Institution Building in Weak States. Andrew Radin
plan was insufficiently democratic. Both cases show how even high-resource missions with effective sovereign control cannot overcome public opposition and how the missions achieved greater success during the stages of reform when they did not propose changes that threatened nationalist goals.
Chapter 4 compares defense reforms in Bosnia and Timor-Leste. In Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) was able to eliminate the ethnically based “entity” militaries and create a single, civilian-controlled BiH military. This success depended on extensive international resources and, more importantly, on specifying demands that would merge the entity militaries while not threatening Serb nationalist goals or the ruling elites’ patron-client networks. In Timor-Leste the nationalist importance of a pre-independence guerrilla movement opposing Indonesia’s occupation compelled a UN transitional administration to establish a military, contrary to the UN mission’s original intentions. Successor UN missions paid little attention to the military and therefore failed to improve its accountability and compliance with law. The problems within the military later contributed to violent conflict between elements of the Timorese police and military.
Chapter 5 describes police reform in Bosnia and Iraq. In Bosnia the success of defense reform led OHR to pursue the reorganization of the police and create new police district boundaries that crossed the border between the two entities. This demand threatened Serb nationalist goals by undermining the autonomy of the Serb-dominated regional entity of BiH, the Republika Srpska. The threat of OHR’s demands led to public opposition by Bosnian Serb elites, which blocked the reform effort and contributed to the subsequent delegitimization of OHR’s authority in Bosnia. In Iraq, from 2003 to 2011, Coalition forces attempted to create a police force to take over security when they departed. Shia elites engaged in private opposition, co-opting and undermining Iraq’s internal security forces. Shia private opposition stemmed more from a desire for control and the legacy of oppression under Saddam Hussein than the threat of the Coalition effort to Shia political parties’ networks, although Shia opposition was more intense where there was a greater threat to these patron-client networks.
Chapter 6 examines the case of defense reform in Ukraine after 2014. It shows how the Ukrainian domestic imperative to meet NATO standards led the international community to make recommendations that threatened the ruling elites’ patron-client networks to varying degrees. The recommendations that posed the least threat to these networks were ultimately the most implemented, showing how the domestic opposition theory offers insight outside of highly resourced post-conflict interventions.
Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing the results of the case studies, discussing policy implications, considering the wider applicability of the domestic opposition theory, and proposing directions for future research. By looking across the diverse reform efforts studied in the book, shown in table 1.2, it is possible to observe some general patterns, including that resources appeared to have little consistent impact on success and that the most successful reforms tended to be those that posed the least threat to nationalist goals and patron-client networks. Chapter 7 concludes that institution builders should formulate their demands and recommendations to avoid provoking opposition while still improving state institutions. The chapter also explores how foreign organizations can implement this advice, including developing foreign officials’ local knowledge, ensuring greater autonomy for deployed missions, and increasing the priority of improving partner institutions over other objectives.
NOTES
1This is according to a subsequent Ukrainian MoD report. See Anton Lavrov and Alexey Nikoslky, “Neglect and Rot: Degradation of Ukraine’s Military in the Interim Period,” in Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine, edited by Colby Howard and Ruslan Pukhov, 65–72 (Minneapolis, MN: East View Press, 2015).
2For details, see our final report: Olga Oliker, Lynn E. Davis, Keith Crane, Andrew Radin, Celeste Ward Gventer, Susanne Sondergaard, James T. Quinlivan, Stephan B. Seabrook, Jacopo Bellasio, Bryan Frederick, Andriy Bega, and Jakub P. Hlavka, Security Sector Reform in Ukraine (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1475-1.html.
3See Andrew Radin, “The Limits of State Building: The Politics of War and the Ideology of Peace” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012); and Andrew Radin, “Domestic Opposition and the Timing of Democratic Transitions after War,” Security Studies 26, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 93–123.
4See Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Jakob Hedenskog, “Ukraine: A Defence Sector Reform Assessment,” Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI), 2015, https://www.foi.se/rapportsammanfattning?reportNo=FOI-R--4157--SE; and Oksana Bedratenko, “More Proof Ukraine Is Changing: Opaque Defense Sector Embraces Reform,” October 26, 2016, https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/oksana-bedratenko-proof-ukraine-changing-opaque-defense-sector-embraces-reform.html?cn-reloaded=1.
5“Ukraine to Take into Account RAND Corporation’s Recommendations during Defense Ministry Reform,” Interfax-Ukraine October 24, 2015, http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/298483.html.
6Isabelle Facon, “Reforming Ukrainian Defense: No Shortage of Challenges,” Institut Français des Relations Internationales, May 2017, https://www.frstrategie.org/web/ documents/publications/autres/2017/2017-facon-ifri-reforming- ukrainian-defense.pdf, 23–24.
7See Bedratenko, “More Proof Ukraine Is Changing.”
8On the role of institutions in the maintenance of peace, see Charles Call and Vanessa Wyeth, Building States to Build Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008). On the role of governing institutions, democracy, and peace, see Benjamin Reilly, “Political Engineering and Party Politics in Conflict-Prone Societies,” Democratization 13, no. 5 (2006): 811–27; Philip G. Roeder and Donald S. Rothchild, Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Caroline A. Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Call and Stanley emphasize the importance of the police as the largest security force and the one with the greatest interaction with citizens. Charles T. Call and William Stanley, “Protecting the People: Public Security Choices after Civil Wars,” Global Governance 7, no. 2 (April 1, 2001): 151–72. Skendaj makes a similar assessment of which state institutions are most valuable for study. He identifies four “core state functions” and corresponding state bureaucracies: extraction and boundary maintenance (associated with the customs service), coercion (associated with the police), executive (associated with the central administration and corresponding to my analysis of central government institutions), and legal order (associated with the judicial system).