Institution Building in Weak States. Andrew Radin
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">chapter 6.
Part of the reason for variation in the threat of reform is that different individuals leading or supervising foreign missions may adopt different strategies or priorities based on their own experience and perspective. There are also other political, bureaucratic, or cultural pressures within peace-building organizations that influence the choice of demands or recommendations. Lise Morjé Howard notes that UN organizations may have vested political interests in carrying out peacekeeping operations in certain ways or with particular goals in mind, which may not always maximize the potential success of state building.7 Astri Suhrke, for example, shows how the mandate for the peacekeeping mission in East Timor in 1999 developed from preexisting ideas about impartiality and the United Nations’ recent experience in developing the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.8 Séverine Autesserre highlights how everyday practices and beliefs can undermine the effectiveness of interveners, especially by reducing their ability to understand and adapt to local circumstances. She notes that interveners tend to emphasize “thematic” or generally accepted technical knowledge over “local” knowledge about the society where they are active. This tendency can lead to a range of dysfunctional practices, such as a preference for “short deployments and rapid turnover” of personnel, which leads to a lack of institutional memory and knowledge of events in the society; the selective recruitment of local partners who may provide a biased perspective of events on the ground; and a tendency to adopt one-size-fits-all approaches across different societies.9 Assessments of US counterinsurgency and state-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are also critical of the problems of rapid rotation, lack of training in local languages, and a focus on general technical principles without attention to their applicability to local circumstances.10
In a given intervention, there are often three levels of authority: a foreign mission, a headquarters overseeing the mission, and the country or countries that provide funds and staff the mission. The varying objectives of these separate organizations can also lead to the selection of counterproductive demands or recommendations.11 The headquarters may, for example, have an incentive to demonstrate to the mission’s backers that the mission is abiding by liberal principles or other ideals, which may lead the headquarters to ask the mission to seek particular demands even if they are not achievable. For example, Reo Matsuzaki shows in the case of US colonial policy in the Philippines that policymakers in Washington preferred a concept of bottom-up democratization based on the American historical experience of small New England towns. This policy was inappropriate in the Philippines since the municipalities in the Philippines did not have the capacity or will to run effective local administrations.12 Alternatively, the headquarters may have an incentive to declare success even if the mission is not making progress and thus encourage skewed reporting.
Another possibility is that particular domestic actors are able to influence foreign actors’ demands or recommendations to suit their interests. Foreign actors must to some degree take into account the interests of domestic-interest groups and draw their insight about what is good for the society through discussions with domestic actors. Few foreign actors seek direct involvement in local political competition, even though they recognize that their intervention will have an impact on it. The influence of particular domestic actors may mean that reform poses less of a threat to domestic interests in general, or it may lead foreign actors to adopt demands or recommendations that threaten the interests of competing domestic parties or groups.
Some foreign actors are able to modulate their demands or recommendations to the particularities of domestic politics, without being captured by particular domestic-interest groups, and thereby maximize the success of reform. Indeed, foreign actors sometimes learn from their failure and achieve greater success in later stages of reform. Drawing from the observed cases of success below, the concluding chapter also observes that foreign officials who have greater knowledge of domestic politics and the autonomy to select demands tend to be better able to avoid domestic opposition.
NATIONALIST GOALS
Political mobilization in defense of nationalist goals is an underappreciated factor influencing the outcome of foreign-supported institution building. Public opposition based on the threat of reform to nationalist goals is a bottom-up process that may involve both elites and the mass population but that is fundamentally driven by the popularity of nationalism among the population of a society. Because of the power of popular mobilization, my theory sees nationalist goals as an upper limit for what reform efforts can achieve.
Nationalism refers to the idea that a specific group should govern a territory.13 In societies where nationalism is politically important, individuals within the society tend to associate themselves with one or more identifiable “groups” distinguished by a “salient political cleavage” within their society.14 Elites and political parties in these societies often compete for support within their particular group.15 For example, postwar Bosnia was, and perhaps remains, an “ethnocracy”: there were three main groups—Bosnian Muslim, Croat, and Serb—each with their associated political parties, and political competition focused on the identity and relative political position of these three groups.16 In some cases, such as the Shia or Sunnis of Iraq, groups may not seek independence within a territory but may have beliefs for how a shared state is governed, such as seeking a dominant position or minimum representation for their group.17 I include these sentiments as part of nationalism since they amount to a group-based vision for the governance of a society. Nationalism can also be politically important in societies without strongly defined ethnic groups. In Timor-Leste, there was only one main group after 1999, as supporters of Indonesia had largely fled. Nevertheless, the nationalist discourse of the achievement of independence remained politically important.18
The importance of nationalist goals in explaining institution building depends on a scope condition: whether or not nationalism is politically important in the relevant society. This condition is met in some but by no means all societies where foreign actors pursue institution building. In societies where there is little history or likelihood of popular mobilization around group identities, this element of the theory is unlikely to explain the process or outcome of reform. In neopatrimonial societies where patronage relationships dominate politics, for example, group identity may be more important for structuring patron-client networks than as a means of mass mobilization, and mass mobilization in response to a threat to nationalist goals may be unlikely.19
Scholars have noted several reasons for the political importance of nationalism, including the specific history of political and economic modernization, the mobilizing role of elites, and a history of violent conflict. While nationalist leaders may claim that ethnic identities go far back in history, scholars have traced the origins of nationalism in many countries to processes associated with economic and political modernization that occurred in the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, including mass literacy, industrialization, and the rise of widely distributed media.20 Many works also highlight how elite rhetoric and competition reinforce nationalist ideas and show that elite participation is an essential part of nationalist mobilization.21
A recent experience of war often leads to an increase in the political importance of nationalism. Carrie Manning, for example, observes that many political parties emerging from wartime into the postwar period continue to use “war-time packages of collective incentives,” meaning appeals that include reference to general wartime objectives, depending on whether the “major war-time cleavage remains relevant in the post-war political arena.”22 Elizabeth Wood explains how individuals’ experience of war or violence can influence the lasting development of particular political beliefs through mechanisms such as the military recruitment of individuals into rebel groups.23 Laia Balcells documents in the case of Spain that experiences of victimization are often socialized into subsequent generations, which can lead wartime identities to have a long-standing political impact.24 Roger Petersen argues that the experience of violence may create emotional residues that create a resource for subsequent political mobilization.25 When many individuals identify with nationalist beliefs and elites begin to depend on nationalist identities for political power, it