Building Legitimate States After Civil Wars

1 Angola, Cambodia, Liberia, Somalia are all generally regarded not only as failed states, but as state-building failures. The list could easily be extended. In each instance, an international trustee, typically the United Nations or a " coalition of the willing " sanctioned by the United Nations, intervened more or less forcefully to rehabilitate a state that had fallen into anarchy and chaos. In each, success was, at best, short-lived. The record of state-building by international trustees since the end of the Cold War is grim and offers few reasons for optimism. 1 Max Weber's (1948, 78) famously defined the state as " a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. " State-building after a civil war, in turn, requires the reconstruction of both the state's monopoly of violence and the legitimacy of that monopoly. As we know from the literature on civil war termination, in the absence of total victory rebuilding a state's monopoly of force can be quite difficult. Barbara Walter (1997) describes this as " the critical barrier to civil war settlement. " The disarming of one or more groups or the merging of forces can leave groups vulnerable, hesitant to enter negotiations, and reluctant to implement agreements once reached. Most important, with coercion being their primary political instrument, disarming or merging forces implies changing the balance of power between the groups that existed at the time of agreement. This fatally 1 I use the term international trustee to refer generically to external parties that exert authority over failed states. I recognize that there are large differences in how these trustees carry out their responsibilities, and that the term is politically charged. Some object to its association with colonialism. This is particularly the case among advocates of a greater role for outside powers in overseeing state-building who fear that the term will alienate post-colonial states wary of their own sovereignty. Others correctly point out that " trustee " has a particular legal definition within United Nations-based international law, and none of the trustees I will discuss below have been appointed in that formal status. Nonetheless, all of the interventions discussed here are led by a de facto trustee that performs many of the responsibilities as legal trustees, at least for a limited period of time. I could use a euphemism such as " external power " …