although its impact has been limited, it therefore has had symbolic importance and some beneficial outcomes. While the ECCC has received more respect than the Liberian TRC for due process and legitimacy, it has similarly had little effect on the local-level reconciliation and demonstrates similar gaps between the interests of the elite and those of the public. It also illustrates the willingness of the Cambodian elite to manipulate processes to their own end, at the expense of the interests of the public. Beyond the ECCC, there has been no national reconciliation process, likely because of the ongoing political dynamics of competition and conflict discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, although there have been a number of local-level efforts to foster truth-telling and reconciliation between individuals in communities.109 The Documentation Center of Cambodia, estab-

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lished by the US Cambodian Genocide Justice Act of 1994, became an autonomous Cambodian NGO in 1997 and has perhaps become the most central truth-telling mechanism by documenting what happened during the Khmer Rouge era and distributing information to the Cambodian public for free.110 Since 2000, the Cambodian Center for Social Development, a local NGO, has organized public forums that bring together victims and perpetrators to discuss national reconciliation and the ECCC’s work and, in doing so, has created a space for the public to participate in discussions from which they have otherwise been excluded.111 As in Liberia, the divide between the elite and the rest of the citizenry has been exacerbated by the weak judiciary, widespread impunity, corruption, and the executive’s strong control of the judiciary.112 Judges and prosecutors are often affiliated with political parties and the executive interferes in judicial matters, which has undermined the rule of law and public confidence in judicial institutions. There have been numerous instances where politically motivated human rights abuses were not investigated or prosecuted, including the March 1997 massacre of public demonstrators outside parliament and the executions of about forty military advisers to Norodom Ranariddh during the 1997 coup.113 On a systemic level, serious delays in establishing laws governing the activities of judges and public prosecutors as well as the court and legal systems meant that, when the first parliament closed after the 1998 elections, the foundations for well-functioning justice institutions had not been laid.114 The Constitutional Council’s legitimacy and legality were subject to criticism from the start, given that it was not constituted in accordance with constitutional procedures and was biased toward the CPP.115 While there have been some attempts at judicial reform to address these weaknesses, significant obstacles to reform include insufficient resources, lack of coordination, and lack of expertise.116 The political implications of reform would be quite significant for the elite who benefit from the status quo. Adrian Edwards argues that, “having taken the route to peace by ignoring justice and human rights, Cambodia’s leaders have placed themselves in a position where their interests are at odds with restoring justice and protection of individual agency.”117 This again highlights the divide between the elite and the public, the perpetuation of which follows the logic of elite interests. As with the Liberian experience of transitional justice, the Cambodian experience suggests that the process had few positive social outcomes and served largely as a mechanism by which the demands for some sort of transitional justice (in this case through a war crimes tribunal) were satisfied and the legitimacy of the current political elite was, by default, confirmed. The elite bargaining and interests that drove the process meant that it resulted in primarily political outcomes, rather than the social ones that

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underpin the idea of transitional justice processes. The ECCC process confirms that state institutions and the rule of law in Cambodia serve elite, rather than public, interests. The performative nature of these trials is clear: states need to be seen to be doing transitional justice for a whole range of reasons, including internal and external pressures. The trials provided political cover for both the Hun Sen government and the international community, suggesting that something had been done to satisfy the demands of justice when nothing substantial had in fact been achieved, and the existing power structures and dynamics that were rooted in some of the injustices to which the trials were nominally responding remained largely intact. Timor-Leste and Aceh: Truth-telling in the Indonesian Archipelago The transitional justice process in Timor-Leste followed a pattern similar to that in Cambodia and Liberia. The peace process in Timor-Leste did not stem from a peace agreement nor happen in a strictly post–civil war context, and thus technically should have been excluded from this study. However, the postreferendum peace process sponsored by the international community followed the same dominant approach to peace building and state building that has characterized many of the other cases that I examine in this book. It is particularly illustrative to consider the transitional justice process that attempted to deal with past human rights abuses of the Indonesians in Timor-Leste as the approaches were similar to those used in Cambodia and Liberia and reflect similar challenges, suggesting that these challenges are not unique to individual cases but reflect deeper problems with the dominant mechanisms. The transitional justice process for Timor-Leste saw the institutionalization of four truth and trial mechanisms between 2001 and 2005: the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court based in Jakarta; the Special Panels for Serious Crimes; the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation; and the Commission on Truth and Friendship. Elizabeth Stanley’s study of these mechanisms and their outcomes suggests that the “political economy of transitional justice . . . inhibited opportunities to discover the ‘truth’ or to bring perpetrators to account” and reinforced inequalities of power and economy at both local and regional levels.118 The Ad Hoc Human Rights Court was established in 2001 by the Indonesian government in response to its promises to the UN Security Council to try those responsible for serious human rights violations committed in the lead-up to East Timorese independence and thereby avoid an international tribunal. However, a number of subsequent presidential decrees significantly limited its mandate and temporal and geographic scope: the cases

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covered were from only three of Timor-Leste’s thirteen districts during only two months of the ten-month violent conflict. In addition, investigations were not thorough, indictments were weak, trials did not satisfy international standards, and sentences were short and did not reflect the gravity of offenses. Overall, the process was widely criticised as a “sham.”119 Just eighteen individuals were tried under the court; twelve were initially acquitted and six convicted, although five had their convictions overturned following appeals. The only standing conviction is of a Timorese man who led the Aitarak militia; no Indonesian officials were held accountable for rights violations.120 David Cohen, of the ICTJ, argues that the trials before the court were intended to fail, allowing Indonesian officials to manipulate the process in order to protect their personnel while outwardly demonstrating that the Indonesian government was satisfying its duties to respond to human rights violations and thereby averting the establishment of an international tribunal.121 This determination to protect their own is reminiscent of Hun Sen’s approach to the ECCC in Cambodia as well as the Liberian elite’s concern to ensure their continued hold on power. The Dili-based Special Panels for Serious Crimes, run under the auspices of the UN transitional administration, faced similar challenges. The panels were responsible for trying serious crimes committed in TimorLeste between January and October 1999, and they had some successes such as the indictment of many high-level Indonesian officers and senior militia leaders, including General Wiranto, former head of the TNI. 122 However, they had no cross-border authority, which meant that 110 of the 339 indictees who were in Indonesia were not brought to trial and many remained active in the TNI.123 They were also undermined by a complex set of operational and political conditions and limitations.124 The failure of these two formal mechanisms to bring any Indonesian perpetrators of wartime crimes to account, or comply with standards of due process, led to widespread negative perceptions of formal criminal justice processes within Timor-Leste as well as renewed calls by the international community for an international tribunal.125 The political interests at play in Timor-Leste that shaped how the transitional justice project developed were partly driven by the East Timorese political elite’s determination to ensure a positive relationship with Indonesia. For example, when it became apparent that the four established mechanisms were falling short of international standards of due process and failing to prosecute any senior Indonesian officials, experts recommended the creation of an ad hoc international criminal trial. Timor-Leste’s president Xanana Gusmao protested this proposal to the UN, arguing that an effective balance had to be found between the need to bring perpetrators of violence to account and the need to secure peace and stability between Indonesia and

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Timor-Leste. He claimed that prosecuting and punishing senior Indonesian military figures would undermine peace and stability.126 To avoid an international tribunal, the two governments instead established the Commission of Truth and Friendship in 2005, with the objective of establishing “the conclusive truth” about the independence referendum and its aftermath. However, the founding documents include a recommendation that, in order to heal “wounds of the past,” those involved in human rights violations who cooperate with the commission’s investigation be granted amnesty, and it was made clear that no prosecutions would stem from the commission’s work.127 In contrast, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), which began its investigations in 2002, was established though consensus by all pro-independence political parties and more closely involved East Timorese in the truth and reconciliation process that it entailed. Some argue that the CAVR resulted from the awareness that the special panels would not be able to develop a satisfactory historical record, given their inability to summon key individuals.128 The CAVR was a much more bottom-up process than the other transitional justice mechanisms pursued in Timor-Leste. It brought perpetrators, victims, and communities together to pursue truth-telling and justice outside of the formal system, incorporating criminal law, civil procedure, mediation, arbitration, and local traditional and spiritual ceremonies. 129 While this process contributed significantly to peace consolidation, it did have weaknesses, most prominently its inability to hold accountable those who had been involved in planning and executing the violence—namely, Indonesian officers and militias.130 These four interrelated transitional justice mechanisms, especially the formal legal ones, contributed little to the overarching goal of holding to account perpetrators of war crimes and serious human rights violations in Timor-Leste. Despite some successes, they ultimately contributed to the consolidation of Indonesia’s political, economic, and strategic dominance over Timor-Leste, providing another example of elites manipulating transitional justice processes in order to serve their political interests. By manipulating the mandates and operational scope of these various mechanisms and ensuring their inability to reach those most responsible for past human rights violations, Indonesia effectively gained political cover for the violence for which it was responsible in Timor-Leste and, in the process, mostly satisfied the international community’s need for some transitional justice process. One of the international community’s central concerns in the post–September 11 global context is preserving the stability and goodwill of the world’s largest secular Muslim state. Therefore, it is unlikely that the international community will push further for legal accountability of Indonesian actors, particularly given the military’s strong political influence and its potential to destabilize the country if highranking officers are pursued for their actions in Timor-Leste.

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*** Aceh is an interesting case to consider in the context of these conclusions about Timor-Leste, given that the establishment of a TRC, mandated by both the MOU and the subsequent LOGA, was obstructed by the Government of Indonesia. The GOI has made no serious attempt to fulfill this provision, probably for many of the same reasons that have prevented the establishment of effective human rights and judicial institutions in other conflict-affected regions in Indonesia. The hostility of the national political elite, and especially the TNI, to the prospect of an international tribunal to prosecute gross human rights abuses in Timor-Leste is an indication of the general approach to commissions that look into human rights abuses and the slim chances that retributive justice or investigations will be pursued in Aceh.131 Similarly, the Maluku peace process, which resulted in an agreement in 2002 that provided for a TRC and a Human Rights Commission, mirrors the confusion in Aceh over the specific implications of the MOU and the resistance to its implementation. To date, neither institution has been established in Maluku and there is confusion as to whether or not their establishment was actually mandated by the peace agreement at all.132 The broader Timorese experience of transitional justice mechanisms being hijacked by elite interests suggests that transitional justice processes are unlikely to be pursued in Aceh. The GAM was as ambivalent as the GOI about establishing accountability mechanisms that could potentially address past human rights abuses committed by its rebels. It has emphasized the need to maintain good relations with Jakarta and not unsettle the peace over this issue, which is reminiscent of Hun Sen’s line about continued prosecutions at the ECCC and Gusmao’s protest to the UN about prosecution of Indonesian officials. 133 Although different, the behavior of both the GAM and the GOI mirrors the reluctance of the political elite in Liberia and Cambodia to engage in transitional justice processes—although, in those cases, the elite undermined the processes once they had begun, rather than obstructing their establishment altogether. Another factor contributing to the delayed establishment of a TRC in Aceh was the continued debate and lack of consensus over what its purpose and jurisdiction would be—for instance, whether or not it would incorporate prosecutions.134 Civil society, led by the NGO Coalition for Truth Recovery (KPK), has been active in challenging this situation, pushing for the establishment of a TRC, at least at a provincial level in Aceh, which would not challenge the stability of Aceh-Jakarta relations and would not be able to force senior military officials to testify.135 However, there has been no progress on this, as of this writing. As such, there has been no transitional justice process in Aceh, and the uneven distribution of postconflict

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and post-tsunami recovery support may have exacerbated tensions and divisions within the society. Edward Aspinall argues that, while truth-telling processes are not always useful in postconflict contexts, the case for such a process in Aceh is strong, given the historical narrative of human rights abuses and injustices that is central to Acehnese identity. He argues that “failing to deal definitively with the legacy of the past will result in the persistence of a potent source of grievance, which will cause many Acehnese to view every error or failing of the central government as masking sinister intent, and which in the long term could help re-ignite violent conflict.”136 The Acehnese case further confirms the conclusions drawn from the Liberian, Cambodian, and Timorese formal transitional justice processes that such processes often reflect elite bargaining in peace processes, and are subject to manipulation by the elite, who perceive them as a potential challenge to their continued hold on power. *** That transitional justice in all of these cases has been highly legalistic may be at the root of some of the weaknesses identified. Kieran McEvoy argues that legalism has come to dominate the transitional justice discourse and praxis, partially because lawyers in the field have fallen back on legal formalism to deal with the highly political and contingent nature of legality.137 Justice is a highly political concept that is deeply rooted in moral claims, and conceptions of justice vary greatly, reflecting the particularities of the context in which they are located. International norms and processes have been developed in part to deal with this contingency and to map out a common ground, a set of universals, on which the transitional justice project can be based. Consequently, transitional justice has often been institutionalized in major legal edifices such as the war crimes tribunal in Cambodia, the ICTY and ICTR, and in state-based processes and structures such as the truth commission in Liberia. The result has been that transitional justice is predominantly understood as a state-centric and top-down legalistic process, in which the reassertion of the state is the primary way to achieve rule of law and promote justice.138 This effectively limits transitional justice processes to state-based action, which means that the grassroots communitybased transitional justice efforts that exist in most postconflict societies are excluded from the official transitional justice stage. As a result of this limitation, states and the elites that dominate their institutions have determined the language and systems of transitional justice. In the Cambodian, Liberian, and East Timorese cases, this meant that transitional justice processes came to serve the political interests of those elites rather than the broader societal interests of reconciliation, truth-

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telling, and peace building, for which transitional justice processes are ideally vehicles. This in turn entrenched the divide between the elite and the public, which undermined the legitimacy of both state institutions and those populating them, even though the elites were using the transitional justice process to legitimize their status as power holders. The international community’s assumption that, in the aftermath of a civil war, state institutions (generally the same institutions that perpetrated wartime violence against a portion of the population) are those best placed to achieve the goals of transitional justice, indicates a willingness to ignore the highly politicized nature of those institutions, their complicity in the conflict, and their relationship to and perceived legitimacy in the eyes of the wider community. In addition to facilitating or validating the consolidation of power by the elite, legal formalism in transitional justice processes papers over the cracks remaining within a society, leaving substantive social cleavages and problems unaddressed. The technical bias of the transitional justice processes that I examined meant that mechanisms designed to clear the air, cauterize the wounds of war, and build trust between formerly divided communities did not in fact achieve these ends, but consolidated mistrust and left many narratives of the war untold. This can lead to broader dissatisfaction or disengagement with the peace process, and compounds the issues identified in earlier chapters about the weaknesses of security- and governance-building processes. It suggests that there are some problems inherent in the way that transitional justice mechanisms are built into either peace agreements or the dominant international approach to postwar peace building, particularly when they are chosen based on other regional or recent experiences rather than a more substantive engagement with questions of what is necessary or likely to work in the context at hand. The template of legal formalism has meant that processes are often unable to strike an institutional balance between the sometimes competing demands of postwar justice, elite interests, politics, and the public.

Informal Transitional Justice Processes In the first part of this chapter I suggested that formal transitional justice processes, in their highly legalistic and state-like form, are easily dominated by the political elite to secure their own interests, thereby entrenching class divisions and “legitimizing” the ongoing political authority of the elite. I highlighted a number of weaknesses in this approach; most important, the fact that these transitional justice processes achieved political outcomes rather than the social ones underpinning the transitional justice paradigm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in light of Hayner’s and McEvoy’s critiques

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discussed earlier, these transitional justice processes also had little impact on reconciliation, with cleavages remaining between formerly warring groups. Although there has been a proliferation of formalized transitional justice processes in the past decade, there are numerous postwar states that have not pursued them and where transitional justice in the sense of pursuing accountability and justice for wartime crimes has happened informally, driven largely by grassroots processes. In this section, I examine the case of Bougainville to explore how an informal transitional justice process operated, its impact on society, and its relationship to reconciliation and healing, in order to contrast Bougainville’s experiences and outcomes with those of Cambodia, Liberia, and TimorLeste. This informal transitional justice process was a grassroots movement, which was responsive to what communities needed in order to heal the wounds of war, to acknowledge responsibility for wartime violence, and to establish some level of reconciliation for the postwar society. Although by no means a perfect process as the following discussion shows, it was more closely tied to community needs than to elite interests and achieved more substantive outcomes in terms of justice and reconciliation. After that, I consider briefly what has happened in South Sudan where transitional justice has not been pursued in any form. Bougainville: Bottom-up Transitional Justice Unlike the top-down processes in Liberia, Cambodia, and Timor-Leste, the reconciliation process in Bougainville was organized largely by ordinary Bougainvilleans. As discussed in earlier chapters, the Bougainville civil war began as a conflict between Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guinea government over resources, but descended into an ethnonationalist war with widespread violence between, within, and among groups in Bougainville, as well as between Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guinea government.139 Consequently, the reconciliation process among the warring Bougainvillean groups took place before the overarching conflict with Papua New Guinea was brought to an end, in order to provide the basis for a unified Bougainvillean negotiating position. The reconciliation process within Bougainville started “almost as soon as the conflict began,”140 with village-level conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts responding to the individual acts of violence that made up the war. These microreconciliation processes gathered momentum and, by 1995, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army started using a small group of trained elites to foster reconciliation in the areas under its control to prevent a second generation from being drawn into the communal conflict.141 Then, in late 1996, Bougainville Interim Government (BIG) president Francis

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Ona established the Ministry of Political Education and Reconciliation and Internal Affairs, with James Tanis, who later became the BIG president, at the head, to foster reconciliation efforts across the region. Tanis recalls that a small group of officers was formed and started organizing local-level reconciliation processes across Bougainville. The group had no formal training in conflict resolution, but drew on traditional methods to encourage reconciliation. They studied each situation to identify interest groups and different cases within each conflict, then reestablished dialogue between groups by becoming a neutral second channel of communication and facilitating one-to-one negotiations, and finally held a reconciliation ceremony after securing an agreement between the groups. Tanis recalls the first reconciliation ceremony in which he was personally involved. It was between two groups of villagers who were kinsmen that had been divided by the civil war into supporting the BRA or the Papua New Guinea government. After describing the simple ceremony during which a prayer was said and opposing sides shook hands, Tanis recounts that there was no money, no feasting, no lengthy speeches, no media and no neutral observers. Just us. It was a day of sorrow and forgiveness, of happiness and hope. Yes, it was the day of reconciliation and unity. In our haste, we put aside the traditional rituals of chewing betel nut. What mattered was in our hearts. No compensation was discussed. There were no big men with special chairs. We were all the same. The day was Saturday 14 June 1997—the first large public reconciliation in the district. Soon the whole district was standing in line for reconciliation.142

