Institution Building in Weak States. Andrew Radin
the quality of an institution ranging from 0 to 9.
The case studies repeatedly apply this scoring system over the course of the reform effort to evaluate the quality of an institution over time and thereby judge the success of reform following a rubric shown in table 1.1. The case studies seek to be as transparent as possible in making this assessment, although the result is inevitably subjective and some improvement or decline in quality may not alter the score. This scoring system offers a useful, if not always precise, metric for evaluating competing theories and for comparing the relative improvement of state institutions across different countries and regions.
TABLE 1.1. Change in Score and Associated Level of Success
| Change in 0–9 score | Judgment of success | Description |
| 0 or negative | Counterproductive | Violence or major nonviolent protest occurred, or the state institution was worse off than when the stage of reform began. |
| 0 | None/Minimal | There may be identifiable improvements in rules, practices, or organization, but an outside observer would likely not notice the difference between the quality of the state institution before and after. |
| 0–1 | Limited | There were some changes in the rules or functioning of the state institution, which might have lasting effect, but the general quality of the state institution remained similar. |
| 2–3 | Moderate | There were clear improvements to the state institution. |
| 4–9 | High | The state institution experienced rapid and dramatic improvement. |
PLAN OF THE BOOK AND RESEARCH DESIGN
The book proceeds with six chapters and a methodological appendix. In chapter 2 I provide the background and hypotheses of my domestic opposition theory, the international resource theory, and the path dependence theory.
Seven case studies in chapters 3–6 evaluate these hypotheses. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each considers two reform efforts from highly resourced post-conflict interventions, with chapter 3 examining reforms of central government institutions; chapter 4, reforms of defense institutions; and chapter 5, reforms of police institutions (see table 1.2). The reform efforts studied in these chapters occurred in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq, which, among interventions with a strong state-building mandate, had the highest level of international resources (see the appendix for details). Following the international resource theory, if reform success is likely to occur anywhere, it would occur in these societies.55 Within these countries, I chose reforms that cover the full range of variation in threat to domestic interests and international resources and that provide useful comparisons for causal inference. The appendix also shows there is substantial variation in the preintervention level of development of these countries, which the path dependence theory expects would lead to different outcomes. Chapter 6 explores the wider applicability of my domestic opposition theory by considering defense reform in Ukraine, which had a very different context from the reform efforts examined in chapters 3–5. Ukraine was not a post-conflict society, the local government was the driver of reform rather than the international community, and Western organizations had far fewer resources to encourage the changes that they desired. The fact that similar dynamics of domestic opposition occurred in Ukraine suggests that my theory applies to a wide range of US and international institution-building efforts, as I discuss in the conclusion.
The case studies use three logics of causal inference to test the hypotheses. A first type of causal inference, congruence testing, simply compares the observed outcome to the outcomes predicted by the various theories. The case studies also use causal process tracing, which means to scrutinize the events of the reform to identify information indicating whether the logic of the process hypotheses is operating as expected.56 Finally, I use the comparative method to isolate the impact of different variables and rule out competing explanations. The case studies compare reforms of the same institution in different countries, different state institutions within the same country, and variation over time within stages of the same reform.57 The appendix offers additional detail on these methods.
The case studies draw on a wide range of official documents, news reports, think tank analysis, and academic work. The case studies on reform efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor make use of more than 160 interviews from over ten months of fieldwork in these countries. I also conducted additional in-person and phone interviews in the United States. The interviews offer a firsthand perspective and fill gaps in the written record.58 Because nearly all interviews were conducted on a not-for-attribution basis, and because the discussion is not available to the reader, I provide a written source to support evidence from interviews wherever possible. For the Ukraine case study, I also draw on the results of RAND’s publicly released report on security sector reform, which relied extensively on interviews. In the case of Iraq, I make use of the academic record of the US presence as well as unclassified materials from the CPA provided to the RAND Corporation.59
TABLE 1.2. Case Studies
Note: CPA = Coalition Provisional Authority; NG = nationalist goal; PCN = patron-client network.
These sources offer a range of ways to gauge the motivation of domestic elites and foreign officials, which is an essential tool for evaluating the theories. Public statements or interview responses are a useful starting point and are most telling when actors have little reason to dissemble. Private discussions and correspondence can be the most compelling evidence but is rarely available. Comparing actors’ responses to different or similar events can also be informative. Where possible, especially for key judgments, the case studies triangulate across multiple sources.
Following the theory chapter, chapter 3 considers the creation of central government institutions in Kosovo and Iraq. The UN Mission in Kosovo quickly established a constitution and parliament to govern Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 but faced riots in 2004 after it changed its policy to indefinitely delay negotiations about Kosovo’s independence, the main Kosovo Albanian nationalist goals. After 2004 the UN began negotiations that would lead to independence, achieving a greater improvement in Kosovo’s institutions. In Iraq in 2003 the CPA sought an extended occupation to build democratic institutions. However, the CPA had to compromise when it faced an elite boycott, spearheaded