The limits of state building : the politics of war and the ideology of peace
Name
813442735-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
25.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8657d377ff57f0f9d5d5f68663f0b6d8
Author(s)
Radin, Andrew M. (Andrew Marc)
Advisor(s)
Roger D. Petersen.
Alternative Title
Politics of war and the ideology of peace
Date Issued
2012
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
When can the international community build strong state institutions - such as security forces or electoral institutions - in post-conflict societies? An influential technical perspective argues that authority, resources, and expertise enable the international community to build its preferred institutions. In Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo, the international community established international administrations with executive powers and a state building mandate. Each international administrations had extensive authority, resources, and expertise, which make them crucial test cases for the technical perspective. I examined seventeen reform efforts in these societies related to security, representation, and revenue. While some institution-building efforts succeeded, many failed and provoked violence or undercut political development. To explain this variation, I propose a theory that specifies the mechanisms of the reform process. The theory is based on the interaction between the international administration, local elites, and the mass public of the post-conflict society. The mass public will protest when demands threaten nationalist goals, such as independence. Local elites, on the other hand, will privately obstruct reform to protect their informal patronage and corruption networks. International officials are ideologically committed to human rights and bureaucracy, which lead them to make overambitious demands. Moreover, competing goals and political friction among international organizations causes disagreement about which demands to make to local elites. The theory predicts that reform efforts only fully succeed when the international administration is unified and its demands threaten neither nationalist goals nor informal networks. I test the theory by conducting causal process tracing in the seventeen reform efforts. The case studies draw from fieldwork in each of these societies, as well as primary and secondary sources. Within these seventeen efforts, I identify fifty-seven stages of reform. Of these, forty confirm the theory's predictions and thirteen partially confirm the predictions. The case studies also demonstrate that the technical perspective, and other alternative hypotheses, cannot consistently explain state building. The dissertation has implications for broader state building efforts by the international community, and urges the adoption of an incremental approach to institution building that takes account of the realities of local politics and the corresponding limits of international authority.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
Subjects
Political Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