Tanis also describes the way that individuals took responsibility for the deaths they caused and apologized directly to their victims’ families and kinsmen, asking for forgiveness and listening as they vocalized their pain.143 This contrasts starkly with the transitional justice processes in Cambodia and Liberia, which were characterized by the performative elements of the justice they were providing, and during which there was little direct responsibility taken for the violence perpetrated during the wars and some disrespect for the victims of violence. Tanis’s account highlights some of the distinctive features of the reconciliation processes across Bougainville. Such processes were not all fostered by Tanis’s unit, many were driven by local leaders, by local NGOs such as the PEACE Foundation,144 and later by Australian and New Zealand peacekeepers. The most striking element of all of these processes is their hyperlocalism: each process reflected the particular experience and loss of the village or family participating in it and was tailored to suit their ongoing needs. Based on local traditions, the reconciliation processes had a number of central components, including: truth-telling; articulation of both victims’ and perpetrators’ feelings about the violence in question; the ask-

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ing and articulation of forgiveness; dialogue and discussion within and between groups about the appropriate course of action; an agreement over a symbolic settlement; and a formal act of reconciliation that represented binding forgiveness.145 Combining indigenous customs and the Christian tradition of healing and forgiveness,146 local reconciliation processes often involved a transfer of goods such as money, pigs, or shell money, which those involved emphasize was not compensation or blood money but rather a symbolic gesture. Peter Mekia, chairman of the North Nasioi Council of Chiefs, argues that when we make peace, it is not [for] the food and it is not [because of] pigs and it is not [for] the speeches. It is people saying, “I forgive you. You forgive me. Let us get on with our lives.” All the rest—the pigs and the food and the speeches—are just the outward signs of our making peace. The shell money is something that people see and they can put their mind on matter as the sign of our making peace.147

Where receiving compensation was the primary motivation for beginning a reconciliation process, chiefs would refuse to mediate the process and instead sent the parties to the formal court, arguing that accepting blood money precludes proper forgiveness.148 These processes were understood to be ongoing: if they did not hold, or if one side became unhappy with what they had agreed to, new discussions could be initiated—these “revivals of reconciliation” could span years.149 This suggests that the social outcome of reconciliation and healing was considered paramount in the process, and processes would continue as long as necessary to achieve it. John Braithwaite and colleagues argue that there were two sides to these traditional reconciliations: the first was the ritual of forgiveness that permanently relinquishes the option of revenge while the second was the traditional method of dealing with spoilers, by which relatives would kill someone who threatened the process in order to preserve peace.150 The hyperlocal nature of the Bougainville reconciliation processes is also indicated by the sheer number of reconciliations that took place in the lead-up to the Burnham Declaration and since the end of the war, with “hundreds of large reconciliations . . . held across Bougainville for big groups, and thousands of smaller ones in relation to hamlets, families or individuals.”151 A striking element of this approach to transitional justice in Bougainville is the complete, and conscious, rejection of legalism as a component of justice in this context of peace making. In fact, the formal court system introduced into Bougainville was a source of anger within the community, which felt that justice was not being served by the system and, when the crisis began in 1988, magistrates were among the first targeted and killed in retribution for the perceived negative impact that they had in the years leading up to the conflict.152 John Tombot, a traditional chief, has warned

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against letting reconciliation processes fall under the purview of a formal court system when it returns to Bougainville, arguing that police and magistrates “think they are the only ones who know about justice,” disallow the people involved in a dispute to air their views and feelings, and use a system of blame and biased decisionmaking that deepens divisions between conflicting parties and within communities.153 Patrick Howley reiterates this, arguing that the law’s definitive declaration of guilt and innocence does not facilitate the healing of relationships that is necessary in Bougainville to consolidate peace.154 In contrast to the approaches taken in Cambodia and Liberia, the international community did not push formal legalism as a way of pursuing transitional justice during the peace process in Bougainville. Rather, Australian and New Zealand peacekeepers in the Truce and Peace Monitoring Groups particularly recognized the “disparate local plurality of conflicts and the trust they could place in local traditions for healing them,” and so played a primarily catalytic role by suggesting to groups that they meet to discuss reconciliation and providing a security guarantee for the meeting instead of an ongoing mediation role, which they understood to be best played by locals.155 Anthony Regan argues that the international community’s approach in Bougainville was one of a “light footprint” that created space for local peace-building initiatives rather than dictating them. 156 The discussion above showed that in Cambodia and Liberia trust was put in formal legalism, with the result that the process of reconciliation was moved further away from communities and individuals who suffered during the wars. In Bougainville, this process was located at the community level, to a very different effect. The emphasis, rather than being on prosecutions and punishment, was on what divided communities needed in order to reestablish a relationship, reflecting the Bougainvillean view that peacemaking begins within families and from there ripples out into the community.157 As the process was primarily intended to reconcile Bougainvillean groups so that they could act as a unified unit in peace negotiations with Papua New Guinea, emphasis was also put on reconciliation at the leadership level between Bougainvillean parties, with public reconciliations between warring leaders through 1997, “the year of reconciliations.” 158 Nevertheless, some “big men in government” have not reconciled, and show no signs of doing so, which is criticized by the public.159 The process of intraBougainville reconciliation led to the Burnham Declaration by the BRA and BIG and the Bougainville Transitional Government, which committed the groups to pursuing negotiations between Bougainville leaders and the Papua New Guinea government. It included a process to declare a cease-fire and end the war, effectively beginning the process that eventually led to the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001. One outcome of the process was that there is now a strong sense of a collective Bougainvillean

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identity due to the shared sufferings of the war; shared efforts of reconstruction, reconciliation, and peace building; and the grassroots nature of the peace-building process, even though there are still deep divisions between groups.160 Even while local identities define relationships between groups within Bougainville and some conflict remains, common identity is mobilized against the external other, namely, Papua New Guinea. There have been strong centralized attempts to build a form of Bougainvillean citizenship based on kastom, which takes the special relationship of the people to the land as a starting point to harmonize local and Bougainvillean identity.161 In this way, the state has been building a form of citizenship “based on the communal identities of the people on the ground [which] is at least as important as building state capacities for sustainable peace and order.”162 Although grassroots reconciliation processes have been widespread and have continued between groups since the BPA was signed, Volker Boege argues that there are many outstanding issues, both between and within families, clans, villages, and political factions and at the higher political level.163 This view is supported by many Bougainvilleans who argue that, although there have been many reconciliations, most remain to be done, reflecting the depth of the Bougainvillean definition of reconciliation.164 Braithwaite et al. further suggest that, while there has been deep bottom-up reconciliation and restorative peace locally in Bougainville, regional restorative peace is shallow and much remains to be done at that level to promote reconciliation.165 They specifically identify the potential for processes of reconciliation between Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, for the refugees who fled to mainland Papua New Guinea, for outsiders who had married into Bougainville and were targeted and forced to flee, for the long-standing Chinese community that was forced out, for the mining company Bougainville Copper Limited, and for the various regional powers, including Australia, that supported the mine and the war in the early years. Braithwaite and colleagues also highlight the lack of any national-level reconciliation process with Papua New Guinea, arguing that its political elite is still not committed to honoring the outcome of the referendum on independence and “tricked” Bougainville into an agreement to which it was not committed.166 They suggest that a national TRC might be an appropriate vehicle for some of these reconciliations. The Bougainville transitional justice process offers a useful counterpoint to the Cambodian and Liberian cases because, instead of relying on a top-down legalistic approach of retributive justice, it used a bottom-up hyperlocal restorative justice approach. This meant that peace building and reconciliation efforts did not reflect a grand narrative of the causes and consequences of the conflict, but responded to local acts of violence that often were triggered by allegations of sorcery, intrafamily conflict, or disputes over a piece of land.167

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The Bougainville experience of transitional justice reflects a number of particularities of the conflict context, such as the small scale of the population involved, the small geographical area, and the fact that violence took place in a highly localized way in that people generally knew exactly who had perpetrated violence against them or their relatives. There was also a strong local tradition of reconciliation based on truth-telling and forgiveness. This is remarkably different from some other conflict contexts such as Liberia or Sudan where the warring groups were divided along community lines and were not as closely bound through social and familial relationships, and where militias often moved far from their original communities. Nevertheless, the Bougainville experience does suggest that the transformative rather than transitional justice approach is useful to foster grassroots reconciliation. This is not to suggest that retributive justice is not necessary—there are cases in which it clearly is important to hold perpetrators accountable for the crimes they committed during a war—but the Bougainville experience illustrates the importance of allowing the local context and the needs and traditions of a community to determine the form that a transitional justice process takes. In this sense, it throws into question steps that are taken primarily during peace negotiations to define the form and process transitional justice will take because those steps tend to take the form of legal mechanisms that are vulnerable to manipulation by the elite to serve their own interests. The Bougainville transitional justice process suggests that there are viable alternatives to the formalized legal processes pursued in Cambodia and Liberia. Bougainville’s grassroots process avoided the main weakness of the formal legal procedural processes in that it did not become the vehicle for the elite to pursue their own self-interest and confirm the legitimacy of their authority. Instead, the absence of formal mechanisms from the peace agreement meant that communities could find their own ways of accepting back perpetrators of violence, drawing on traditional and religious mechanisms to pursue justice and healing. There are some clear shortcomings to this approach, particularly in that it does not hold accountable those responsible for gross human rights violations during the war nor develop a national narrative of the violence to make sense of the past, but the formalized processes that I discussed earlier did not achieve these things either. Processes of accountability and truthtelling are important, and my analysis suggests that some high-level transitional justice mechanisms might contribute positively to peace consolidation in Bougainville. However, such processes may be more relevant and useful in some contexts than in others, and the Bougainville experience suggests that approaches that depart from legal formalism can play important roles in transitional justice. That said, the grassroots level of a society is also characterized and informed by political dynamics and power negotiations, and can be a site of exclusionary practices and unequal power relation-

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ships as much as any other level of a society; thus, the benefits of bottomup processes should not be assumed.168 Rather, this analysis suggests that a community-generated approach to transitional justice can make important contributions to the consolidation of peace in a postconflict society and can avoid some of the deep flaws associated with formal war crimes tribunals or truth commissions. South Sudan: Are There Lessons to Be Learned? These conclusions about the effectiveness of different forms of transitional justice offer insights for the ongoing peace process in South Sudan, given that wartime atrocities remain unaccounted for and social and political divisions, both between Sudan and South Sudan and among southerners, run deep. A formal legal transitional justice process is unlikely, given the newly independent state’s tense relationship with Sudan and also that the Dinka and Nuer, who control the SPLM, have dominated South Sudan’s conflict narrative and show few signs of creating space for minority narratives. In South Sudan, many intergroup grievances were put aside in the time between signing the CPA and the independence referendum: in effect, the common goal of self-determination united the many conflicting groups. 169 The CPA did not include any provisions for transitional justice mechanisms or processes, and conflicts between southern groups have been escalating since independence. The ineffectiveness of the police force and judicial system, in addition to historic precedent, meant that communities descended into vicious cycles of revenge as a means of achieving justice after independence; the roots of these cycles generally lie in grievances that both stemmed from and animated the war in the South. There are claims that nearly all people living in violence-prone areas believe that the reestablishment of tradition judicial systems could halt these cycles of revenge, especially in communities where there are no cattle and therefore fewer economic motives for continued violence.170 However, the protracted civil war destroyed the traditional systems of social organization and control—for instance, by undermining the authority of traditional chiefs and replacing them with local warlords or militia leaders. Traditional authority structures do not simply reassert themselves in the aftermath of a peace settlement: civil war fundamentally shifts the structures of power and authority in a society toward those with guns and, as Chapter 3 demonstrated, technical processes of disarmament are not enough to shift power structures back to how they were before the war, or toward new postwar systems of governance and authority. As in Bougainville, the issues of identity and marginalization, which were central to this and all other violent conflicts in Sudan, were not addressed in the CPA or its implementation. Amir H. Idris argues that the

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main problem is that the racialization of Sudan and the ethnicization of southern Sudan during the war were not addressed during the peace process. He argues that in the context of Sudan’s civil war, Africanism and Arabism are political identities, rather than cultural ones, which were produced and perpetuated by the policies of the state and maintained by the power-sharing arrangements that distinguished between races in the interim period between the CPA’s adoption and the South’s secession.171 For instance, the CPA allowed sharia to be maintained in Khartoum while customary law was adopted in the South. Idris suggests that this entrenched the ethnic identities that have driven much of the localized conflict in the South over the past two decades. That identity politics animated the political landscape of Sudan during the war and the peace process had profound effects on the politics of the newly independent South.172 On the local level, intergroup reconciliation was not actively supported or facilitated by the GOSS, despite some initial symbolic gestures in the immediate aftermath of the CPA. In that early period, the SPLM offered amnesties to key leaders of other armed groups in return for their allegiance and integration into the SPLA. In late 2010, the GOSS and SPLM convened a week-long all-parties conference to promote intergroup political reconciliation ahead of the independence referendum.173 This was a high-level political process that did not extend to ex-combatants or the wider communities and, although there have been some incidences of local peace processes between communities, these have not been widespread.174 According to the ICG, although southern groups were united by the goal of independence from the North, local clan and tribal identities are stronger than any national consciousness in the region and are being ever more deeply entrenched by the cycles of retaliatory violence that characterize intergroup relations in some areas.175 A major obstacle to reconciliation between such groups is the fact that many of the children abducted during the war have not been returned to their families, and communities have said that they will not cooperate with other communities or reconcile with them until their children are returned. 176 Children often were not taken far, and their families generally know which communities they have been absorbed into either as slave labor or as wives. The lack of attention given during the peace process to the deep divisions between warring groups within the South meant that violence remained a pervasive characteristic of intergroup relations, which contributed to the ripe conditions for the resurgence of war in 2013. The ongoing cycles of violence in South Sudan seem to call for some form of transitional justice process. The lack thereof appears to be a factor in the nonconsolidation of peace in the short time since independence. Given that it is unlikely that the GOSS will establish a formal legal process, especially in the context of the recent split within the SPLM and consequent war,

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and in light of the transitional justice experience in Bougainville, local-level informal processes may be the most appropriate option to pursue. The Liberian experience suggests that, were a formal TRC to be established in South Sudan, given the SPLM’s current hold on authority and its interest in maintaining it, it may be vulnerable to manipulation by the current Nuer and Dinka elite, and used to legitimize their continued dominance of state structures by exonerating them from the worst crimes committed during the civil war. In the context of already deep cleavages between the SPLM and other groups in the South, this could undermine peace consolidation even further.

Conclusion The various experiences of transitional justice that I have explored in this chapter illustrate the tension between the ideological underpinnings and prescriptions of the transitional justice project and the complex realities of dealing with truth, justice, and peace in the aftermath of violent civil war. The legal formalism that dominates the international approach to transitional justice created—in Cambodia, Liberia, and Timor-Leste—a platform for existing elites to legitimize their positions of power by effectively exonerating them of responsibility for the worst crimes of the war. This demonstrates the essentially performative nature of formal transitional justice processes: postwar authorities need to be seen to be doing transitional justice for a range of reasons, including the status that transitional justice has acquired as a cornerstone of postwar peace consolidation. Concomitantly, the international peace-building community needs to be seen to be doing transitional justice because the narrative of peace has come to rest on its conflation with reconciliation and truth-telling. As Teitel argues, the pre-eminent characteristic of transitional justice [is that] the structure of the legal response [is] inevitably shaped by the circumstances and parameters of the associated political conditions. Justice might not then reflect the ideal. And, moreover, in such hyperpoliticized moments, . . . the law operates differently, and often is incapable of meeting all of the traditional values associated with the rule of law, such as general applicability, procedural due process, as well as more substantive values of fairness or analogous sources of legitimacy.177

Transitional justice is conceived as serving both political and social ends. However, its practice has come to be dominated by the legal formalism of TRCs and war crimes prosecutions, which in the cases that I studied were largely elite-driven processes that were manipulated to serve the political ends of those with power at the expense of the broader social interests that underpin the transitional justice paradigm. The cases exemplify elite

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bargaining at work to maintain existing structures of authority and power in the postwar society while giving the impression of addressing the demands of justice for wartime atrocities. Legal formalism is a neat way of dealing with the complexities and contingencies of justice in postwar societies. But transitional justice is a fundamentally complex process that deals with the crimes committed and the suffering caused during civil wars and, as such, is a deeply social process. Legal formalism distanced the transitional justice processes from their social context and, consequently, the TRC in Liberia and war crimes tribunal in Cambodia became elite political processes and deepened the cleavages between the elite and the rest of society. By subsuming conflict into a highly legalistic process, these approaches also papered over the issues of trust and trust building and, in so doing, contributed to the embedding of mistrust into the postwar society. The issue of pragmatism is central, as transitional justice necessitates finding an acceptable balance between the political and social ends it is expected to serve. The flaws of the formal transitional justice processes discussed above suggest that a satisfactory balance was not struck between the need to hold accountable those responsible for wartime atrocities and the need to reconstitute state institutions that were occupied by people who could hold the state together in the peace consolidation phase. Cambodia and Liberia each laid bare the reality that purging everyone involved or implicated in a long and complex civil war would leave no one to run the new state. But they also showed that, when new state structures are dominated by those who were fighting the war, they can become hostage to the particular interests of those groups rather than broader societal interests. Transitional justice is the site at which these two demands can be reconciled, but the examples of formal processes suggest that the legal procedural model alone is not robust or comprehensive enough to facilitate this reconciliation. In most cases, there was a sense that people who bore significant responsibility for wartime violence nevertheless held powerful official positions, and this undermined the legitimacy of the justice mechanisms for the wider society, even if they satisfied the international community’s need to attribute guilt and legitimize postwar state structures and authorities. In contrast to the weaknesses of the legal procedural approach to transitional justice, informal processes offered alternatives in terms of creating a space for community-generated justice, which was more locally responsive and satisfied social needs in ways that formal justice processes did not. The Bougainville case did not suggest that legal processes were not necessary: a well-run formal process might complement the achievements of the grassroots process and address the issues the informal process left unaddressed. However, it did suggest that localizing transitional justice mechanisms can have more substantive and popularly relevant outcomes than

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legal formalism, which satisfies a very different set of needs and interests. This raises the challenge that traditional conflict resolution or reconciliation methods may not exist in all civil war contexts or may not be widely accepted enough to be of use in transitional justice processes. Hazan argues that transitional justice rests on the assumption that “if crimes against humanity, by definition, unleash men, then transitional justice will accomplish the path in reverse by restoring social ties and a political community.”178 In this chapter, I have suggested that when transitional justice is embodied in formal legal processes, they can serve the political ends of the elite at the expense of social outcomes. Rather than “restoring social ties and a political community,” they can deepen the division between the elite and the rest of society, embed mistrust in the postwar society, and preclude the possibility for real accountability for wartime crimes in the future. I have also suggested that the legal procedural approach to transitional justice is the legal mirror of the technical approach to peace building that the analyses of governance building and security building showed in Chapters 3 and 4. Peace agreements are increasingly likely to include transitional justice mechanisms and the inclusion of these mechanisms is advocated by many who work in the international peace-building arena. Despite its various flaws, legal formalism is the dominant approach around which many transitional justice mechanisms, especially those included in agreements, are structured. This is due in part to a type of path dependency that I discuss in more depth in the next chapter, which means that because it has been the dominant approach to date, most of the experiences that inform new processes have followed that approach. As the Liberian case demonstrates, those involved in peace negotiations often look to other peace agreements to inform their decisions about what to include, and the dominance of formal transitional justice mechanisms with the lofty goals of promoting truth and reconciliation creates an informal logic of what the constituent components of peace agreements ought to be. Promoting this form of transitional justice is also a neat way for the international community to deal with the highly contingent and complex nature of justice, which is conceptualized differently in different cultures and contexts. Legal formalism allows the international community and national political elites in postwar states to be seen to be “doing” transitional justice, without substantively achieving difficult outcomes such as accountability for wartime crimes, including removing those responsible from postwar state structures, or building trust and developing a broadly accepted narrative of wartime violence. It creates an opportunity for elites to use transitional justice mechanisms to absolve themselves of responsibility for wartime crimes and legitimize their hold on power in the postwar state, rather than to cauterize the wounds of war and lay the foundations for future peace building.

