Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christoph Zürcher is Professor of Political Science the University of Ottawa. Carrie Manning is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Georgia State University. Kristie D. Evenson is an independent researcher. Rachel Hayman is Head of Research at the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC). Sarah Riese is a PhD candidate at Free University Berlin. Nora Roehner is an advisor for the government of Afghanistan in Kabul.

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COSTLY DEMOCRACY

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface.....................................................................vii1 Introduction..............................................................12 Leverage, Adoption Costs, and the Peacebuilding Game......................203 The Legacy of War.........................................................354 The Mission Footprint.....................................................575 Aid.......................................................................826 Neighborhood..............................................................1127 Conclusion: Explaining Postwar Democratic Transitions.....................131Notes.......................................................................155Bibliography................................................................163The Authors.................................................................175Index.......................................................................177

Chapter One

Peacebuilding missions can bring peace to war-torn countries, but they seldom bring democracy. Why do countries so rarely emerge from civil wars as democracies? And what is the role of peacebuilders in both failed and successful postwar democratic transitions? These questions lie at the heart of the collective research effort presented in this volume.

The evidence for successful postwar democratic transitions is not encouraging: Since 1989, the international community has launched nineteen major peacebuilding operations (see Table 1.1). These operations were reasonably successful in securing peace but much less successful in establishing democratic regimes. Five years after the operations began, only two countries were rated "free" by Freedom House and qualified as "liberal democracy"; that is, as a regime that "extends freedom, fairness, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law from the electoral process into all other major aspects of governance and interest articulation, competition, and representation." Also, no recent missions of significant size—including those in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan—have resulted in the establishment of a liberal democracy.

It is unrealistic, perhaps, to expect a liberal democracy to emerge from the ashes of war. But even when we apply a lower and less ambitious threshold for success, such as an electoral democracy (that is, according to Freedom House's definition, a regime that holds elections but provides less protection for civil liberties than a liberal democracy), we still find that just nine out of the nineteen countries that hosted major peacebuilding missions qualify. Among those governments that miss the mark, three are classified as fully authoritarian and four as electoral authoritarian—that is, ruled by autocrats who allow some form of multiparty elections that they almost certainly win by a comfortable margin. Given the vast amount of resources and hopes that are invested in liberal peacebuilding, these are sobering results.

Scholars have offered several explanations as to why postwar democracy is so difficult to establish. To start with, some scholars argue that bringing democracy to a war-torn country is simply the impossible dream born of Western hubris; it is unreasonable, they say, to expect peacebuilders to socially engineer a society capable of producing and maintaining a liberal democratic regime in a matter of years, and they point to the fact that the emergence of social structures that enabled democracies to grow in Western Europe was a process that took centuries.

Other scholars take a less radical stance but maintain that democratization after war is an extraordinarily rare event because most postwar societies lack the capacities to implement and sustain the complex and costly political institutions required for democratic and accountable governance. This echoes Seymour Martin Lipset's famous "social requisites of democracy" argument, which states that low economic development and a small middle class negatively affect democratization.

A third explanation focuses on the geostrategic location of a country and states that the threat of violent spillovers from adjacent countries may discourage leaders from steering a more democratic course or that support from an authoritarian leader in a neighboring country reduces the international pressure on elites for democratic reforms in a postwar country.

Lastly, perhaps the most prominent strand in the peacebuilding literature centers on the cooperation problem between the warring parties and argues that the most obvious factor that hinders the emergence of democracy after war is war itself. Civil wars, especially when they are long, highly destructive, and fought between identity groups, can reduce a society's capacity for a stable and democratic peace because they create highly divided societies and elites who deeply mistrust one another. Under such circumstances, actors may lack the capacities to overcome the cooperation problem and be unable to engage in a meaningful peace process or to accept the bounded uncertainty that comes with democratic rules. For all of these reasons, countries emerging out of war find it difficult to democratize.

And yet modern peacebuilding missions are designed precisely to address these challenges. They are launched to help domestic elites overcome the many difficulties presented by postwar democratic transitions. Peacebuilders bring tremendous resources to the table with budgets that frequently dwarf those of host governments, as we have seen in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. They deploy civilian personnel who assume vital administrative functions and military personnel to guarantee security. Peacebuilders also bring economic aid, which frequently becomes the single most important source of government income. Aid is directed toward state institutions, election processes, and civil society. This assistance is usually committed over years rather than months, all of which has a tremendous impact on the economic, social, and cultural fabric of the intervened-upon society but has, apparently, only a weak effect on postwar democratization, as Table 1.1 shows. What explains the limited impact of external actors and their resources on postwar democratization?

Beyond the aforementioned difficulties of democratic transitions, some scholars assume that poor implementation is also at the root of mission failure. Often, time and resource constraints are thought to doom democratization efforts. The assumption is that missions with a larger footprint in terms of financing, personnel, and mandate could perhaps achieve better outcomes. Lack of coordination between peacebuilders and an inability to learn from past mistakes are also cited as potential obstacles. Critics lament that peacebuilders rarely adapt strategies to specific contexts but tend to apply a cookie-cutter approach to their democratization efforts, which prioritizes political and economic liberalization over the construction of effective political and economic institutions.

We do not discard any of these arguments, and we think that all of them encapsulate some of the aspects that explain why postwar democratic transitions rarely result in the liberal democracy that serves as...