It Takes a Village: UN Peace Operations and Social Networks in Postconflict Environments

Why are civil society organizations so often unable to make a difference during the transition to peace? I argue that the contributions of local civil society organizations and women's organizations to postconflict peacebuilding should be understood in terms of the networks that emerge during the peacebuilding process. Horizontal network conditions are essential for successful postconflict reconstruction. Yet external actors often implement policies that strengthen hierarchical links at the expense of such horizontal networks. To explore the types of networks that emerge in postconflict reconstruction, I use semistructured interviews conducted in Liberia. The evidence suggests that emerging horizontal networks are more robust in areas where local communities and women have a tradition of organizing. However, these networks remain fairly unstable. The assistance is mostly channeled centrally, strengthening hierarchical ties and leading to distortions in the distribution of resources.

Civil War, Economic Governance & State Reconstruction in the Arab Middle East

Civil wars currently underway in Libya, Syria, and Yemen demonstrate that patterns of economic governance during violent conflict exhibit significant continuity with prewar practices, raising important questions along three lines. First, violent conflict may disrupt prewar practices less than is often assumed. Second, continuity in governance highlights the limits of state fragility frameworks for postconflict reconstruction that view violent conflict as creating space for institutional reform. Third, continuity of prewar governance practices has important implications for the relationship between sovereignty, governance, and conflict resolution. Civil wars in the Middle East have not created conditions conducive to reconceptualizing sovereignty or decoupling sovereignty and governance. Rather, parties to conflict compete to capture and monopolize the benefits that flow from international recognition. Under these conditions, civil wars in the Middle East will not yield easily to negotiated solutions. Moreover, to the extent that wartime economic orders reflect deeply institutionalized norms and practices, postconflict conditions will limit possibilities for interventions defined in terms of overcoming state fragility.

The Role of Reparations in the Transition from Violence to Peace

Reparations are among the most tangible, victim-centric, and personal of processes in the transition from violence to peace, symbolizing the recognition that an individual has been harmed and has rights in the eyes of the state or international community. Reparations are also an inherently political project, transforming official visions of violence, responsibility, and victimization into material and psychological benefit. Despite the power of reparations to shape transitions from violence to peace, they have been too often ignored in practice, leaving most victims of gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law without reparation. Partly as a consequence, research has tended to focus more on “harder” processes, like trials and truth commissions, than on the “stepchild of postconflict justice.” Yet, there have been significant developments in reparations theory and practice that motivate key outstanding questions for researchers. Reparations derive their symbolic power from the law, which is an imperfect tool for responding to the varied forms of violence experienced in conflict and to the diverse, sometimes contradictory, priorities and needs that people hold. In such contexts, there is an inherent tension between expanding reparations programs to be inclusive and adaptable and preserving their fundamental distinction as a justice process. This is a difficult balance to strike, but there are frameworks and questions that can offer useful guidance. In particular, the lenses of economic violence and positive peace are useful for articulating the role of reparations in postconflict transitions, offering conceptual expansion beyond transitional justice’s traditional concern for political violence without delving too far into the customary terrain of development or postconflict reconstruction. Yet, the specific mechanisms through which the inward and outward feelings and attitudes and broader social changes that reparations are expected to produce remain undertheorized in transitional justice scholarship, in large part because of a lack of empirical evidence about how recipients experience them in practice. Does the restoration of civic trust, for example, depend upon recipients of individual reparations telling their neighbors about their payments? Does recognition as a citizen depend upon a beneficiary publicly self-identifying as a victim? Questions like these about the particular variables that drive reparations outcomes represent the next frontier for transitional justice researchers interested in the role of reparations in the transition from violence to peace.

Foreign Aid, Resource Rents, and State Fragility in Mozambique and Angola

Sharing similar colonial and postindependence civil war experiences, Mozambique’s and Angola’s development paths are often contrasted, with foreign aid–dependent Mozambique hailed a success compared to oil-rentier Angola. This article questions the so-called Mozambican miracle and revisits Angola’s trajectory over the past two decades. Paying attention to ruling parties and postwar political economy transitions, we discuss differences and similarities in postconflict reconstruction paths, policy, and institutional fragility. We suggest that large aid flows to Mozambique have contributed to a relaxation of its government’s urgency in creating the financial structure capable of capturing rents from natural resources in contrast to Angola, where the relative absence of official development aid has led Angolan elites to seek tenure prolongation partly through high rent capture and incipient socialization of massive oil rents. We conclude by discussing the likely consequences of these factors in terms of the relative “fragility” and “robustness” of both states, and by discussing the implications for foreign assistance.

Transition Regimes and Security Sector Reforms in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Why are some countries more successful at carrying out postconflict reconstruction programs than are others? Sierra Leone and Liberia have similar histories and suffered wars that were intimately linked. When the wars ended, foreign-backed efforts were undertaken to reform the security sector in each country. These reforms were more successful in Sierra Leone than in Liberia. This article argues that the diverging outcomes are explained by the extent to which postconflict regimes reflected the distribution of power on the ground in the two countries. Sierra Leone’s transition regime better reflected the distribution of power among forces on the ground, which led to a consultative approach to framing the reform program. The input of key local actors in policy formulation has made implementation of these reforms less difficult. In Liberia the transition regime was built on a repudiation of local power realities leading to a nonconsultative approach to reform that has severely compromised the implementation of reforms.