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Notes 1. For such analyses, see Ruti G. Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69; Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Pablo de Greiff, “Theorizing Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice, ed. Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 31–77. 2. Ruti G. Teitel, “Editorial Note: Transitional Justice Globalized,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 1 (2008): 1. 3. Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” 73–74. 4. Melissa S. Williams and Rosemary Nagy, “Introduction,” in Transitional Justice, ed. Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 3. 5. Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor, “Transitional Justice from Below: An Agenda for Research, Policy, and Praxis,” in Transitional Justice: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change, ed. Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor (Oxford: Hart, 2008), 1. 6. Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” 77. 7. For a full account of the genealogy of transitional justice, see ibid., 77–80. 8. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 47. After Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in 1998, hundreds of former regime officials were prosecuted for human rights crimes (see p. 49). 9. Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993), 27, www.usip.org/files /resources/collections/truth_commissions/Chile90-Report/Chile90-Report.pdf. 10. Ibid., 28. 11. Williams and Nagy, “Introduction,” 3. 12. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 23. 13. Sarah Wagner, “Identifying Srebrenica’s Missing: The ‘Shaky Balance’ of Universalism and Particularism,” in Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities After Genocide and Mass Violence, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 32; Erin Daly, “Truth Skepticism: An Inquiry into the Value of Truth in Times of Transition,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 1 (2008): 36. 14. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, xiv. 15. Teitel, “Editorial Note,” 4. 16. Neil J. Kritz, “The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice, vol. 1: General Considerations, ed. Neil J. Kritz (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), xxvii. 17. de Greiff, “Theorizing Transitional Justice,” 32. 18. Williams and Nagy, “Introduction,” 4. 19. International Center for Transitional Justice, “What Is Transitional Justice?” (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, n.d.), http://ictj.org/about /transitional-justice. 20. International Center for Transitional Justice, “Truth and Memory” (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, n.d), http://ictj.org/our-work /transitional-justice-issues/truth-and-memory. 21. Kieran McEvoy, “Letting Go of Legalism: Developing a ‘Thicker’ Version of Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change, ed. Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor (Oxford: Hart, 2008), 15–16.

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22. UN Secretary-General, The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies, UN Doc. S/2004/616 (New York: UN Security Council, 2004), 4. 23. James L. Cavallaro and Sebastian Albuja, “The Lost Agenda: Economic Crimes and Truth Commissions in Latin America and Beyond,” in Transitional Justice: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change, ed. Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor (Oxford: Hart, 2008), 140–141. 24. Pierre Hazan, Judging War, Judging History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 8–9. 25. Jose Zalaquett, “Confronting Human Rights Violations Committed by Former Governments: Principles Applicable and Political Constraints,” in Transitional Justice, vol. 1: General Considerations, ed. Neil J. Kritz (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), 5–6. 26. Williams and Nagy, “Introduction,” 8. 27. Jon Elster, “Justice, Truth, Peace,” in Transitional Justice, ed. Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 93–95. 28. Roger Duthie, “Afterword: The Consequences of Transitional Justice in Particular Contexts,” in Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities After Genocide and Mass Violence, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 254–255. 29. de Greiff, “Theorizing Transitional Justice,” 40–58. 30. Ibid., 41. 31. For a discussion of this, see Special issue, “Transitional Justice on Trial— Evaluating Its Impact,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 4, no. 3 (2010). See also many of the chapters in Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster, eds., Transitional Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 32. Elster, “Justice, Truth, Peace,” 78. 33. Ibid., 93–95. See especially Elster’s characterization of the fundamental tensions between justice, truth, and peace. 34. Duthie, “Afterword,” 255; de Greiff, “Theorizing Transitional Justice,” 35. 35. Gary J. Bass, “Reparations as a Noble Lie,” in Transitional Justice, ed. Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 166–167. 36. Williams and Nagy, “Introduction,” 14. 37. Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling, “The Impact of Human Rights Trials in Latin America,” Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 4 (2007): 429–433; Eric Brahm, “Uncovering the Truth: Examining Truth Commission Success and Impact,” International Studies Perspectives 8, no. 1 (2007): 16–35; Oskar N. T. Thoms, James Ron, and Roland Paris, “The Effects of Transitional Justice Mechanisms: A Summary of Empirical Research Findings and Implications for Analysts and Practitioners,” Working Paper (Ottawa, ON: Center for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa, 2008), 15–16, http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~rparis/CIPS _Transitional_Justice_April2008.pdf. 38. Sikkink and Walling, “The Impact of Human Rights Trials in Latin America,” 430–431; Hayner, Unspeakable Truths. 39. Pewee Flomoku and Lemuel Reeves, “Formal and Informal Justice in Liberia,” in Accord 23: Consolidating Peace: Liberia and Sierra Leone, ed. Elizabeth Drew and Alexander Ramsbotham (London: Conciliation Resources, 2012), 44. 40. Priscilla Hayner, Negotiating Peace in Liberia: Preserving the Possibility of Justice (Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2007), 19.

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41. Ibid., 17–18. 42. Ibid., 15–16. 43. Ibid., 18. 44. Paul James-Allen, Aaron Weah, and Lizzie Goodfriend, Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Transitional Justice Options in Liberia (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2010), 6, http://reliefweb.int/sites /reliefweb.int/files/resources/E30635C33A3FB6DC852577210057AE9C-Full _Report.pdf. 45. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, Consolidated Final Report (Monrovia: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, 2009), 12–13, http://trcofliberia.org/reports/final-report. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 40. 48. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 66. 49. Jonny Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” African Affairs 109, no. 434 (2010): 139. 50. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 67; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, Consolidated Final Report, 325; Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 139; Lansana Gberie, “Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia,” African Affairs 107, no. 428 (2008): 458; James-Allen, Weah, and Goodfriend, Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 3, 9. 51. Gberie, “Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia,” 458–460; Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 140; Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 67. 52. Gberie, “Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia,” 459. 53. Ibid., 459–460. 54. Jonny Steinberg calls this the “warlord’s predicament”: “Throughout, nobody was ever able to put to paper the amnesties that were serially agreed upon in private for fear of popular moral censure. Shame and a resulting silence, it seems, have done much to shape the course of transitional justice in Liberia.” Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 140. 55. James-Allen, Weah, and Goodfriend, Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 9. 56. Gberie, “Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia,” 463. 57. Ibid., 458. 58. Steinberg argues that the TRC’s claims of Sirleaf’s wrongdoing are not backed up with evidence and, in fact, when commissioners were pushed for details, they claimed that they were not at liberty to reveal the contents of the “secret [Central Intelligence Agency] documents,” which allegedly contain the evidence against Sirleaf. Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 141. 59. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “Special Message by Her Excellency Mrs. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf President of the Republic of Liberia on the Occasion of the 162nd Independence Anniversary of the Republic of Liberia,” Government of Liberia, July 27, 2009, 7–8, www.emansion.gov.lr/doc/7_26_09_President26Remarks.pdf. 60. Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 141. 61. Jonny Steinberg, “A Truth Commission Goes Abroad: Liberian Transitional Justice in New York,” African Affairs 110, no. 438 (2011): 52. 62. James-Allen, Weah, and Goodfriend, Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 11. 63. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 68; Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 136.

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64. James-Allen, Weah, and Goodfriend, Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 4. 65. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, Consolidated Final Report, 363–406. 66. Ruthie Ackerman, “Rebuilding Liberia, One Brick at a Time,” World Policy Journal 26, no. 2 (2009): 87. 67. Steinberg, “Liberia’s Experiment with Transitional Justice,” 143. 68. Ibid., 142–143. 69. Aaron Weah, quoted in ibid., 143. 70. For a discussion of this, see Gerry Cleaver and Simon Massey, “Liberia: A Durable Peace at Last?” in Ending Africa’s Wars: Progressing to Peace, ed. Oliver Furley and Roy May (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 194–195. 71. David Harris, “Liberia 2005: An Unusual African Post-conflict Election,” Journal of Modern African Studies 44, no. 3 (2006): 393–394. 72. Ibid., 375. 73. Thomas Jaye, “An Analysis of Post-Taylor Politics,” Review of African Political Economy 30, no. 98 (2003): 645. 74. For instance, in May 2010 there were significant tensions between the government and the auditor general over audits that showed that over $50 million was unaccounted for at several ministries. These allegations led to a series of claims and counterclaims over the integrity of the finance minister, and disagreement over the actions that the government should take to rectify the situation. This appears to be just one of many cases that highlight the ongoing challenge that corruption presents to the government, particularly to the president. See “Auditor General Challenges Government to Account for US$50 Million,” New Democrat, May 19, 2010, http://unmil.org/1article.asp?id=3852&zdoc=1. 75. BBC News Africa, “Liberian President Suspends Son,” August 21, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19333908. 76. For a discussion of this, see Wolf-Christian Paes, “The Challenges of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Liberia,” International Peacekeeping 12, no. 2 (2005): 260. 77. Ackerman, “Rebuilding Liberia, One Brick at a Time,” 87. 78. Hayner, Negotiating Peace in Liberia. 79. Ibid., 23. 80. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2010: Events of 2009 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2010), 137. 81. UN Secretary-General, Twenty-first Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia, UN Doc. S/2010/429 (New York: UN Security Council, August 11, 2010), 8, www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol =S/2010/429. 82. James-Allen, Weah, and Goodfriend, Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 12. 83. International Crisis Group, Liberia: How Sustainable Is the Recovery? (Dakar: International Crisis Group, August 2011), 20. 84. International Crisis Group, “Liberia: Time for Much-delayed Reconciliation and Reform,” 2012, 8, www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/africa/west-africa/liberia /b088-liberia-time-for-much-delayed-reconciliation-and-reform.aspx. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 1. 87. Ibid., 8. 88. Steinberg, “A Truth Commission Goes Abroad,” 41.

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89. “Agreement Concerning the Sovereignty, Independence, Territorial Integrity and Inviolability, Neutrality and National Unity of Cambodia,” October 23, 1991, pars. 1, 2, http://peacemaker.un.org/cambodiaparisagreement91. 90. See, for instance, Sam Bory, “National Reconciliation in Cambodia: Can There Be Forgiveness in the Absence of the Rule of Law?” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 49. 91. “Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict,” October 23, 1991, sec. III, http://peacemaker.un.org/cambodiaparisagreement91. 92. International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend (Phnom Penh: International Crisis Group, August 2000), 28. 93. Caitlin Reiger, expert adviser from the International Center for Transitional Justice to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed During the Period of Democratic Kampuchea, interviewed by the author, New York, February 8, 2011; Michael Vickery and Naomi Roht-Arriaza, “Human Rights in Cambodia,” in Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice, ed. Naomi Roht-Arriaza (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 247. 94. Adrian Edwards, “Human Rights in Negotiating Peace Agreements: Final Act of the Paris Conference on Cambodia,” paper presented at the International Council on Human Rights Policy review meeting “Peace Agreements: The Role of Human Rights in Negotiations” (Belfast: International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2005), 17. 95. UN Human Rights Commission, quoted in International Crisis Group, Cambodia: The Elusive Peace Dividend (Phnom Penh: International Crisis Group, August 2000), 28. 96. Ibid. 97. Thun Saray pointed out that, while Hun Sen initially told the Cambodian public that if they wanted peace, they had to forget the past, the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC) ran a petition calling for a tribunal and collected 85,000 signatures within two weeks despite military and political pressure on signatories. Hun Sen changed his mind when the petition was presented to him and agreed to the tribunal. Thun Saray, president, ADHOC, interviewed by the author, Phnom Penh, March 10, 2011. 98. Brianne N. McGonigle, “Two for the Price of One: Attempts by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to Combine Retributive and Restorative Justice Principles,” Leiden Journal of International Law 22, no. 1 (2009): 127–149. 99. J. Eli Margolis, “Trauma and the Trials of Reconciliation in Cambodia,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 8, no. 2 (2007): 153–161. 100. For a detailed account of how Duch did this, see Stephanie Giry, “Cambodia’s Perfect War Criminal,” New York Review of Books, October 25, 2010, www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/25/cambodias-perfect-war-criminal/. 101. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, “Case 002,” n.d., www.eccc.gov.kh/en/case/topic/2. 102. Neha Jain, “Between the Scylla and Charybdis of Prosecution and Reconciliation: The Khmer Rouge Trials and the Promise of International Criminal Justice,” Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 20, no. 2 (January 2010): 248; Reiger interview; Stephanie Giry, “Necessary Scapegoats? The Making of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal,” New York Review of Books, July 23, 2013, www.nybooks.com /blogs/nyrblog/2012/jul/23/necessary-scapegoats-khmer-rouge-tribunal/. 103. Giry, “Necessary Scapegoats?”

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104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Reiger interview. 107. Giry, “Necessary Scapegoats?” 108. Reiger interview; Scott Worden, senior rule of law adviser, US Institute of Peace, interviewed by the author, Washington, DC, February 15, 2011; Saray interview. 109. Peter Bartu and Neil Wilford, Transitional Justice and DDR: The Case of Cambodia (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2009), 26. 110. Ibid., 28–29. 111. Ibid., 28. 112. UN Secretary-General, Report of the Special Representative of the SecretaryGeneral on the Situation of Human Rights in Cambodia, UN Doc. A/56/209 (New York: UN General Assembly, July 26, 2001), 12; Thun Saray, “Preventing Future Human Rights Abuses: Whose Responsibility?” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 67. 113. Saray, “Preventing Future Human Rights Abuses,” 67. 114. Son Chhay, “Breathing Life into Cambodia’s Constitution: Constraints to Debate in the National Assembly,” in Safeguarding Peace: Cambodia’s Constitutional Challenge, ed. Dylan Hendrickson (London: Conciliation Resources, 1998), 65. 115. Ibid. 116. See, for example, UN Secretary-General, Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the Situation of Human Rights in Cambodia, 12– 13; H. E. Sok An, “The Legal and Judicial Reform and the Policy of the Royal Government of Cambodia” (Government of Cambodia, December 2008), 2. 117. Edwards, “Human Rights in Negotiating Peace Agreements,” 24. 118. Elizabeth Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor,” in Transitional Justice: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change, ed. Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor (Oxford: Hart, 2008), 167. 119. David Cohen, Intended to Fail: The Trials Before the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court in Jakarta (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2003); Caitlin Reiger, “Hybrid Attempts at Accountability for Serious Crimes in TimorLeste,” in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156–157; Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor,” 171–172. 120. Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor,” 171. 121. Cohen, Intended to Fail. 122. Reiger, “Hybrid Attempts at Accountability for Serious Crimes in TimorLeste,” 152. 123. Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor,” 172. 124. For a discussion of these, see Reiger, “Hybrid Attempts at Accountability for Serious Crimes in Timor-Leste”; Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor.” 125. Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor,” 173. 126. “Letter Dated 14 July 2005 from the Secretary-General Addressed to the President of the Security Council,” UN Doc. S/2005/459 (New York: UN Security Council, 2005), 3, 6; For an analysis of these events, see Stanley, “The Political Economy of Transitional Justice in East Timor,” 173–174. 127. “Terms of Reference, Commission of Truth and Friendship Established by The Republic of Indonesia and The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste,” Jakarta, March 9, 2005, par. 14.c.i, www.etan.org/et2005/march/06/10tor.htm.

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128. Reiger, “Hybrid Attempts at Accountability for Serious Crimes in TimorLeste,” 157. 129. Patrick Burgess, “A New Approach to Restorative Justice—East Timor’s Community Reconciliation Process,” in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 177, 184–186. 130. For a full discussion of these issues, see ibid., 188–197. 131. Edward Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? The Helsinki Peace Process in Aceh (Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2007), 10. 132. Scott Cunliffe, Eddie Riyadi, Raimondus Arwalembun, and Hendrik Boli Tobi, Negotiating Peace in Indonesia: Prospects for Building Peace and Upholding Justice in Maluku and Aceh (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, June 2009), 7. 133. Ibid., 21–22. 134. Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? 30. 135. Cunliffe et al., Negotiating Peace in Indonesia, 21. 136. Aspinall, Peace Without Justice? 37. 137. McEvoy, “Letting Go of Legalism,” 25. 138. Ibid., 25–26. 139. Jim Rolfe, “Papua New Guinea: The Melting Pot: Ethnicity, Identity, and Separatism in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea,” in Fixing Fractured Nations: The Challenges of Ethnic Separatism in the Asia-Pacific, ed. Robert G. Wirsig and Ehsan Ahrari (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 236–237. 140. A. J. Regan, Light Intervention: Lessons from Bougainville (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010). 141. James Tanis, “Reconciliation: My Side of the Island,” in Accord: Weaving Consensus: The Papua New Guinea–Bougainville Peace Process, ed. Andy Carl and Sr. Lorraine Garasu (London: Conciliation Resources, 2002), 60. 142. Ibid., 58. 143. Ibid., 61. 144. For an account of the PEACE Foundation’s reconciliation work, see Patrick Howley, “Restorative Justice in Bougainville,” in A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands, ed. Sinclair Dinnen (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2010), 215–254. 145. This analysis is based on the accounts in ibid.; John Tombot, “A Marriage of Custom and Introduced Skills: Restorative Justice, Bougainville Style,” in A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands, ed. Sinclair Dinnen (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2010), 255–264; John Braithwaite, Hilary Charlesworth, Peter Reddy, and Leah Dunn, Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2010), chap. 6. 146. For a discussion of this grafting of traditions, see Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment, chap. 6. 147. Peter Mekia, quoted in Patrick Howley, “Restorative Justice in Bougainville,” in A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands, ed. Sinclair Dinnen (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2010), 238. 148. Ibid., 241. 149. Ibid., 240. 150. Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment, chap. 6. 151. Ibid. 152. Tombot, “A Marriage of Custom and Introduced Skills,” 259. 153. Ibid.

