Institution Building in Weak States. Andrew Radin
that government is democratic or not.” Francis Fukuyama, “What Is Governance?,” Governance 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2013): 350.
45Accountability is closely associated with the concept of “democratic” institutions but is intended to include a broader sense of whether institutions reflect the interest of the entirety of society rather than just the majority.
46There is also debate about how the sequencing of these objectives—for example, some claim that effective institutions should be built before elections are held. See, e.g., Paris, At War’s End; Miller, Armed State Building; and Thomas Carothers, “The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 1 (2007): 12–27.
47For example, Marina Ottaway writes, “For the international community, rebuilding institutions in collapsed states means organizing government departments and public agencies to discharge their functions both efficiently and democratically, following models found in Weberian states.” Ottaway, “Rebuilding State Institutions in Collapsed States,” 1003–4. See also Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
48Roland Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice,’” Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (2002): 638.
49Pritchett and Woolcock observe that there is “a broad consensus on objectives” and on the “adjectives” associated with good institutions: “‘accountable,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘responsive,’ and ‘transparent.’” Pritchett and Woolcock, “Solutions When the Solution Is the Problem,” 203–4. Institution-building efforts by non-Western organizations may have fundamentally different goals and methods, such as Russia’s institution-building efforts in the Donbass in Ukraine or Syria, or China’s engagement in Africa. See, e.g., David Dollar, China’s Engagement with Africa: From National Resources to Human Resources, Brookings Institution, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/research/chinas-engagement-with-africa-from-natural-resources-to-human-resources/; and Lance Davies, “Russia’s ‘Governance’ Approach: Intervention and the Conflict in the Donbas,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (April 20, 2016): 726–49.
50Reveron, Exporting Security, 131–32.
51See also Paddy Ashdown, Swords and Ploughshares: Bringing Peace to the 21st Century (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 27.
52Variation in the World Governance Indicators in other study countries was similarly small. World Bank, “World Governance Indicators” (2018), http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/#home. Other measures tend to be highly correlated, such as in the case of the rule of law. Mila Versteeg and Tom Ginsburg, “Measuring the Rule of Law: A Comparison of Indicators,” Law & Social Inquiry 42, no. 1 (December 1, 2017): 100–137.
53Polity IV, for example, lists interruptions in BiH for the period of study and in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, and only codes Kosovo after 2008. Center for Systemic Peace, “INSCR Data Page” (2018), http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/p4v2017.xls. Freedom House’s “Freedom of the World” (2017) index does not specifically study effectiveness, accountability, and the rule of law; see https://freedomhouse.org/report/fiw-2017-table-country-scores.
54Cullen Hendrix notes a range of different metrics of state capacity, some with significant flaws, and observes that the validity of these metrics may vary across countries with different export profiles and levels of development. Similarly, there is extensive criticism of the various available cross-national indicators of democracy. Cullen Hendrix, “Measuring State Capacity: Theoretical and Empirical Implications for the Study of Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 3 (2010): 273–85. See also Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Steven Fish, Allen Hicken, Matthew Kroenig, Staffan I. Lindberg, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Holli A. Semetko, Svend-Erik Skanning, Jeffrey Staton, and Jan Teorell, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (2011): 247–67; and “Indicators of Governance and Institutional Quality” (n.d.), http://siteresources.worldbank.org /INTLAWJUSTINST/Resources/ IndicatorsGovernanceandInstitutionalQuality.pdf.
55This selection is similar to the “folk Bayesian” approach identified by Timothy McKeown. See Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), chap. 9.
56In the course of recounting the events of the reform effort, the case studies describe details or data points or “causal process observations” that offer evidence in support or opposition to the proposed process hypotheses of the different theories. See James Mahoney, “After KKV: The New Methodology of Qualitative Research,” World Politics 62, no. 1 (2010): 125–29; Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), chap. 10; and Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry. For an application of process tracing in studying state building, see Oisín Tansey, “Evaluating the Legacies of State-Building: Success, Failure, and the Role of Responsibility,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2014): 175–77.
57See George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, chap. 8.
58All interviews cited below were conducted by the author. Where I cite interviews conducted by others, I cite the work in which they are quoted or described.
59See James Dobbins, Seth Jones, Benjamin Runkle, and Siddharth Mohandas, Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009).
CHAPTER TWO
The DOMESTIC OPPOSITION THEORY and ALTERNATIVE THEORIES
In 2008 I made my first field research trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia, or BiH). The postwar mission in Bosnia had begun in 1995, and by the time I arrived the international community had pursued a wide range of efforts to help build peace, strengthen state institutions, and encourage the development of a multiethnic society. Some of the most well-resourced efforts to remake the country had achieved little, such as a police restructuring effort (see chapter 5). More practical, incremental efforts that avoided core political interests had the most success, such as the creation of a value added tax and a defense-reform effort (see