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154. Patrick Howley, Breaking Spears and Mending Hearts: Peacemakers and Restorative Justice in Bougainville (London: Zed Books, 2002). 155. Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment, chap. 6. 156. Regan, Light Intervention. 157. Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment. 158. Tanis, “Reconciliation,” 58–61. 159. Howley, Breaking Spears and Mending Hearts, 240–241. 160. Volker Boege, Bougainville and the Discovery of Slowness: An Unhurried Approach to State-building in the Pacific (Brisbane: Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, June 2006); Volker Boege, A Promising Liaison: Kastom and State in Bougainville (Brisbane: Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, October 2008), 31. 161. Boege, Bougainville and the Discovery of Slowness, 32. 162. Ibid., 11. 163. Boege, A Promising Liaison, 11. 164. Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment, chap. 6. 165. Ibid., chap. 10. 166. Ibid. 167. For examples of the particular issues that triggered violence, see James Tanis, “In Between: Personal Experiences in the 9-year Long Conflict on Bougainville,” State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project Working Papers (Canberra: Australian National University, 2002); Tanis, “Reconciliation”; Tombot, “A Marriage of Custom and Introduced Skills”; Braithwaite et al., Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment, chap. 6. 168. For a discussion of the problems of the bottom-up approach, see McEvoy and McGregor, “Transitional Justice from Below,” 9–10. 169. International Crisis Group, Politics and Transition in the New South Sudan (Juba: International Crisis Group, 2011), 4. 170. Alfred Lokuji, Overview of the Challenges to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (Waterloo, ON: Project Ploughshares and Africa Peace Forum, 2006), 102. 171. Amir H. Idris, Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 92–93. 172. For a discussion of these identity politics and the way they operated in the interim period, see Alicia Ranck and Roseline F. Tekeu, “Is the Comprehensive Peace Agreement Holding?” in Implementing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Prospects and Challenges, ed. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008), 39. 173. International Crisis Group, Politics and Transition in the New South Sudan, 3–4. 174. Julie Brethfeld, Unrealistic Expectations: Current Challenges to Reintegration in Southern Sudan (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2010), 36. 175. International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts: Countering Insecurity in South Sudan (Juba: International Crisis Group, December 2009), 1. 176. Lokuji, Overview of the Challenges to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, 20. 177. Teitel, “Editorial Note,” 2. 178. Hazan, Judging War, Judging History, 9, emphasis in original.

6 The Anatomy of Failure

Peace processes are complex and multifaceted endeavors. In this book, I have conducted a broad cross-sectional investigation of the various factors that undermined peace consolidation in a range of civil war–affected countries, focusing particularly on the three central themes of security, governance, and transitional justice. My analysis has identified a number of factors that commonly contribute to difficulties in consolidating peace in the aftermath of a peace agreement. These factors can be broadly divided into two groups: (1) the practical challenges involved in implementing governance, security, and transitional justice programs after civil wars; and (2) the challenges related to the fact that many peace processes do not adequately engage with or respond to the political structures and dynamics of postagreement societies. This second set of challenges reflects a systemic problem with the way peace processes are conceptualized as technical processes of perfecting institutions, and the deeply technocratic and bureaucratic way the international community engages in them. The major task left in this analysis is to explore why it is that these challenges persist in the context of an international community that, by and large, is well intentioned and concerned with improving the effectiveness of peace building. In this chapter, I review the major findings of the previous thematic chapters and develop an overarching analysis of why negotiated peace processes often fail to establish a stable peace. I suggest that there is a dominant approach to peace processes that focuses on the technical aspects of peace building and takes largely the same form, despite the context in which it is implemented and the rhetoric about tailor-making responses to suit each context. This approach is based on a set of assumptions about what peace is and how it can be achieved that implies the universality of the experience of the war-to-peace transition. It leaves little room for peace processes to be responsive to local contexts and tends to depoliticize the

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peace-building process, distancing the technical aspects of governance building, security building, and transitional justice from the political dynamics of the postwar society that define the shape that peace actually takes. This dominant approach to peace building is technocratic in that it is concerned with organizing technical processes and mechanisms, based on a conviction of both the superiority and rationality of technical mechanisms and their applicability across contexts, and it privileges the bureaucratic imperative over other forms of decisionmaking.1 A number of factors work together to foster the perpetuation of the technocratic model of peace building, despite the near-universal acceptance of the importance of locally responsive processes. First, the way that knowledge about peace-building options and their results is generated, managed, and transferred in the international system creates an internal bias toward technocratic approaches and limits the realm of possible action to a certain type of peace-building process. Second, funding and evaluation pressures demand reporting on measurable outcomes and successes, which tend to tie peace processes to short-term goals and methods that have already been tested. And third, the way that the UN, as a central actor in the peace-building sphere, is organized and operates, combined with the thirdparty state agendas that inevitably shape peace processes, further limits the potential for responsiveness and innovation in each context. These factors are both influenced by and reinforce the problems identified in Chapter 2 about the way that the international community conceptualizes success and understands the goals of peace processes, which lends itself to a technocratic and template-driven approach to responding to civil wars.

Peace Consolidation: A Complex Problem In this book, I have looked at three central areas of postwar peace building; namely, security building, governance building, and transitional justice. The findings about the weaknesses of peace building in each of these areas can be broadly divided into two groups: (1) the practical challenges to peacebuilding programs; and (2) the systemic challenges that reflect an underlying problem with the international community’s approach to peace building after civil wars. Practical Challenges The practical challenges identified in my analysis of peace processes reflect the complex difficulties inherent in peace-building activities. These were perhaps most obvious in the security sphere, where the very technical nature of security-building processes is fraught with challenges. The range

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of cases that I examined demonstrate the ubiquity of such technical problems, including poor DDR and SSR programming, the delayed deployment of international peacekeepers or nonmilitary peace-building support, the lack of funds, and the establishment of critically weak postwar security institutions. These technical difficulties meant, for instance, that demilitarization did not happen satisfactorily in Liberia, Cambodia, Sudan, and Mozambique where communities remained flush with small arms despite attempts to disarm combatants and confiscate weapons. The high numbers of weapons left in circulation in these countries contributed variously to regional conflict processes, criminality, and political instability. In addition, ex-combatants were often not effectively reintegrated in their communities and the training provided to them was not aligned with the economic opportunities of the postwar society. As a result, while the security situation in these states did not deteriorate to the point that civil war resumed, the securitybuilding processes inadvertently contributed to creating a postwar environment where violence and insecurity remained pervasive. In the governance sphere, the practical challenges that undermined peace consolidation revolved around the bad faith in which some actors approached postconflict peace processes, the mutual mistrust between formerly warring parties, and the lack of commitment to peace building. This not only undermined technical processes such as elections, lawmaking, and institutional development across the countries examined, but also contributed to the consolidation of a violent political culture in postwar governance structures and processes. In some cases, such as Aceh and South Sudan, it meant that peace agreements were signed even though they included provisions that parties were unwilling to implement, such as autonomy and wealth-sharing provisions. There are many imperatives for signing a peace agreement, and my analysis suggests that they do not necessarily all align with peace. Numerous studies have shown that peace negotiations have been used as breaks during which armed groups can regroup, recuperate, and rebuild their military capacity; for example, this was alleged to be the case in Côte d’Ivoire in 2011 when outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo participated in peace negotiations, allowing his forces to regroup and rearm ahead of new attacks the following week.2 Peace settlements, as the cases in this book have shown, may also be reached because there is no other option for the parties involved in the conflict, but they may not indicate a real commitment to peacemaking or peace building. Peace builders should not assume that, just because a peace agreement has been signed, parties will cooperate in its implementation. These cases suggest that, in order to continue the trust building, relationship building, and peace building that a peace settlement begins, significant emphasis needs to be put on maintaining dialogue and negotiations between parties in the aftermath of a peace agreement.

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Finally, in the transitional justice sphere, the difficulties involved in establishing and running credible war crimes tribunals and truth commissions were significant factors in undermining their capacity to contribute to peace building in postwar contexts. This contributed in part to the ease with which elites manipulated these formal legal processes to serve their own political and economic interests. For instance, neither the Liberian TRC, the various East Timorese transitional justice processes, nor the Cambodian war crimes tribunal credibly identified or held accountable those most responsible for wartime crimes, and those processes were openly undermined by the interests of power holders. The fact that the broader communities were aware that the processes were being manipulated by those in power undermined the capacity of these processes to contribute to peace building, as they further entrenched the cleavages between the political elite and the rest of the country. The capacity of transitional justice mechanisms to contribute to peace building was also undermined by the inherent tensions in what its goals and processes are—for instance, the difficulty in actually fostering reconciliation and peace building through formal truthtelling or war crimes prosecutions. These practical challenges highlight the extreme difficulty of peacebuilding processes, and the complex contexts in which they operate. Peace agreements establish the conditions under which arms will be laid down and generally map the institutional and social frameworks for how formerly warring groups will live together in the future state or under what conditions they will establish separate political entities. As earlier chapters have shown, peace agreements tend to include a similar set of issues—provisions around how the postwar political authority will be divided and decided, how security will be reestablished, and how justice for wartime crimes will be pursued. In addition, they may include provisions on issues ranging from refugee resettlement to resource ownership. While peace agreements lay out these provisions, they leave much to be done in terms of implementing them and consolidating peace. Essentially, they create the basis for a negative peace, an end to open violence, and buy time during which a more substantive peace can actually be built. This more substantive peace does not imply a maximalist version of positive peace, but rather a situation where frameworks have been established that can resolve future conflicts before they escalate into open violence. In addition to establishing security, this involves rebuilding governance systems and institutions, and pursuing some form of transitional justice, as well as other things not addressed in this book, including economic development and the reinvigoration of civil society. Civil wars leave behind deeply scarred and divided communities, which are animated by narratives of the suffering experienced during the conflict and wrongdoing by other groups. While peace agreements create the frame-

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works for ending violence, they do little more than lay the groundwork for peace building. In such a context, it is not surprising that efforts to consolidate peace through the building of governance structures, the demobilizing or restructuring of military and police forces, the development of new laws and constitutions, and the establishment of judicial or truth-telling structures are fraught with practical difficulties. Bringing a formal end to a violent civil war does not resolve the many conflicts that exist between people and communities and that have been perpetuated by war. Nor does a peace agreement heal the wounds inflicted by the war or end the deep mistrust between formerly warring groups. Postwar societies, like all societies, are animated by a range of competing interests, but in the aftermath of civil war many of these interests may not be aligned with the interests of peace and may pose particular obstacles to processes that attempt to restructure the postwar society’s institutions and political processes in ways that consolidate peace. Additionally, there are the practical realities facing the international community’s work in postwar societies, which were highlighted in the cases discussed. Inadequate resources and funding, difficulties in recruiting appropriate international and local staff, delayed deployments, and the challenges involved in understanding local dynamics are just some of these issues. Although serious problems, these issues do have reasonably straightforward solutions, albeit solutions that are often difficult to achieve for political, financial, and infrastructural reasons. I revisit some of these issues below. Ultimately, post–civil war peace building is a relatively new arena of action for the international community, and one which operates in exceedingly difficult contexts, and aims to achieve very ambitious outcomes— namely, consolidating peace on the back of the often fragile negative peace established in a peace agreement. The practical difficulties inherent in processes of postwar governance building, security building, and justice building reflect the challenges of the contexts in which they operate and are, in many ways, self-evident. Peace building is an ambitious task that operates in complex environments; of course it is plagued with practical challenges. Systemic Challenges In addition to these practical challenges to peace building, my analysis suggests that there is a set of deeper and more detrimental factors that undermine peace-building success, and which stem from the international community’s approach to building peace after civil wars. Across the three sectors and the range of cases examined, I identified a recurring trend— technical peace-building processes were pursued in ways that did not recognize the influence of local political structures and dynamics on their ability to achieve their goals. Conducting security-building, governance-building,

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and transitional justice initiatives as primarily technical processes meant that the fundamentally social, political, and economic drivers of conflict were not addressed. This resulted in the establishment of an often deeply flawed set of institutions and processes designed to keep the peace, but which contributed to perpetuating the very circumstances of insecurity, mistrust, and violence that they were attempting to change. Security building, templates, and the convergence of approaches. Liberia’s flawed DDR and SSR processes demonstrated a distinct depoliticization of postwar security building. This was particularly apparent in the way that the conflict’s regional dynamics and the opportunities they afforded to unemployed demobilized soldiers were overlooked, with efforts focusing instead on the more technical security tasks such as demobilizing the armies, confiscating weapons, reconstituting security institutions, and giving ex-combatants an opportunity for further education. The depoliticization of security building was common, to varying degrees, across the security-building processes in South Sudan, Mozambique, Cambodia, Aceh, and Bougainville. The international community involved in designing and implementing DDR and SSR often misunderstood the economic and strategic incentives for individuals to participate in ongoing violence. It also overlooked the role that violence occupies in the political cultures of societies affected by protracted civil war, that is sometimes traditional, but more often is normalized as the way the society is organized and regulated. Attempting to control this violence through technical means meant that these political, social, and individual dimensions of insecurity were not addressed. The disconnect between security and its political dimensions compounded the technocratic nature of security-building activities in the countries studied and exacerbated the impact of their technical weaknesses. For example, while the practical weaknesses of DDR in Mozambique and Liberia meant that weapons were not removed from circulation, the political factors created incentives for fighters to traffic weapons into neighboring countries and participate in their civil wars. The cumulative result of the depoliticization of security building was that the peace-building process not only failed to address the incentives for ongoing violence, but created conditions that actually augmented those incentives; as a result, violence and insecurity remained pervasive in many of the postwar societies examined. Another striking factor of the security-building processes that I studied was that they all followed broadly the same format: ex-combatants were disarmed, demobilized, and then provided with varying levels of reintegration support, often in the form of retraining for the postwar economy and small cash grants to restart their lives as civilians. The security sector was reformed, with national armies reorganized to absorb some rebel forces,

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training or retraining provided to staff and officers, and support provided to improve the institutional frameworks of the army and police. These discrete tasks illustrate the highly technocratic nature of security-building processes. By focusing predominantly on the technical aspects of security building, rather than the contextual factors that shape individuals’ motivations for acting against the interests of peace, the processes examined were delinked from the political, social, and economic context and the effectiveness of their contribution to peace consolidation was undermined. One factor that contributes to the perpetuation of technocratic approaches is the tendency for templates to be lifted from recent missions to frame new peace missions, particularly when they appear to have been successful. This is not an issue confined to the security-building sphere. For instance, it is widely acknowledged that the UN mission deployed to Timor-Leste in 1999 broadly replicated the recently completed and highly successful mission in Eastern Slavonia and also drew heavily on the ongoing UN mission in Kosovo as a model.3 In the same way, Liberia’s DDR process replicated the DDR process in Sierra Leone, which at that time was considered a success story, although it has since become apparent that it was seriously flawed and failed to achieve many of its goals.4 Despite this, in the early excitement about its successes, Sierra Leone was used as the model for new DDR processes in Burundi and Haiti.5 This problem not only affects the UN. Daniel Korski and Richard Gowan show that the EU’s police training mission in Bosnia in 2003–2004 set the template for subsequent missions; namely, “capacity building through long-term police and security reform.”6 For example, as a result of early success with this model in Bosnia and Macedonia, the EU modeled its mission to the DRC in 2005–2006 on the Bosnian template, aiming to train local police and improve army payment systems despite the fact that the country’s size and political situation “rendered its small missions largely irrelevant,” especially to the violent conflicts outside of Kinshasa.7 Despite this experience, similar approaches were implemented in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian Territories, even in the absence of the basic security conditions required for effective police and security reform. The tendency for mission templates to be replicated is compounded by the proclivity of lessons learned processes, which are now included in the vast majority of peace operations and projects, to focus on technical lessons. Recent research into the usefulness of formal lessons learned processes has revealed not only the challenge of encouraging actors to honestly appraise the strengths and weaknesses of the missions they were involved in, rather than seeing them as “shame and blame” exercises, but also the significant disjunct between formal and informal processes of sharing lessons learned.8 While formal processes capture technical lessons learned at the planning and operational levels, it is through informal

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processes, or corridor talks, that the more political lessons are learned—for instance, around decisionmaking processes for designing and launching new missions.9 The relative usefulness of formal lessons learned mechanisms has been questioned, with some arguing that informal mechanisms have a long history in the peace-building community, are more pragmatic and responsive, and may be more effective and productive at facilitating knowledge transfer beyond technical details.10 However, the professionalization of the peace-building sector has brought with it the technocracy associated with bureaucratic structures, including reporting systems, lessons learned exercises, and “a compulsion to use a precise terminology.”11 Laurent Goetschel and Tobias Hagmann trace the “growing momentum” of the peace-building agenda throughout the 1990s, arguing that the mainstreaming of peace-building efforts in existing humanitarian and development programs meant that peace building became “subjected to the project management logic that had so far been used to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate conventional development projects.”12 Project cycle management rationalizes peace building by facilitating the “planning, assessment and evaluation of peace,” as the Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment illustrates, and thereby brings peace building in line with donor countries’ general approach to international assistance.13 This is fueled by two sets of interests: on the one hand, states and nonstate actors involved in peace processes need to sustain the basic legitimacy of international approaches to peace building to justify their past actions, and major shifts away from current approaches may be considered an admission of failure. On the other hand, the “increasingly professionalised networks of intervening actors” need to justify their continued existence as well as their ongoing funding and influence.14 The professionalization and bureaucratization of the peace-building field has given rise to specialists and experts who “by espousing a managerial project logic, evade the thorny question of what peace means for different social groups in a particular place and time.”15 By privileging a technocratic and bureaucratic interpretation of peace and the process by which it is established, peace is pursued as a fundamentally uncontested idea or condition. Template-based responses are a natural outcome of the causal logic that underpins this technocratic approach to peace processes, as is the dominance of external “expert” knowledge over local knowledge in their design and implementation. Senior UN diplomat Ian Martin has argued that the international community goes through phases of different approaches to intervention and peace building.16 In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a tendency toward large-scale multidimensional peace operations, but, for various political and economic reasons, there has been a shift back toward a lighter approach to postwar peace building. The dominant approach to peace building at any particular time plays a significant role in defining the parameters of possible

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action for international involvement in peace processes, thereby also contributing to the convergence of options around a particular template. For instance, Séverine Autesserre has found that a dominant peace-building culture in the mid-2000s shaped the international intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo in ways that precluded responsiveness to local conflicts by constructing local peace-building tasks as unimportant, unfamiliar, unmanageable, and outside the purview of the mission. 17 The total disengagement of the peace process from localized forms of conflict and the factors driving them contributed to its failure to establish peace and, thus, the ongoing violence that characterizes politics and society in the DRC. Similarly, Roland Paris has demonstrated that global culture, understood as “the formal and informal rules of international social life,” has limited the range of possible policies that peacekeepers can realistically pursue.18 He argues that this is due to the development of normative frameworks around what actions are appropriate, which preclude the development of new approaches that may more likely lead to peace-building success. He shows that global political culture has legitimized policies aimed at establishing modern liberal states according to the Westphalian state structure, while also prohibiting interveners from engaging with the domestic affairs of states.19 This helps to explain why many of the peace processes I examined in this analysis have failed to address the local dynamics and structures that shape both conflict and peace consolidation. In addition to the limitations imposed by the global peace-building culture and the professionalization of the peace-building sphere, a number of other factors inhibit the development of new approaches to peace building and contribute to the convergence of peace-building options around a set of technocratic mechanisms like DDR and SSR. One of these factors is the difficulty in moving beyond existing approaches because of the vested interests that various actors have in maintaining the status quo, as discussed above. Another factor is states’ deep aversion to risk, especially when justifying expenditures and soldiers’ lives in foreign countries. A NATO official argued that the NATO Response Force epitomizes this challenge. The force is designed to work as a preventative measure and is made up of troops from two member states in each round who, if deployed, are responsible for covering their own costs. The official argued that there is resistance to this from member states and that countries might simply refuse to deploy their troops if the need arises.20 This concern was echoed by a senior UN official with respect to a UN rapid response force.21 A rare “designer mission” that departed from the standard template of peace operations was the UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) in 2007–2011. Martin, SRSG to Nepal and head of UNMIN, faced significant resistance from the UN bureaucracy when he proposed a “light” mission to oversee the implementation of the CPA, including the demobilization of both

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Maoist and government forces, with only 186 unarmed retired military and police officers and a small civilian component. Martin argues that the reason for this resistance was twofold. First, officials at UN headquarters “felt that the role requested could only be properly performed by armed peacekeepers in substantial numbers, and . . . by serving military personnel, not by retired officers,” and, second, the UN had no processes or structures to recruit retired military and police officers to serve in a civilian mission. 22 The failure of understaffed UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda and the Balkans probably contributed to the reluctance to deploy a light force. Nevertheless, Martin managed to establish the light mission, and it successfully oversaw the disarmament and demobilization of the two armies and created the space for peaceful elections and ongoing peace consolidation in Nepal. While this sets a precedent for moving away from the dominant existing template to security building postagreement, it does remain the outlier. Unlike new approaches, which are risky and depart from professionalized expertise, existing approaches are safe, while also being supported by technical knowledge and historical precedent. Experimenting with new approaches not only means that goals may not be successfully met, but puts donors and participating states at risk of having to justify “failed” international missions to their constituents, with potentially severe domestic political implications. Template peace agreements, governance building, and the pressure for success. My analysis of governance building revealed similar problems to those found in the security sphere in terms of technocratic approaches that converged around a particular way of developing governance institutions and processes in the aftermath of a peace agreement. The international community’s focus in the peace processes studied was placed heavily on establishing new governance structures and processes such as electoral systems, writing constitutions, institutional development, and developing legal frameworks. However, the new institutions of governance were often disassociated from the local power structures and dynamics of the postwar society, which opened a chasm between the formal location of political authority and the real operation of power in the society. For instance, while Hun Sen was formally part of a power-sharing arrangement with FUNCINPEC’s Norodom Ranariddh in Cambodia in the aftermath of the first elections, he actually wielded significant informal power and used that to manipulate governance arrangements and marginalize those opposing him in the formal decisionmaking structures. This eventually led to the 1998 coup in which Hun Sen took complete control of the state’s authority structures. The peace process in Sudan also highlights the complexities of reforming governance structures and processes in postwar states when different groups remain locked in a web of overlapping conflict

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relationships and power struggles, which color their commitment to abide by the formal processes and structures established for decisionmaking. Across the countries studied, this delinking of new governance institutions from the local political structures and dynamics that shaped their effectiveness resulted in weak institutions and the consolidation of informal power structures outside of them. The weaknesses of governance reform that stemmed from the way that technical reform processes were not sensitive to the local political context were compounded by the challenges posed by parties’ bad faith participation in peace negotiations and the ongoing mistrust between conflicting groups discussed earlier. Consequently, many of the post–civil war states studied remained characterized by violent political cultures that undermined the legitimacy and capacity of the formal structures established. Ultimately, the focus on technocratic governance reform processes came at the expense of a broader consideration of the political dynamics and processes that are expected to submit to the new structures. Rather than creating a space for power to be contested in the nonviolent political sphere, they resulted in situations where wartime divisions and instability were embedded in the postwar system. These processes were essentially about implementing institutional “solutions” to weak state structures, rather than about the politics of war and peace that animate peace processes. This indicates a deeper problem with the way that civil war states are dealt with by the international community. Conceptualizing civil war as essentially barbaric, and anathema to modern society, means that the logical response to such wars is the establishment or repair of the modern liberal state.23 Conflict analysis frameworks see war as a “dysfunction” that can be fixed through the application of the right technical responses.24 Caroline Hughes and Vanessa Pupavac argue that this “pathologisation” of postwar societies has meant that conflict is understood as a “series of individual experiences of violence” rather than a political process and has given rise to “therapeutic” approaches to peace making.25 The assumption that conflict can be reduced to the simple analyses of individual rationality or irrationality ignores the complex political, social, and economic processes that animate civil wars.26 The effect is that conflicts themselves are depoliticized by technocratic approaches to peace processes. This is reinforced by what Roger Mac Ginty identifies as the “liberal belief in the perfectibility of institutions,”27 which has shaped the global peace-building culture and contributed to the replication of technocratic governance reform as the cornerstone of peace processes. Paris argues that, by perpetuating the liberal market democracy as the ideal model of domestic governance, peace processes are not just about managing civil wars. Rather, they are part of the much larger phenomenon of globalizing a specific model of how a state should look and act “from the core to the periphery of the international sys-

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tem.”28 In that peace processes attempt to instill liberal democratic values into postconflict states, Paris argues that they should be considered a modern instance of the mission civilisatrice, which was “the colonial-era belief that the European imperial powers had a duty to “civilise” their overseas possessions.”29 As a result, international involvement in resolving civil wars is less about peace than it is about exporting order.30 The global peace-building culture that reduces civil wars to pathologies or dysfunctions is at the heart of why technocratic and template-based peace processes have come to dominate the peace-building sphere, and highlights the liberal democratic ideology that underpins it. It is clear that a number of factors in the international system promote the convergence of possible options in peace processes around a particularly technocratic template. But issues of politics, power, authority, and governance are at the heart of all civil wars, and the way the conflict is configured around these issues makes each conflict unique, so it is surprising that the technocratic approach to governance building is ubiquitous. The very nature of politics and governance would seem to demand highly tailored approaches in order to effectively build peace. In addition to the structural and cultural issues discussed above that prevent peace processes from addressing local dynamics, the lack of local knowledge among those involved in peace processes plays a significant role in undermining local responsiveness. Many experts either implicitly or explicitly distinguish between two sets of actors involved in peace processes, pinning some of the responsibility for technocratic approaches on this divide. On the one hand, there are people with significant knowledge and experience in peace processes and conflict-affected countries who have a high capacity to respond to local contexts. On the other hand, there are people in positions of leadership because of bilaterally negotiated political appointments to international structures—for instance, as SRSGs or chief UN peace negotiators as well as staff in the UN bureaucratic structures—who do not have the same depth of local expertise, but have significant power over how a peace process develops.31 One senior UN official argued that 80 percent of decisionmakers fit into this second category.32 Those who drew this distinction suggest that this lack of expertise contributes to people falling back on technocratic responses and templates from past missions. In the words of Goetschel and Hagmann, technical experts “substitute their lack of contextual knowledge by referring to peace orthodoxies.”33 As a result of what Colin Keating, former New Zealand ambassador to the UN and executive director of the Security Council Report, calls the “amateur” nature of many of the people running peace processes,34 one way to achieve outcomes is to pursue template-based peace agreements. At the extreme end of the template approach, there are a number of examples of where peace agreements were modeled directly on recent agreements in other

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countries. A UN official involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo peace negotiations recounted that, in the initial stages of the negotiations process, those supporting the process took the recent Kofi Annan–negotiated peace agreement from Kenya and did a “search and replace all” so that it could be the basis for the Congolese negotiations.35 Transitional justice expert Priscilla Hayner presented a similar story from the negotiations process in Kenya in 2008: all of the parties at the negotiating table came into the negotiations demanding a truth and reconciliation commission to be set up in the same manner as all other commissions in Kenya, which includes a one-year mandate period and a consultative appointment process. Hayner was the only person who challenged that approach, arguing that it was not context appropriate, but she found it hard to convince anyone, including the mediator, of the problems of the approach suggested and a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission was established in the final agreement.36 My analysis in Chapter 5 showed that the South African TRC was the reference point for the parties negotiating the peace agreement and its transitional justice provisions in Liberia, which illustrates how conflicting parties themselves can bring a set of preconceived ideas of what form the structures and processes for peace building should take based on their knowledge of other peace settlements. Although the use of templates may not always be as obvious as in these cases, my analysis suggests that there is a dominant model for negotiated peace processes and, while the specifics and the language used may vary, agreements are fundamentally similar in the path that they lay out to move a civil war state from war to peace, as are peace consolidation processes more broadly. This does not suggest, however, that the use of templates is deliberate. This chapter shows that a range of organizational incentives, institutional and cultural factors, and bureaucratic processes produce a strong tendency toward template-based peace agreements and subsequent implementation processes. Another major factor that contributes to the pressure for particular mechanisms for governance building to be implemented after civil wars is the financial and political pressures for fast measurable results, both in peace negotiations and their implementation processes. Alvaro de Soto, former SRSG to the Middle East, Cyprus, and El Salvador peace processes and one of the world’s most experienced peace mediators, has argued that one of the most significant pressures in peace negotiations is that put by third-party states on peacemakers to produce results that can be measured and quantified in the short term.37 This goes some way toward explaining why the focus of peace agreements rests so heavily on institutional processes like the establishment of electoral systems. Antje Herrberg, mediation expert and chief executive officer of the European Forum for International Mediation and Dialogue, similarly argued that international peace mediators are under such intense pressure to produce results, in the form of peace agreements,

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that they often do not have the time to ensure that all parties properly understand and are committed to the solutions to which they are agreeing.38 The peace negotiations between North and South Sudan exemplify this pressure and the negative implications it can have for the integrity of the process. There was significant pressure from the international community to finalize the peace negotiations between North and South Sudan so that attention could be redirected to the growing humanitarian and political crisis in Darfur. This meant that the CPA was essentially a cease-fire that laid the ground for further negotiations on substantive issues such as resource ownership and the North-South border, but it did not resolve central aspects of the war. Despite this, the CPA was hailed as a comprehensive settlement, international attention was redirected to Darfur, and the ongoing negotiations did not actually happen as they were intended. Instead, as shown in Chapter 4, conflict, violence, and mistrust continued to characterize the interactions between the North and South. The intense external pressure put on peace agreements has also meant that outside parties have exerted significant influence on the shape that peace agreements have taken: in El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique, mediators successfully encouraged negotiating parties to include provisions for liberal democratic state systems, including plans for elections, in the peace settlements.39 This suggests an underlying assumption that any peace agreement is better than no agreement because it provides the starting point of negative peace on which a more stable peace can be built. As I have shown in this book, peace agreements are highly technical and prescriptive, and the majority lay out in great detail how the security-building process will occur, what the future type and form of governance system will be, and how transitional justice will be pursued. This leaves little room for postagreement peace consolidation processes to accommodate the changing realities of peace building on the ground or the shifting incentives for individuals to either engage in the peace process or work against the interests of peace. The pressure to get to an agreement as soon as possible may fundamentally undermine the integrity of the agreement reached and the overall peace process. Postagreement programming is similarly constrained by the pressure for short-term measurable goals, which is partly the result of donor agendas being tied to budget and project cycles and can mean that donors are unwilling to invest in long-term peace building.40 This also contributes to international involvement in peace processes focusing disproportionately on technocratic service delivery that can produce easily measurable results, rather than locally responsive peace building, as highlighted in the case analyses in earlier chapters. In some cases, the pressure to achieve outcomes quickly has combined with broader political constraints to result in an extreme unwillingness to

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commit to anything beyond short-term involvement in peace processes. For instance, the UN Mission in Haiti (UNMIH), which ran from 1993–1996, never had a mandate of more than seven months, and its mandate was often extended by only a month or a few months at a time, which severely undermined forward planning and the capacity of the mission to respond to the deeper issues at hand in the country.41 Haiti is an extreme example of the funding and time limitations to which peace operations may be subjected, but other cases examined in this book have been subjected to similar constraints, and most UN peace operations operate on renewable mandates of one to two years. Haiti also provides an enlightening example of the international community establishing ambitious short-term goals for progress, in spite of funding constraints. In 1994, UNMIH was mandated to assist in establishing an environment conducive to holding free and fair elections and provide technical support to Haitian electoral authorities, with only a six-month mandate extension.42 It did assist with three legislative elections and a presidential election during its extended mission in 1995, but these elections were undermined by allegations of widespread fraud, with the Carter Center’s chief observer declaring them the “most disastrous technically” of all the elections he had formally witnessed and estimating that up to one-third of ballots were tainted.43 This suggests, in line with earlier findings about the technocratic nature of postwar governance processes, that the pressure for short-term measurable outcomes may have undermined the integrity of the process of moving Haiti toward democracy and led to pressure to meet targets on a technical and ultimately superficial level. The problem with this approach is that building governance structures and processes in the aftermath of a civil war, especially a protracted one, is not a short-term endeavor. These structures and processes are often at the heart of the conflict, and reconstituting them in a way that not only satisfies the conflicting parties but serves the broader interests of society is a long-term, unpredictable, and difficult endeavor that is not reducible to particular benchmark achievements such as elections or the establishment of specific commissions. It is deeply political and requires a high level of responsiveness to the particular and changing political dynamics of the postwar society.44 The pressure for reporting on outcomes has another impact in addition to shaping the way peace processes are conceived, designed, and implemented. One of the challenges to peace building that my analyses in earlier chapters showed was the tendency for the international community involved in peace processes to declare that missions had been successful on the basis of technocratic achievements as a way of justifying the withdrawal of military, technical, or other support. For instance, despite the increasingly obvious cracks in the political settlements in both cases, the SRSG to Cambodia, Yasushi Akashi, declared that mission’s success after

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the 1995 elections, and the EU high representative for the CFSP, Javier Solana, declared that peace had been “firmly established” in Aceh at the time of the EU mission’s withdrawal in December 2006. Martin, special envoy of the Secretary-General to Timor-Leste in 2006, argues that the UN’s military withdrawal from Timor-Leste in 2005 followed a similarly misguided declaration of success and high levels of self-congratulation in New York about the mission’s achievements.45 The UN redeployed to Timor-Leste within a year after renewed fighting. Senior UN official Mandhyan suggested that one of the factors that drive claims of success is the reporting processes for programs, which capture technical achievements but fail to capture the extent of actual change in the way that the country operates or its movement toward consolidated peace.46 This is linked to an issue raised by a policy adviser in the UNDP’s Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Response (BCPR) about the desire of individuals involved in peace processes to see outcomes in terms of their own employment. This means that they may sometimes do what will achieve visible outcomes in the short term rather than what is best in the long term, and also that they may raise the expectations of both the local and the international community in terms of what they can achieve.47 These pressures, in combination with the bureaucratic imperatives discussed above, contribute to the tendency for peace processes to focus on relatively short-term technocratic goals and reinforce the international community’s proclivity for a particular type of peace process. As a result, declarations of success reflect technocratic short-term goals rather than the deeper political goal of peace building, which reinforces the disconnect between dominant peacemaking templates and the political contexts in which they are deployed. Transitional justice, naïve transference, and the shrinking realm of the possible. Finally, many of the obstacles to effective transitional justice processes stemmed from the deep tension between the ideological goals of transitional justice, which center around truth-telling, reconciliation, and peace building, and the political realities of dealing with issues of truth, justice, and peace after civil wars. That the international community’s preferred approach to transitional justice has tended to fall back on legal formalism in the attempt to deal with the highly political, contingent, and subjective nature of justice has led to processes that are largely shaped and driven by states and the elites that dominate their institutions to the exclusion of wider communities. This illustrates the issues raised earlier about the international community’s preference for “safe” options and technocratic mechanisms. Bureaucracies prefer technocratic approaches because they are seen as neutral and efficient. However, the analysis of transitional justice processes in Chapter 5 showed that they often were neither neutral nor efficient, in that they provided vehicles

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for the existing elite to legitimize their ongoing hold on power and did not achieve their basic goals of securing justice for the worst wartime crimes. The tendency toward technical processes not only made the formal transitional justice processes examined vulnerable to manipulation by elites, who used them to validate their continued authority or exonerate them from responsibility for wartime crimes, but also undermined the legitimacy of the outcomes of transitional justice processes in the eyes of the public. Legal formalism also papered over the divisions remaining in postwar societies, overlooking the deep mistrust running between communities and leaving substantive social cleavages and problems unaddressed and many narratives of the war untold. The conviction that providing a forum for airing grievances about the past can help rebuild trust between warring communities may lead to a blindness about the ways such processes reflect divisions and mistrust. Due to this blindness, the outcomes of such processes are not recognized by the international community engaged in them to be the result of political maneuvering. In the cases examined, formal transitional justice processes tended to serve the elite’s political ends rather than broader social ones and their nature was essentially performative. Both the international community and the local elite had to be seen to be “doing” transitional justice to maintain their legitimacy and perpetuate the narrative that truth and justice led to reconciliation and peace, which is central to the transitional justice paradigm. This was particularly clear in the way that Indonesia pursued a selective and limited set of transitional justice mechanisms in the aftermath of Timor-Leste’s secession, which satisfied the international community’s initial demands for justice, but in no way held accountable members of the Indonesian elite who were responsible for wartime crimes. Although criminal processes were pursued, they effectively exonerated Indonesian officials from any human rights abuses and did little to achieve the deeper goals for justice for East Timorese civilians. The sphere of transitional justice illustrates most clearly the attempt to facilitate social and political processes through technocratic mechanisms. It demonstrates the instrumentalist understanding of social relations that guides many actors in the bureaucratized peace-building sector who are driven by “institutional imperatives and pseudo-scientific models of society and social change” rather than local knowledge.48 Particular options become the norm not only for the reasons described above, including knowledge management processes and financial and temporal pressures, but also because technical expertise develops around them. Although it is not the case that templates are deliberately replicated across contexts without due consideration for their relevance, there are pressures that contribute to the perpetuation of a particular template for building peace after civil wars. Korski and Gowan describe this phenomenon as “naïve transference,”

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which involves models that work in one context being replicated in contexts to which they are less suited because of their technical merits.49 There seems to be some awareness of the dangers of this sort of templating: a UN official in the BCPR argued that there is increasing awareness of the limitations of “best practice,” and the need to distinguish between lessons learned that are contingent on context and those that are cross-cutting.50 The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 on conflict, security, and development makes the same point, emphasizing that there are no one-size-fits-all responses to conflict and postconflict states, but the report does go on to identify “a set of basic tools emerging from experience” that can be adapted to suit each context.51 Despite this caveat, the core tools mirror quite closely the broad template identified earlier in this book, focusing on the transformation of institutions through security sector reform, justice sector reform, anticorruption measures, community empowerment programs, employment programs, macroeconomic policy, humanitarian delivery, and social protection. In addition to these, the report advocates “gradual, systemic programs,” including political and electoral reform, decentralization, and transitional justice.52 Although it calls for measures to be adapted to each context, it actually perpetuates the dominant approach to peace building and leaves a relatively limited set of options available to policymakers in each context. The approach is highly focused on institutions, which is what the international community of states is particularly well suited to doing, partly because of the imperatives discussed above, including planning and evaluation processes that capture technical detail much more effectively than political complexity. Naïve transference goes some way toward explaining why certain approaches have become the big ticket items of the international community: DDR and SSR in the security sphere, electoral systems and institutional capacity building in the governance sphere, and formal legal mechanisms like TRCs and war crimes tribunals in the transitional justice sphere. But the wider set of structural conditions and institutional, bureaucratic, and ideological imperatives identified earlier in this chapter further entrench the dominant technocratic approach to peace building. Because of their technical merits, the relevance of commonly deployed mechanisms to particular situations is not questioned and alternative approaches to building security, developing governance institutions, and pursuing transitional justice are not explored. Institutional path dependency has resulted in a poverty of imagination in terms of peace-building responses to civil wars and a shrinking of the realm of possible action in peace processes. Political Agendas and the Shape of Peace Processes In addition to the issues discussed above that explain the convergence of peace-building options around the technocratic template, there is another

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set of factors that contribute to this trend, and which stem from the way the that UN is organized and operates and the way that the international community of states engages in peace processes. The political agendas that shape the international community’s engagement in peace processes point to the “genetic defect” of the UN as a key actor in the peace-building arena that is primarily driven by state interests. These third-party interests shape the path that specific peace processes take—for instance, by pushing for the inclusion or exclusion of provisions in peace agreements, defining time frames, and setting peace-building objectives. They can also influence the way that the implementation of peace agreements happens, sometimes pushing the process to diverge from the interests of peace. For instance, Martin has recounted that, although UNMIN departed from the dominant template in terms of DDR, the process was constrained by India’s insistence that the national army not be scaled down significantly because it was seen as the only actor that India could work with to regain control of the situation if the civil war recurred.53 That the UN is composed of states also means that it inevitably reproduces the dominant model of a state or, at least, state-like structures and institutions: doing otherwise would undermine the states’ claims that their legitimacy stems from the way their state is organized around a generally accepted set of principles. This reinforces Paris’s argument that peace processes facilitate the globalization of the liberal market democracy as the dominant global form of domestic political organization.54 The tendency to replicate donor state models of organization has caused particular tension in the relatively new rule-of-law arena, with experts arguing that the variation in legal and policing systems even among Western states has resulted in constant conflict about the model that should be replicated in postwar societies, which has undermined progress overall.55 These political agendas contribute to the narrowing of the sphere of possible actions in peace processes. At another level, the political realities of state interests and engagement in international action have led to what some consider the empty rhetoric of local ownership of peace processes. Expert mediator Herrberg argues that international mediation has become an increasingly accepted technique in the resolution of civil wars and, although there is talk of the importance of local ownership of peace agreements, she argues that there is no real commitment at the international level to foster it.56 This may account in part for the low levels of commitment to implementing peace agreements that I found in some of the cases—for instance, Indonesia’s apparent bad faith in agreeing to Acehnese autonomy and the obstructive policies of both Sudan and South Sudan in the secondary negotiation processes to define the border and negotiate the final aspects of the peace after the initial political settlement in the CPA. Timothy Donais argues that the notion of local ownership in peace processes has not moved beyond rhetorical commitment to the principle, partly because the dominant international approach has patholo-

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gized civil war societies and attempted to establish peace through externally driven technical processes.57 The power imbalance that this approach establishes sets up local actors as “junior partners in the peacebuilding enterprise” that are often seen as obstacles to the establishment of peace rather than as valuable participants in the process.58 The externally driven technocratic approach does create the opportunity for a particular type of local elite ownership, which was apparent in many of the cases examined in earlier chapters. By “displacing community, culture, identity, and welfare,”59 technocratic peace processes facilitated the elite capture of peace processes. This was particularly obvious in the transitional justice sphere where local elites manipulated the processes to serve their own ends, but it was also apparent in security- and governancebuilding processes where local elites selectively engaged in and exploited the processes in order to maximize their own power, influence, and wellbeing in the postwar state. Donais argues that this presents the international community with the difficult option of moving from technical capacitybuilding tasks toward “capacity disabling,” or efforts to marginalize or coopt local power structures that obstruct the consolidation of new democratic systems that challenge the privileged position of the existing elite.60

Politics: The Elusive Factor The systemic challenges to peace consolidation point to a deeper problem with the international community’s approach to peace building: the depoliticization of peace building. In each of the areas explored, the technical elements of peace-building processes were predominant and often divorced from the local political structures and dynamics of the contexts in which they operated. The politics of the society—the way that power and authority were organized and contested—did not significantly shape or inform the overall form that the peace consolidation process took. As a result, many of the intended outcomes were undermined and, rather than contributing to the consolidation of the negative peace achieved in the peace agreements, the peace processes themselves perpetuated the political, economic, and social conditions that provided incentives for ongoing insecurity in many of the cases studied. Although fundamentally different contexts, the postwar “peace” in Liberia, Cambodia, Mozambique, South Sudan, and Aceh shared similar characteristics, specifically instability, insecurity, mistrust, and a violent political culture. The analysis of cases showed that there is a dominant way that peace-building processes happen and, although it is tweaked to suit each context, it follows the same basic template of technocratic responses to build security, establish governance institutions and processes, and pur-

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sue transitional justice. Notably, where this did not happen—for example, in Bougainville—the peace-building approaches were more localized and did not follow the dominant international peace-building model. The negotiated peace processes that I examined in this book appear to be underpinned by a set of assumptions about what a peace process must include in order to be successful: a DDR mechanism; an SSR mechanism; a mechanism for representative and, usually, electoral governance; and, increasingly, a formal legal transitional justice mechanism in the form of either a war crimes tribunal or a truth-telling process. The approaches within each of these arenas also tended to follow the same broad template across the range of countries surveyed. This model is often identified as the “liberal peace,”61 although the liberal peace includes economic and civil society elements not addressed in this book. The convergence of peace building around this particular model points to deeper assumptions, which are that the path from civil war to sustainable peace follows the same route despite the particularities of each context and that a set of essentially technocratic processes can move a society out of civil war and toward peaceful social relations. This technocratic and template-based approach prevails despite the widely repeated wisdom that each context is unique and requires a locally responsive and relevant approach. In this chapter I have explored why this is the case and suggested that a number of factors contribute to the perpetuation of the dominant peace-building model. These include the bureaucratic incentives for planning, assessing, and learning from peace processes that are based on the assumption that lessons are transferable as well as the structure of the international peace-building sector, including the UN, the way that external state interests shape and animate peace processes, and the global peace-building culture. These various pressures and processes combine to limit the realm of possible action in peace processes, by and large, to technocratic, tested, and measurable tasks. They also establish a significant disconnect between the sophisticated learning that has been built up by practitioners about effectiveness in peace processes and the way processes are actually conceptualized, designed, and implemented to mimic past peace processes. These factors both shape and are reinforced by the way that peace processes and their goals are conceptualized, which helps to explain the convergence described in Chapter 2 around highly technocratic, tick-the-box definitions of success and its component elements. As a result, the technocratic elements of peace processes are distanced from the local political structures of the society in which they are being implemented, although these structures define the extent to which the peace processes can achieve their goals. For instance, DDR processes failed to respond to the economic and social incentives for ongoing violence that

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existed both within their society and regionally and that shaped the choices of individual ex-combatants to undermine the peace process. Similarly, governance institutions were established but were not the location of political authority or power in the society, and formal transitional justice processes were pursued in ways that serve elite political interests rather than social ends. The bureaucratic incentives, organizational imperatives, global culture, and international factors that limit the realm of possible options in peace processes mean that practitioners and policymakers are doing what they can and what they know, but not necessarily what should be done to make the postwar society more peaceful. Civil wars are highly complex processes of social conflict and power contestation, and the characteristics of each war reflect the particular circumstances of the society in which it rages. Peace processes, however, are increasingly limited by a relatively standardized view of how civil war states can become peaceful, what a peaceful state should look like, and how that state should operate. The international community’s engagement in peace processes rests on high expectations of what can and should be achieved and on a set of technocratic causal beliefs on how to get there. Although these noble objectives are necessary for states to internally justify their international involvement in civil wars, particularly if it involves military or police deployments into dangerous situations, they reproduce a deeply flawed way of approaching conflict-affected states. The technocratic approach perpetuates the assumption that societies at war within themselves are “broken states” that, like a broken machine, can be fixed by a good mechanic.62 By pathologizing conflict-affected societies and focusing on state institutions as the locus of the problem, it is inevitable that peace processes result in responses that see “fixing” institutions as the means to establishing peace. In other words, the way that the problem of civil war– affected societies is constructed determines the way that it is responded to, and has entrenched an approach that is technocratic and template-based rather than responsive to the political and social dynamics of the particular context. Technocratic responses see the state as the solution to civil wars and, in doing so, do not see the way that the state’s relationship to society is often at the heart of civil wars and therefore needs to be central to peace processes. Overall, due to these pressures and the resulting context in which peace processes must operate, peace processes not only often fail to consolidate peace, but they also establish a set of postwar security, governance, and transitional justice institutions that are disconnected from the dynamics of political and social organization. As a result, peace processes contribute to entrenching the conditions that facilitate or incentivize ongoing insecurity and instability in the new postwar state and society. Politics is missing from this picture of postwar peace building, despite being at the heart of civil wars. But while politics is missing, it is not an

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ingredient that can simply be added to the existing template in order to improve its effectiveness. It is a factor that is much more elusive than that, and one that requires a deep engagement with the particularities of each context to determine which peace-building options and approaches are best suited for responding to that conflict. Both the technocratic approach itself and the many pressures in the international system that perpetuate that approach preclude this sort of responsiveness. Those involved in peace processes are, as Paris describes, both “promulgators and prisoners of a global culture”63 that privileges technocratic “fixes” over dynamic approaches that could respond to the political, social, and economic context of each civil war and peace process.

Notes 1. Miguel Angel Centeno, “The New Leviathan: The Dynamics and Limits of Technocracy,” Theory and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 308–312; Roger Mac Ginty, “Indicators+: A Proposal for Everyday Peace Indicators,” Evaluation and Program Planning 36, no. 1 (2012): 57. 2. “Ivory Coast: Gbagbo’s Forces Attack Hotel HQ of President-elect Ouattara,” The Guardian, April 10, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/10/ivory-coast -gbagbo-ouattara-golf-hotel. For other examples, see Daniel Byman, “Talking with Insurgents: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Washington Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2009): 130; Daniel Byman, “The Decision to Begin Talks with Terrorists: Lessons for Policymakers,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 5 (2006): 408; Chester A. Crocker, Taming Intractable Conflicts: Mediation in the Hardest Cases (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2004), 158; Kristine Höglund and Isak Svensson, “‘Sticking One’s Neck Out’: Reducing Mistrust in Sri Lanka’s Peace Negotiations,” Negotiation Journal 22, no. 4 (2006): 379; Sylvie Mahieu, “When Should Mediators Interrupt a Civil War? The Best Timing for a Ceasefire,” International Negotiation 12, no. 2 (2007): 210, 215; Jonathan Stevenson, “Northern Ireland: Treating Terrorists as Statesmen,” Foreign Policy 105 (1996): 135; Nazih Richani, “Third Parties, War Systems’ Inertia, and Conflict Termination: The Doomed Peace Process in Colombia, 1998–2002,” Journal of Conflict Studies 25, no. 2 (2005): 94. 3. Julian Junk, “Designing Multidimensional Peace Operations: The Cases of International Interim-administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor” (Master’s thesis, Konstanz University, 2006), 130, http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/bitstream /handle/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-18228/JunkJ.pdf?sequence=1; Jaque Grinberg, head of analysis and assessment of UNPROFOR, head of political affairs of UNTAES, head of civil affairs of UNMIBH, and director of political affairs and chief of staff of MONUC, interviewed by the author, Bologna, July 13, 2011. 4. Dan Smith, secretary general, International Alert, interviewed by the author, London, January 5, 2011. 5. Christiana Solomon and Jeremy Ginifer, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration in Sierra Leone (Bradford: Centre for International Cooperation and Security, University of Bradford, 2008), 2. 6. Daniel Korski and Richard Gowan, Can the EU Rebuild Failing States? A Review of Europe’s Civilian Capacities (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2009), 27–29. 7. Ibid., 28.

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8. Elisa Dari, Megan Price, Jense Van Der Wal, Marlene Gottwald, and Nicole Koenig, CDSP Missions and Operations: Lessons Learned Processes (Brussels: European Union, 2012), 21–22, 102. 9. Ibid., 12; Raphael Bossong, EU Civilian Crisis Management and Organisational Learning (Berlin: Economics of Security, DIW Berlin Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, February 2012), 3. 10. Bossong, EU Civilian Crisis Management and Organisational Learning; Michael Smith, “Developing a ‘Comprehensive Approach’ to International Security: Institutional Learning and the CSDP,” in Constructing a Policy-making State? Policy Dynamics in the EU, ed. Jeremy Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11. Mac Ginty, “Indicators+,” 57. 12. Laurent Goetschel and Tobias Hagmann, “Civilian Peacebuilding: Peace by Bureaucratic Means?” Conflict, Security and Development 9, no. 1 (2009): 59–60. 13. Thania Paffenholz, Third-generation PCIA: Introducing the Aid for Peace Approach, Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series No. 4 (Berlin: Berghof Foundation, 2005), 2. See also Goetschel and Hagmann, “Civilian Peacebuilding,” 60. 14. Bossong, EU Civilian Crisis Management and Organisational Learning, 10; see also Robert Templer, director, Asia Program, International Crisis Group, interviewed by the author, New York, February 8, 2011. 15. Goetschel and Hagmann, “Civilian Peacebuilding,” 64. 16. Ian Martin, formerly special representative of the secretary-general and head of the UN Mission in Nepal (2006–2009), special envoy of the secretary-general for Timor-Leste (2006), and high-level official in the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (2000–2001), the East Timor Popular Consultation (2009), Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (1998–1999), the UN Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda (1995–1996), and the UN/OAS International Civilian Mission in Haiti (1995–1995), interviewed by the author, New York, March 1, 2011. 17. Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18. Roland Paris, “Peacekeeping and the Constraints of Global Culture,” European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 3 (2003): 441–443. 19. Ibid., 462. 20. James Mackey, NATO official, interviewed by the author, Brussels, January 20, 2011. 21. Kishore Mandhyan, deputy director of political affairs (peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs), UN Secretary-General’s Office, interviewed by the author, New York, March 3, 2011. 22. Ian Martin, “All Peace Operations Are Political: A Case for Designer Missions and the Next UN Reform,” in Review of Political Missions 2010, ed. Richard Gowan (New York: Center on International Cooperation, New York University, 2010), 9. 23. Patricia Daley, “Challenges to Peace: Conflict Resolution in the Great Lakes Region of Africa,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2006): 304. 24. Roger Mac Ginty, “Routine Peace: Technocracy and Peacebuilding,” Cooperation and Conflict 47, no. 3 (2012): 300. 25. Caroline Hughes and Vanessa Pupavac, “Framing Post-conflict Societies: International Pathologisation of Cambodia and the Post-Yugoslav States,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 6 (2005): 874–875. 26. Ibid., 874. 27. Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15.

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28. Roland Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice,’” Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (2002): 638–639. 29. Ibid., 438. 30. Oliver P. Richmond, “The Globalization of Responses to Conflict and the Peacebuilding Consensus,” Cooperation and Conflict 39, no. 2 (2004): 147. 31. Colin Keating, former New Zealand ambassador to the UN and executive director of the Security Council Report, interviewed by the author, New York, March 2, 2011; Mandhyan interview. 32. Mandhyan interview. 33. Goetschel and Hagmann, “Civilian Peacebuilding,” 66. 34. Keating interview. 35. Senior UN official, interviewed by the author, New York, February 11, 2011. 36. See also Priscilla Hayner, senior adviser, Center for Humanitarian Dialogue and co-founder of the International Center for Transitional Justice, interviewed by the author, Geneva, January 18, 2011; Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 73. 37. Alvaro de Soto, special coordinator for the Middle East peace process (2005–2007); Secretary-General’s special adviser on Cyprus (1999–2004); UN under-secretary-general (1999–2007); SRSG Central American peace process (1990–1991), interviewed by the author, Paris, February 4, 2011. 38. Antje Herrberg, chief executive officer, mediator for the European Forum for International Mediation and Dialogue, and director for mediation and dialogue, Crisis Management Initiative, interviewed by the author, Brussels, January 21, 2011. 39. Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice,’” 642–643. 40. John McNamara, principle deputy coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, US Department of State, interviewed by the author, Washington, DC, February 16, 2011; Vikram Parekh, policy adviser, UN Peacebuilding Support Office, interviewed by the author, New York, February 11, 2011; Neclâ Tschirgi, Post-conflict Peacebuilding Revisited: Achievements, Limitations, Challenges (New York: International Peace Academy, 2004), 16; Timothy Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition? Dilemmas of Local Ownership in Post-conflict Peacebuilding Processes,” Peace and Change 34, no. 1 (2009): 9. 41. UN Security Council, Res. 867 (September 23, 1993); UN Security Council, Res. 905 (March 23, 1994); UN Security Council, Res. 933 (June 30, 1994); UN Security Council, Res. 940 (July 30, 1994); UN Security Council, Res. 975 (January 30, 1995); UN Security Council, Res. 1007 (July 31, 1995); UN Security Council, Res. 1048 (February 29, 1996); UN Security Council, Res. 1085 (November 29, 1996); UN Security Council, Res. 1086 (December 5, 1996). 42. UN Security Council, Res. 940. 43. Robert A. Pastor, Report on the Elections in Haiti, June 25, 1995 (Atlanta: Carter Center, 1995), 1–2, www.cartercenter.org/documents/1248.pdf. 44. A number of practitioners argued that many of the longer-term peacebuilding projects are actually quite cheap—for instance, localized work to foster communal relationships or to set up radio stations as a communications tool. However, these projects are unlikely to be funded as part of official peace processes because it is more difficult to measure and report their outcomes and their funding overheads are seen as too high relative to the total cost of the project, so that donors do not consider them worthy of investment. William Lowrey, former director of peacebuilding, World Vision International, interviewed by the author by phone, February 16, 2011; former UN official, interviewed by the author, New York, March 2, 2011; McNamara interview. 45. Martin interview.

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46. Mandhyan interview. 47. Michael Lund, policy adviser, Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, UN Development Program, interviewed by the author, New York, February 9, 2011. There is a side issue here, which concerns new human resources policies for undersecretaries-general brought in by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Ban has put all under-secretaries-general on twelve-month contracts, so there is an impetus to not challenge the system or the dominant approaches too much because they may risk losing their jobs. 48. Keith Krause and Oliver Jütersonke, “Peace, Security and Development in Post-conflict Environments,” Security Dialogue 36, no. 4 (2005): 459; Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 8; Goetschel and Hagmann, “Civilian Peacebuilding,” 62. 49. Korski and Gowan, Can the EU Rebuild Failing States? 28. 50. Lund interview. 51. World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011), 16. 52. Ibid., 17. 53. Martin interview. 54. Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice,’” 638–639. 55. Templer interview; Mandhyan interview. 56. Herrberg interview. 57. Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 3–9. 58. Ibid., 8–9. 59. Oliver P. Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday,” Review of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): 575. 60. Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 16. 61. See, for instance, Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. 9–10; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance, 22; Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 33–57; Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, vol. 87 (London: Zed Books, 2001). 62. Stephen Ellis, “How to Rebuild Africa,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5 (2005): 136. 63. Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice,’” 463.

7 Why Peace Fails

In 1992, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali launched An Agenda for Peace, calling for the international community to enhance preventative diplomacy, peace making, and peace keeping with a new endeavor—postconflict peace building—to prevent the relapse into war.1 Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has become increasingly involved with the business of bringing civil wars to an end through the negotiation and implementation of peace settlements. In early 2015, there were sixteen UN peace operations deployed across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, 2 and the international community was engaged in broader peace-building processes through nonmilitary interventions in many more countries. However, although postwar states do not relapse into civil war as often as they have in the past, many peace processes do not actually consolidate peace but instead establish “neither war, nor peace” situations in which violence, instability, and cleavages between groups remain pervasive characteristics of the postsettlement society and where the potential for renewed warfare is not inconceivable. At the end of 2012, the international spotlight returned once again to the protracted conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which had been formally brought to an end by a peace settlement in 2003 and followed by significant international involvement in peace building, including the largest and most expensive UN peace operation to date. In late November 2012, a rebel group known as M23 (March 23 Movement) seized the regional capital, Goma, and threatened to continue marching to Kinshasa if President Joseph Kabila failed to enter into negotiations on the basis of a range of demands. These included what they considered to be the failed implementation of a 2009 peace accord that ended a previous uprising in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and provided for the rebels’ integration into the Congolese army. They also called for the release of political prisoners, the dissolution of

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the electoral commission, and freedom of movement for opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, who had been under heavy guard since losing the controversial 2011 presidential elections.3 The uprising in the east was complicated by the evidence that “the Government of Rwanda, with the support of allies within the Government of Uganda, created, equipped, trained, advised, reinforced and directly commanded the M23 rebellion,”4 highlighting the regional dimensions of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A year later, in December 2013, South Sudan’s fragile postindependence peace crumbled when political disputes at the highest levels of government and a series of attempts to monopolize political control by various power holders manifested in open violence between the supporters of President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar. The ethnic divisions that animated the second Sudanese war were remobilized by politicians who had spent the postindependence years sharing power under the SPLM, which controlled the state structures. Violence was quick to erupt, old communal rifts reopened, and formerly warring groups rearmed and remobilized. Within a month, an estimated 10,000 people were killed; 200,000 people were displaced within South Sudan; 30,000 were displaced to neighboring countries; and thousands more were injured.5 Within a year, an estimated 50,000 were killed and 2 million displaced, and peace talks have, to date, made no inroads into resolving the resurgent conflict.6 Although the peace process had invested heavily in building the infrastructure for peace through governance and security programs, the conflict had remained just below the surface. The “neither war, nor peace” situation that had characterized the South since the 2005 peace agreement dissolved when the right trigger conditions arose, and the problems now facing the peace process in the South are much the same as they were when the state declared independence in 2010. These events showcase the challenges involved in consolidating peace after peace settlements and reflect the experiences of many other postagreement societies, which are often characterized by localized violence, resistance to the new governance and security institutions, a violent political culture, disenfranchisement with the peace process, and generalized insecurity.

A Complex Problem, a Novel Approach, and the Findings In this book, I have investigated why negotiated peace processes in civil wars since the end of the Cold War have often not resulted in stable peace. I have examined why violence, insecurity, and instability remain pervasive in many postwar contexts, despite peace-building efforts that attempt to address them through security-building programs, governance reforms, and transitional justice mechanisms.

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To date, many attempts to answer these questions have focused on either technical analyses of a large set of cases or deeper analyses of particular cases. In order to explain why peace fails or sometimes succeeds, technical approaches have focused variously on the grievances of warring groups, the rational choices behind continued warfare, the analysis of the characteristics and context of the civil war country, and the specifics of the mechanisms by which the peace process was pursued. While these analyses provide interesting insight into general trends across civil wars, they often do not capture the broader picture about how and why various factors interacted to produce particular results. This inability to reflect the specificity of each case is particularly obvious in those studies that rely on quantitative analysis. On the other end of the spectrum, in-depth studies of the flaws and merits of individual cases or comparative analyses between two or three cases provide a more detailed account of the interaction of various factors in a particular context, but lead to conclusions that are limited to those cases and rarely shed light on the broader reasons why so many peace processes face the same challenges. I have taken an alternative approach to analyzing peace process failure, by balancing the uniqueness of particular cases with a broader analysis of why peace processes have resulted in similar flaws across a range of peacebuilding cases since 1991. To do this, I have used security building, governance building, and transitional justice as the frames for a functional analysis of the merits and weaknesses of a wide range of peace processes. I chose these three themes for the prominent place they occupy in peace agreements: security and governance are central elements of almost all peace settlements and transitional justice provisions are becoming increasingly common, particularly since 1999. While I have drawn on a large number of peace processes since the end of the Cold War, I focused on six countries in significant detail. Rather than using these as case studies in the classic sense of the approach, I approached them in terms of their functional elements, specifically those processes and factors that help understand why a peace process unfolded in a particular way and what the sources of weakness were in consolidating peace. Cambodia, Mozambique, Bougainville, Liberia, North and South Sudan, and Aceh were the primary subjects of this functional case study approach because they represent a diverse range of experiences of both conflict and the war-topeace transition underpinned by peace settlements. A range of other countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Timor-Leste, and Côte d’Ivoire, were drawn into the analysis to develop the conclusions from the main cases in greater detail and to canvass the extent to which those findings were relevant to other peace-building experiences. The analysis of the peace processes in these cases was based on a conceptualization of success in peace processes that avoids the normative bag-

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gage of the maximalist approaches to understanding success, which expect broad liberal state-building outcomes while painting a more complex and compelling picture of peace than that provided by the security-focused minimalist approach. This minimalist+politics understanding of success facilitated a dynamic and flexible analysis of the security-building, governancebuilding, and transitional justice processes across a variety of postwar countries, which made visible the extent to which actions in these various arenas either contributed to or undermined peace consolidation. Combining this framework for analyzing success with a broad, qualitative, and narrative-based approach to investigating trends in peace process success led to a set of conclusions in each thematic field about the common factors that undermined peace building in the range of cases studied. Together, these thematic analyses suggest overarching conclusions about the flaws in the international community’s approach to peace processes after civil wars that contribute to the recurring failure of peace processes to consolidate peace. The analysis of postagreement peace processes gave rise to two main sets of findings about the obstacles to peace consolidation across the three thematic areas. On the one hand, significant practical challenges undermined the consolidation of peace in the postwar states studied. These ranged from the delayed deployment of peacekeepers to poorly designed DDR and SSR programs, insufficient funds and resources for peace-building activities, and the bad faith or lack of commitment to peace that characterized some conflict parties’ ongoing engagement with the peace process. Although serious, these practical challenges reflect the complexity of the environments in which peace building occurs; protracted civil wars are, by definition, difficult environments in which to build peace. On the other hand, this investigation suggests that security-building, governance-building, and transitional justice initiatives were primarily technocratic exercises in most of the cases studied. They both followed and perpetuated a particular model of peace building based on an instrumentalist understanding of war-to-peace transitions and the processes of social transformation they entail. The technical focus of peace processes meant that they were undertaken in ways that did not recognize the relevance or influence of local power structures and dynamics on the effectiveness of peace building. It also meant that peace processes privileged mechanisms or reforms that were measurable and could draw on existing international technical expertise over approaches that more closely addressed the social, economic, and political drivers of ongoing insecurity in postwar societies. The cases studied illustrated the way that peace itself is often depoliticized by peace processes: civil conflict is understood primarily as the result of a dysfunctional state, and peace is pursued through a set of mechanisms that attempt to “fix” the state to return order and security to its population.

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These mechanisms include DDR and SSR, a system of representative governance, the development of state institutions according to a liberal democratic model, and a formal legal mechanism to hold accountable those responsible for wartime crimes. A causal quasi-universalist logic underpins this approach: there is a set of assumptions about what a postconflict state and society should look like, and what mechanisms can facilitate such a transition across a variety of contexts. Peace is taken to be a fundamentally uncontested idea, which is at odds with the realities of peace building illustrated by the highly contested peace processes that I examined. In this book I suggest that the technocratic template, which is embedded in peace agreements and shapes postagreement peace consolidation processes, persists despite a widespread understanding that civil wars are unique and require tailor-made responses. The perpetuation of this model is caused by a range of systemic factors. International structures, organizational incentives, bureaucratic imperatives, and the global peace-building culture all contribute to the perpetuation of the dominant model of peace building, which revolves around technical security and governance reforms and formal transitional justice processes and leaves little room for peacebuilding efforts to respond to local contexts. These various pressures reinforce one another, with the result that the realm of possible action in peace processes is limited to technocratic interventions that are measurable and reflect technical expertise. This is in direct contradiction to the increasingly sophisticated knowledge of practitioners and analysts that has developed over the course of many flawed peace processes, which discourages such approaches to peace building. Civil wars are deeply political affairs. At their heart lies conflict over how a society is organized and run and how power and authority are embodied and exercised. Divorcing a peace process from the political and social contexts in which it operates results in a fundamentally hollow peace: a peace in which the institutions and structures of security, governance, and transitional justice are disconnected from the dynamics of politics and social organization that shape how effective those new institutions will be in consolidating peace. By focusing on the technical rather than the contextual aspects of building peace after civil wars, the peace processes studied were manipulated and captured by elite interests, thereby inadvertently contributing to the perpetuation of the very conditions of insecurity, conflict, and instability that they were attempting to alleviate. In the absence of a genuine engagement with the politics of war and peace in a particular society, a peace process cannot be effective; nor can it contribute to the establishment of stable and lasting peace. But while a responsiveness to local context must find a way back into negotiated peace processes, it cannot simply be added to the existing model. In this book, I have suggested that the approach to negotiating, designing, and implement-

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ing peace agreements needs to be fundamentally reconstructed in order to move away from technocratic responses and toward approaches that engage more deeply with the particularities of conflict and peace in each context. I am calling for a bespoke approach to peace processes where (1) the form of each process is custom designed and tailored to suit the specific functions of the process, the context in which it operates, and the needs of the local population; and (2) the interaction of these factors and the constituent elements of the peace process are regularly assessed and approaches are shifted as necessary to respond to changing conditions, outcomes, and challenges. This is not to suggest that each peace process begins from first principles or deep musings on the nature of peace and conflict, but rather that the variety of options in the peace-building toolbox are not simply applied in the same sequence and manner that they have been used in the past. Rather, they are selected after a genuine consideration and discussion of their utility and likely impact in each individual context and implemented in ways that are sensitive to the politics of the war-to-peace transition and the particular social, political, and economic pressures that shape that transition. The transition away from the dominant technocratic approach toward one that is more bespoke will necessarily involve changes in the global peace-building system, so that actors in peace processes can strike a better balance between the technical elements of peace building and a responsiveness to the political and social dynamics that characterize social transformation and the war-to-peace transition. One might wonder, given the challenges inherent in local responsiveness, the capacity of local power holders to manipulate the international community’s engagement in postwar contexts, and the deep difficulty of making peace in civil wars—all of which I have illustrated in this book— whether effective peace-building responses are at all feasible. Is the international peace-building exercise fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure? I do not think that it is. What I have shown here is that there have been elements of successful peace building even in the countries that have become stuck in “neither war, nor peace” situations. I have shown that, where an awareness of and responsiveness to local dynamics shape peace processes and the international community’s engagement in them, the outcomes were more positive than in those where it did not. This was most evident in Bougainville, but there were also numerous elements of peace building in the other cases that demonstrated this, even if the overall approach in those peace processes was technocratic and delinked from politics. I have shown that the international community can avoid the pitfalls illustrated by the cases studied if it embeds its security-building, governance-building, and transitional justice efforts in an engagement with the political, social, and economic dynamics of each postwar society—and that there is a growing awareness among high-level practitioners and policymakers about the need

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to do so. All of this militates against abandoning the international peacebuilding exercise and underscores the need to rethink and reframe the way that the international community engages in the complex processes of social change to better support civil war states in transition to peace.

Conclusion Civil wars are bloody and bitter social phenomena and the peace processes that respond to them reflect not only their complexity, but also their unpredictability. Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has been heavily involved in fostering peace processes in civil wars, through facilitating and supporting peace agreements, the implementation of those agreements, and the broader processes of consolidating peace. However, these processes often contributed to entrenching conditions of insecurity and instability in postwar societies and, while fewer postwar countries slide back into civil war, many remain locked in situations of “neither war, nor peace.” The distinction between war and peace is these contexts is blurry, with the result that while war may not restart, violence, instability, and insecurity remain pervasive characteristics of postwar societies and a political culture of violence persists. Peace processes have reflected the assumption that war is a dysfunction that can be fixed through technocratic interventions that rebuild state structures and institutions. In negotiated peace processes, these interventions have revolved around governance reform, security building, and transitional justice. In this book, I suggest that these processes are underpinned by the assumption that a society’s prewar relationship to violence can be reestablished through the right institutional “fixes.” As a result, they have often failed to respond to the dynamics and structures of power in the postwar society that provide the context in which they are being implemented and determine how effective they will be in consolidating peace. As long as peace processes do not engage with the local context of societies moving from civil war toward peace and assume that a postconflict society is effectively a blank slate onto which peace can be projected using technocratic solutions, peace processes will continue to create fundamentally unstable and insecure postwar states. Recognizing the processes by which power and authority are organized and contested within a postwar society, and the interaction of those politics with the imperatives for either war or peace, is essential to move away from the technocratic model of peace building and toward something more effective. Peace building happens in the context of these dynamics: they shape its success. There is no recipe for peace, and politics is not a missing ingredient that can simply be added to the existing approach to peace processes to

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improve its effectiveness. Moving beyond the dominant approach toward a more tailored approach to peace will require significant changes within the system of actors engaged in peace processes as well as changes in the expectations of what peace processes can and should be expected to achieve and what form they take. These expectations animate not only the international community involved in peace processes, but participants in peace negotiations, civil war communities, and citizens in third-party countries that contribute to peace operations and processes through military, humanitarian, and other means. At their heart, civil wars are political processes; they are violent negotiations of who gets what, when, and how. They contest power, authority, and resources, and often challenge the fundamental way that a society is organized. Peace processes fail when they do not respond to this central characteristic. The absence of politics from peace processes, and the dominance of a technocratic approach to postwar peace building, stems from the international community’s approach to dealing with civil wars. Despite the best intentions of those involved in peacemaking and peacebuilding, and the increasingly sophisticated knowledge about how to respond to the complexities of civil war, there are perverse incentives for international actors to keep doing the same thing. Unless the international community is able to break away from these pressures, stop implementing the same technocratic peace package, and find novel ways of approaching peace processes that see civil war–affected societies not as broken but as undergoing complex processes of social transformation and political negotiation, it is unlikely that negotiated peace agreements will become more effective at establishing peace after civil wars.

Notes 1. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, UN Doc. A/47/277–S/24111, June 17, 1992, www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html. 2. UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, “Current Peacekeeping Operations,” n.d., www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml. 3. “DR Congo: M23 Rebels Set Conditions for Goma Pullout,” BBC News Online, November 27, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20506995; “DR Congo Rebels Demand Negotiations,” Al Jazeera Online, December 2, 2012, www.aljazeera .com/news/africa/2012/12/2012122211559911764.html; “Congo Army Returns to Goma as M23 Demand Negotiations,” BBC News Online, December 3, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20585179. 4. UN Security Council, Report by the Group of Experts on the DRC to the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1522 (2004) Concerning the DRC, UN Doc. S/AC.43/2012/NOTE.26, November 27, 2012, http://s3.document cloud.org/documents/526823/goe-letter-to-unsc-27-nov-2012-copy.pdf?ocid =socialflow_twitter_africa.

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5. Nicholas Kulish, “New Estimate Sharply Raises Death Toll in South Sudan,” New York Times, January 9, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/world/africa/new -estimate-sharply-raises-death-toll-in-south-sudan.html. 6. International Crisis Group, South Sudan and Sudan’s Merging Conflicts (Addis Ababa: International Crisis Group, January 2015), i.

Acronyms

ABC ABG AFL AMM ASEAN AU AusAID BCPR BDLP BIG BPA BPCP BPF BRA BRF CAVR CFSP CHD CIVPOL CMI COHA CPA

Abeyi Border Commission (Sudan) Autonomous Bougainville Government Armed Forces of Liberia Aceh Monitoring Mission (EU) Association of Southeast Asian Nations African Union Australian Agency for International Development Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Response (UNDP) Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (Cambodia) Bougainville Interim Government Bougainville Peace Agreement Bougainville People’s Congress Party Bougainville Police Force Bougainville Revolutionary Army Bougainville Resistance Force Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (East Timor and Indonesia) Common Foreign Security Policy (EU) Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (also known as the Henri Dunant Centre) Civilian Police (UN) Crisis Management Initiative Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (Aceh) Comprehensive Peace Agreement

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Acronyms

CPP DDR DDRR DOCO DPA DPKO ECCC

ECOWAS EU Forkrab FRELIMO FRETELIN FUNCINPEC GAM GNU GOI GOL GOS GOSS GPA GTZ HIV/AIDS HRW ICC ICG ICTJ ICTR ICTY IDDRP IDDRS IDP

Cambodian People’s Party disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration (Liberia) Development Operations Coordination Office (UN) Department of Political Affairs (UN) Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN) Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed During the Period of Democratic Kampuchea Economic Community of West African States European Union Communication Forum for Children of the Nation (Indonesia) Mozambique Liberation Front Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia Free Aceh Movement Government of National Unity Government of Indonesia Government of Liberia Government of Sudan Government of South Sudan General Peace Agreement (Mozambique) German Agency for International Cooperation human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome Human Rights Watch International Criminal Court International Crisis Group International Center for Transitional Justice International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Interim Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Program (South Sudan) Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards (UN) internally displaced person

Acronyms

IMF INCHR IOM KPA KPK KPNLF LNP LOGA LRA LURD M23 MDF MNLF MOD MODEL MOU MPCE MRG NATO NCP NEC NGO NPFL NSAG NSBDC NTGL OAU OECD ONUMOZ PBSO PCA PDK PMSC PPRD PRIO

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International Monetary Fund Independent National Commission on Human Rights (Liberia) International Organization for Migration Aceh Transition Commission NGO Coalition for Truth Recovery (Aceh) Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (Cambodia) Liberian National Police Law on Governing Aceh Lord’s Resistance Army Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy March 23 Movement Me’ekamui Defence Force (Bougainville) Moro National Liberation Front (the Philippines) Ministry of Defense Movement for Democracy in Liberia Memorandum of Understanding (Aceh) Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments Minority Rights Group International North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Congress Party (North Sudan) National Elections Commission (Sudan) nongovernmental organization National Patriotic Front of Liberia nonstate armed group North-South Border Demarcation Commission (Sudan) National Transitional Government of Liberia Organization of African Unity Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development UN Operation in Mozambique Peacebuilding Support Office (UN) Permanent Court of Arbitration Party of Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) private military and security company People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (Democratic Republic of Congo) Peace Research Institute Oslo

252

Acronyms

RCAF RENAMO R2P RSS SADC SAF SGBV SNC SOC SPLA SPLM S&R SRSG SSPS SSR TNI TRC UCDP UDPS UN UNDP UNIFEM UNITA UNMIH UNMIL UNMIN UNOMB UNTAC USIP

Royal Cambodian Armed Forces Mozambican National Resistance Responsibility to Protect Reintegration Support Scheme Southern African Development Community Sudanese Armed Forces (North Sudan) sexual and gender-based violence Supreme National Council (Cambodia) State of Cambodia Sudan People’s Liberation Army (South Sudan) Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (South Sudan) stabilization and reconstruction special representative of the Secretary-General (UN) South Sudan Police Service security sector reform Indonesian Armed Forces Truth and Reconciliation Commission Uppsala Conflict Data Program Union for Democracy and Social Progress (Democratic Republic of Congo) United Nations UN Development Programme UN Development Fund for Women National Union for the Total Independence of Angola UN Mission in Haiti UN Mission in Liberia UN Mission in Nepal UN Observer Mission in Bougainville UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia United States Institute of Peace

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Index

Abeyi Border Commission, 130 Abu Sayyaf (Mindanao), 42 Abuja Accords (Liberia), 57, 134 Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement (Liberia), 56–57, 60, 134, 148, 175 Aceh: attempts to build security, 56, 64, 92, 95–97, 227–228; Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (COHA), 71; civil war, 13–14; corruption, 15, 149– 151; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 65, 71–72, 74–78, 91, 95; EU involvement in, 80, 97, 116, 227–228; Free Aceh Movement (GAM), 26, 71–72, 74– 76, 78, 82, 96, 123–126, 133, 139, 149; governance reform and political culture, 15, 123–126, 133, 149–151, 152, 232; Law on Governing Aceh (LOGA), 123–125, 191; Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), 71–72, 74–76, 77–78, 82, 96, 123–126, 191; peace agreements, 128, 215; peace negotiations, 123– 126; postconflict elections, 96, 123– 125, 135, 139; proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 191; security sector reform (SSR), 81–82, 218; transitional justice mechanisms, 188, 191–192 Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM), 71 Aceh Reintegration Board, 74–76 Aceh Transition Commission (KPA), 78, 82

Addis Ababa Agreement (Sudan), 126– 127 African Union (AU), 19, 57, 137 Ahtisaari, Martti, 123 al-Bashir, Omar, 128–129, 132 Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL), 58, 62, 63 Arusha Accords (Burundi), 38 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 71, 112, 118 Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), 73, 82, 141–143, 145, 150 al-Bashir, Omar, 128–129, 132 Bicesse Peace Accords (Angola), 34 Bosnia, EU involvement in, 219 Bougainville: Burnham Declaration, 196, 197; civil war, 13–14, 92–93; corruption, 149; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 72–74, 85, 91–92; governance reform, political culture, 139, 140–146, 149–151; independence referendum, 145–146; Me’ekamui Defence Force (MDF), 73; mining, 92, 145, 150, 198; Papua New Guinea collaborative relationship with, 141–142, 144–145, 152; Papua New Guinea conflict, 72– 73, 82, 194–195, 197–198; Papua New Guinea service provision within, 149–150; peace process and security building, 14, 64, 91–92, 128, 152–

279

280

Index

153, 218, 233, 244; postconflict elections, 143–144; proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 198; security sector reform (SSR), 85; sexual and gender-based violence, 93; transitional justice mechanisms, 167, 194–204; UN Observer Mission in Bougainville (UNOMB), 72, 143; UN Political Office in Bougainville, 72 Bougainville Interim Government (BIG), 194–195, 197 Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA), 72, 82, 141–143, 144, 167, 197–198 Bougainville People’s Congress Party (BPCP), 144 Bougainville Police Force (BPF), 82, 144–145 Bougainville Resistance Force (BRF), 72–73 Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), 72–73, 82, 194–195, 197 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 28, 239 Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BDLP), 113 Burnham Declaration (Bougainville), 196, 197 Cambodia, 13, 32, 64, 65–74; civil war, 13–14, 111–112; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 65–71; Documentation Center of Cambodia, 186–187; Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), 184– 187, 188, 189, 191; governance reform, political culture, 96, 114–123, 137, 138, 151–153, 222; National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), 65–66, 83, 112–113, 116–118, 138, 183; Paris Peace Agreement, 65, 112–115, 120, 153; peace process, 111–121, 132, 141, 226, 232; postagreement political violence, 112–114, 116; Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF), 67, 119; security sector reform (SSR), 83; State of Cambodia (SOC), 65–66, 112, 115–117, 119– 120; transitional justice mechanisms,

183–188, 195, 197, 202–203; UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), 65–66, 112–117, 119–120, 153, 186; US involvement in, 111– 112, 117–118, 183 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), 65, 83, 112–120, 122, 137–138, 152–153, 183–187 Carter Center: elections monitoring, 36, 124, 131, 136, 137, 140, 227 Case study method, 14–15, 49, 241 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (COHA) (Aceh), 71 Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, 169 Civil war: definition, 18–19; pathologization of, 223–224. See also individual countries Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) (Sudan), 56–57, 87–88, 127, 200–201 Comrade Duch, 184–185 Conflict: definition, 18; causation, 44–45 Côte d’Ivoire, 61, 138, 139, 215 Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), 6, 7, 17, 123, 157 Darfur, 88, 95, 128–129, 226 Democratic Republic of Congo: EU involvement in, 219; government and peace agreement (2009), 239–240; M23 rebellion, 239–240; peace process, 221, 225, 239–240; postconflict elections, 137–140; postconflict political culture, 144, 153 Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 6, 11, 15, 27– 28, 43, 49, 56–57, 65–71, 72–74, 77, 78–79, 84–88, 89–91, 93–94, 95, 97– 98, 101, 112, 215, 218–219, 230, 231, 233–234, 242, 243 Documentation Center of Cambodia, 186–187 Doe, Samuel, 56, 177 DynCorp, 58, 62 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), 57 Elite bargaining, 167–168, 181–182, 187–188, 192 El Salvador peace settlement, 8

Index European Union (EU), 137, 219; involvement in Aceh, 80, 97, 116, 227–228; involvement in Bosnia and DRC, 219 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), 184–187, 188, 189, 191 Free Aceh Movement (GAM), 26, 71– 72, 74–76, 78, 82, 96, 123–126, 133, 139, 149 Garang, John, 88, 95, 127, 128 Gbagbo, Laurent, 61, 139, 215 General Butt Naked, 177 German Agency for International Cooperation (GTZ), 67 Governance, 109–111; mutual vulnerability, 136, 141, 152; political opposition, 116, 118, 132–133, 134, 146, 152, 161 Government of Indonesia (GOI), 71, 76, 123–124, 125–126, 191 Government of South Sudan (GOSS), 67–68, 127, 129–130, 132, 133, 147, 201 Guatemala peace agreement, 8 Gusmao, Xanana, 189–190 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 60, 81 Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR), 180–181 Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI), 71–72, 96, 124, 139, 189, 191 Interim Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Program (IDDRP), 67, 68 Internally displaced persons (IDPs), 6, 31, 59 International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), 170, 177, 186, 189 International community, definition, 19– 20, 231 International Criminal Court (ICC), 128– 129, 138, 139, 168 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 168, 184, 192 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 168, 184, 192

281

International Crisis Group (ICG), 36, 58, 60–64, 68, 84, 90, 124, 129, 131, 149, 201 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 38 Kabila, Joseph, 137–138, 239 Kabui, Joseph, 143–144 Kenya, peace negotiations, 225 Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF), 65–66, 112–113, 117–118 Khmer Rouge, 65, 96, 112–113, 115, 118, 183–184, 186–187 Khmer Working Group on Weapons Reduction, 67 Kiir, Salva, 128, 240 Land disputes, 73, 81, 136, 180 Law on Governing Aceh (LOGA), 123– 125, 191 Legal formalism, 176, 192, 193, 199, 202–204, 228–229 Lessons learned processes, 167, 219– 220, 230 Liberia: civil wars, 13–14, 56–82, 85–87, 90–91, 94–96; building security, 56– 82, 85–87, 96, 215, 218; corruption, 179; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 57–61, 64– 65, 74–78, 218; governance reform, political culture, 133–137, 147–149, 153, 179, 232–233; infrastructure, 57, 147–148; Ministry of Defense (MOD), 62–63; Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), 57– 59, 134; National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), 56; National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL), 57, 134, 179; postwar governance, 133–138, 147, 148–149, 153; security sector reform (SSR), 62–65, 79–82; transitional justice mechanisms, 167, 174–183, 187, 189, 192, 198, 202–204, 216; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 167, 174–183, 203, 216; UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), 58, 59, 63, 65, 81; US involvement in, 62–63, 175 Liberian National Police (LNP), 61, 63– 64, 81, 148, 180

282

Index

Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), 57–59, 134 Local ownership, 64, 136, 231–232 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), 68, 88– 89 Machakos Protocol (Sudan), 127 Machar, Riek, 127, 240 Martin, Ian, 38, 220, 221–222, 228, 231 Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments (MPCE), 37 Me’ekamui Defence Force (MDF) (Bougainville), 73 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) (Aceh), 71–72, 74–76, 77–78, 82, 96, 123–126, 191 Mindanao peace agreement (Philippines), 42–43 Ministry of Defense (MOD) (Liberia), 62–63 Momis, John, 143–145 Monrovia Roadmap (OECD International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding), 30–31 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Mindanao), 42 Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (Mindanao), 42 Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), 57–59, 134 Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), 70, 78–79, 80, 87, 95, 139–141, 152, 154 Mozambique: civil war, 13–14; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 70–71, 74, 77, 85, 87, 91, 95, 215; governance reform, political culture, 96, 139– 141, 152, 154; peace process and security building, 32, 47, 64–65, 92, 96, 218, 226, 232; postconflict elections, 139–141, 226; security sector reform (SSR), 78–81, 85, 91; sexual and gender-based violence, 93; UN Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ), 71, 78, 87 Mozambique General Peace Agreement (GPA), 78, 140, 141 Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), 70–71, 78–80, 87, 95, 139, 140–141, 152, 154

National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), 56 National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL), 57, 134, 179 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 34 National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), 65–66, 83, 112–113, 116–118, 138, 183 Nazar, Muhammad, 124 New People’s Army (Mindanao), 42 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 19, 221 Northern Alliance (Afghanistan), 9 North-South Border Demarcation Commission (NSBDC), 130 Nuer White Army (South Sudan), 133 Ona, Francis, 73, 194–195 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, 30 Ouattara, Alassane, 61, 138 Papua New Guinea: and Bougainville conflict, 72–73, 82, 194–195, 197– 198; collaborative relationship with Bougainville, 141–142, 144–145, 152; service provision within Bougainville, 149–150 Paris Peace Agreement (Cambodia), 65, 112–115, 120, 153 Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK), 65–66, 112–117, 183–184 Patronage networks, 119, 154 Peace: maximalist approach, 25–30, 32– 49, 241–242; minimalist approach, 25– 28, 39–50, 242; minimalist+politics, 16, 41–50, 242–244 Peace agreements: failure of, 9–12, 25– 26; limitations of, 46–50 Peace building: bespoke approach to, 5, 244; bureaucracy, 220; successes, 25– 26, 232–233; technical experts, 224; technocratic approaches, 214 Peacebuilding Commission, 3 Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs): limited mandates, 227; mission templates, 219–220, 224, 229–230

Index Peace process, definition, 19 Pinochet, Augusto, 169 Political culture: global, 221; violent, 33, 111, 120–121, 146, 151–152, 215, 232, 240 Ranariddh, Norodom, 113, 116, 187, 222 Report of the Secretary-General on Peacebuilding in the Immediate Aftermath of Conflict (2009), 31 Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 1, 3 Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETELIN), 35 Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF), 67, 119 San Andres Accord (Mexico), 6 Sann, Son, 65, 112 Savimbi, Joseph, 34 Security sector reform (SSR), 6, 27–28, 29, 31, 55, 56–57, 61–65, 78–86, 89, 91, 93–94, 97–98, 215, 218, 221, 230, 233, 242–243 Sen, Hun, 96, 113, 115–116, 118–119, 122, 138, 153, 184–186, 188, 222 Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), 2, 37, 76, 93, 180 Sierra Leone, 60, 167, 181, 219 Sihanouk, Norodom, 65, 112, 116 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 91, 135–136, 148–149, 177–181 South Africa: arms trafficking, 71, 87; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 166, 169, 175, 225 South Sudan, 37, 94–95, 232; attempts to build security, 88–89, 94–95, 97, 240; civil wars, 13–14, 126–133, 240; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), 67–71, 74, 77, 91; governance reform, political culture, 132–133, 147, 151–152; Government of South Sudan (GOSS), 67–68, 127, 129–130, 132, 133, 147, 201; independence referendum, 88, 142; Nuer White Army, 133; peacebuilding success, 37, 87–88, 126– 133; peace negotiations, 65, 126–130, 215, 226, 231; postconflict elections, 131–132, 135; prospects for Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 202; security sector reform (SSR), 83–84, 91; South Sudan

283

Police Force (SSPS), 84; transitional justice mechanisms, 200–202 South Sudan Police Force (SSPS), 84 Stabilization and reconstruction (S&R), 28–29 State of Cambodia (SOC), 65–66, 112, 115–117, 119–120. See also Cambodian People’s Party Sudan: Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), 56–57, 87–88, 127, 200–201; Machakos Protocol, 127 Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), 67, 69, 131 Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), 67–68, 69, 83, 84, 88, 94, 127, 128, 130, 201 Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), 67–68, 88, 127–130, 132, 200–202, 240 Taylor, Charles, 56–57, 61, 63, 134, 177, 181 Timor-Leste: Ad Hoc Human Rights Court, 188–189; Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), 190; Commission of Truth and Friendship, 190; postelection violence, 34–35; Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETELIN), 35; Special Panels for Serious Crimes, 188–189; transitional justice mechanisms, 188–193, 215; UN involvement in, 188–190, 228 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); Aceh, 191; Bougainville, 198; Liberia, 167, 174–183, 203, 216; South Africa, 166, 169, 175, 225; South Sudan, 202 Tshisekedi, Etienne, 138, 240 Uganda: conflict with Lord’s Resistance Army, 88; connection to M23 rebellion, 240 United Nations (UN), 1, 3, 15, 19, 26, 28, 36, 38–39, 46, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 84, 87, 89, 95, 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 138, 170, 177, 183–184, 189, 191, 214, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224–225, 228, 230–231, 233, 239 United Nations Civilian Police (CIVPOL), 63, 78

284

Index

United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), 38 United Nations Department of Political Affairs (DPA), 36, 38, 46 United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), 93 United Nations Development Operations Coordination Office (DOCO), 38 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 6, 7, 17, 59, 175; Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Response (BCPR), 228, 230 United Nations Executive Office of the Secretary-General, 37 United Nations Human Rights Commission, 184 United Nations Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards (IDDRS), 67, 69, 74 United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH), 227 United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), 58, 59, 63, 65, 81 United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), 221, 231 United Nations Observer Mission in Bougainville (UNOMB), 72, 143 United Nations Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ), 71, 78, 87 United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), 3, 38 United Nations Political Office in Bougainville, 72

United Nations Security Council, 28, 178, 188 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), 65–66, 112– 117, 119–120, 153, 186 United States, 175; involvement in Cambodia, 111–112, 117–118, 183; involvement in Liberia, 62–63, 175; State Department, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, 37 United States Institute of Peace (USIP): Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction, 28–30; Measuring Progress in Conflict Environments, 37 Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 5, 7–8 Violence: codes of, 42l; cultures of, 68, 69–70, 73, 90–91, 92–93, 111, 144, 152, 176, 245 War, definition, 18 World Bank, 1, 66–67, 75, 77, 118, 230 World Development Report 2011, 1–2, 230 Yemen: retaliatory violence, 42–43; small arms, 69 Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang, 123–124 Yusuf, Irwandi, 124

About the Book

Why do so many post–civil war societies continue to be characterized by widespread violence and political instability? Or, more succinctly, why do peace processes so often fail to consolidate peace? Addressing this question, Jasmine-Kim Westendorf explores how the international community engages in resolving civil wars—and clarifies why, despite the best of intentions and the investment of significant resources, external actors fail in their reconstruction efforts and even contribute to perpetuating the very conditions of insecurity and conflict that they are trying to alleviate. Jasmine-Kim Westendorf is lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University.

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