Ansorg, Nadine

Haass, Felix

Strasheim, Julia

English

Kent Academic Repository

GLOBAL INSIGHTSInstitutions for Sustainable Peace: From Research Gaps to New Frontiers Nadine Ansorg, Felix Haass, and Julia StrasheimIN DIVIDED SOCIETIES, CHARACTERIZED BY AN ANTAGONISTIC SEGMENTATIONamong identity groups, formal state institutions are of paramount impor-tance in regulating intergroup conflict. Institutional reform is thus anappealing option to shape such state institutions—the system of govern-ment, electoral systems and party regulations, territorial state structure, thejudiciary, and the security sector—in order to promote sustainable peaceand prevent the occurrence or recurrence of violent conflict. However,research is far from having arrived at a consensus about what institutionswork where and how. Is the choice of institutional design in a postwar sit-uation determined at all by expected political utility? What distinguishableeffects can different designs have under what conditions? How do institu-tions interact—what role does the “concert of institutions” play in theimpact on sustainable peace?This debate is not confined to the ivory tower of academic research,but has important policy implications for national and international con-flict management. Building political institutions for peace is high on theinternational agenda. In recent years, domestic and international reformershave (re)designed state institutions in postwar countries such as EastTimor, Burundi, Afghanistan, and Bosnia to promote sustainable peace anddemocracy—with mixed results. Moreover, the World Bank’s 2011 WorldDevelopment Report “Conflict, Security, and Development,” the UN Sec-retary-General’s 2011 report on preventive diplomacy, and the UN’s 2012guidance note on mediation all emphasize the significance of postwarinstitutional designs. In 2005, the General Assembly and the UN SecurityCouncil explicitly mandated that the UN Peacebuilding Commissionshould “focus attention on the reconstruction and institution-buildingefforts necessary for recovery from conflict.”Thus, closing the research gaps on institutions in postwar and dividedsocieties not only advances the academic knowledge in the field, but speaksdirectly to current national and international peacebuilding agendas. In this19Global Governance 19 (2013), 19–26article, we discuss research gaps and avenues for more integrative researchon the origins of institutions and their effects in postwar societies, and weidentify the missing pieces of data collection in the study of postwar insti-tutional reform. Origins of Institutions in Postwar SocietiesWhy and how do particular political institutions emerge in some postwarcontexts but not in others, and how are institutional origins related to theireffect on peace? In answering these questions, the study of institutionalengineering has so far neglected to comprehensively address three interre-lated elements: causes and dynamics of war, internal elite dynamics, andexternal interventions.First, we need to more systematically connect theories of civil waronset and war dynamics to theories of institutional design. If institutionalreform aims at preventing the recurrence of organized violence, research oninstitutional choice should examine this reform process in the light of whysocietal conflict escalated into organized armed violence. Both the causesof war (be they motives, opportunities, or a mixture of both) and wardynamics (like conflict intensity) may crucially impact the design of post-war institutions. If studies on institutional reform then do not take intoaccount causes that triggered the escalation of conflict, they are unlikely toexplain the causal chain that connects institutional design and the preven-tion of a relapse into war.Second, there is a lack of research on internal political and economiccost-benefit calculations of elites: Why and how do leaders choose particu-lar institutions during and after a war-to-peace transition under the uncer-tainty of cooperating with former enemies? On the one hand, we areparticularly missing studies that complement the rational actor assumptionwidely employed in political economy by exploring additional startingpoints for institutional choice such as culture, prospect theory, or pathdependencies. On the other hand, political science and economics currentlylack insights on the mechanisms that systematically connect the investiga-tion of war economies to postwar institutions that foster peace.Third, external actors, such as international organizations, play a sig-nificant role in determining institutional outcomes after violent conflict.The United Nations, for instance, deployed entire postwar administrationsin East Timor and Kosovo, effectively governing the territories for severalyears. Yet we know relatively little about how international actors influenceinstitutional choice in postwar societies. Which constellation of interna-tional actors in which particular setting is most conducive to creating orreforming institutions in postwar environments? What are the negative20 Institutions for Sustainable Peaceeffects of international involvement in institutional reform? In a relatedstep, we must link this complex international dimension of war-to-peacetransitions to local decisionmaking on priorities and postwar needs. Deci-sions about mandates, strategies, and implementation are largely top downand driven by donor interests, but implementation is frequently left tonational actors (and sometimes receives scant international attention).Research must therefore generate systematic knowledge on which institu-tional arrangements work best to take into account local voices while plan-ning, deploying, and implementing international assistance in postwarsituations.The Effects of Institutions in Divided and Postwar Societies A second academic field covers the effects of different institutions onpeace, conflict, and other institutions. Thus far, studies on the effects ofinstitutions on sustainable peace have been empirically ambivalent andinconclusive. Especially the interactions between institutions—the concertof institutions—have thereby been widely uncharted. Finally, it remainsunexplored how the effects of institutional design on peace are conditionedby noninstitutional contexts such as the ethnic or religious composition ofsocieties. These aspects become evident when looking at each of the above-mentioned state institutions related to sustainable peacebuilding in dividedor postwar societies.The practice of power sharing as one aspect of government design is ofparticular interest to the scholarly community when examining the mixedeffects toward building and sustaining peace. While in practice often seenas a panacea for societies with polarized ethnic groups, research findingsremain inconclusive about the conditions under which power sharing con-tributes to peace and if it is suitable for all kinds of divided societies. Dif-ferent operationalizations of peace and of consociational designs make itdifficult to compare findings of existing studies. Related to this point is the relationship between power sharing and adynamic democratic system. By incorporating power-sharing agreementsbetween warring parties into a constitution, the expression of oppositionmight become strongly limited. Worse, some groups may be excluded fromrepresentation in the course of power sharing. As, for example, the 2009ruling of the European Court of Human Rights brought to internationalattention, can Bosnia be a democratic, minority rights–respecting society ifthe presidency of the country always consists of a Croat, a Serb, and aBosnian Muslim—while members of the Roma or the Jewish communitiesby law never have the chance to become president? More work is thusNadine Ansorg, Felix Haass, and Julia Strasheim 21needed on “postsettlement settlements” and the conditions under whichagreements become obsolescent and need to be renegotiated. There is also a lack of comparative, cross-country, and large-N com-parisons of the role of electoral and party systems for peace in postwarsocieties. Under what conditions do ethnic parties increase violence? Andwhat kind of electoral system works best to peacefully regulate conflict individed societies? Some comparative studies point to the success of pro-portional systems, but they specify this in only Western democracies. Evi-dence of success and failure in postwar societies is missing. The institution of the judiciary, forms of transitional justice, and theireffects on peace in divided or postwar societies are still underresearched inquantitative studies. The findings on transitional justice and the rule of lawas foundations for sustainable peace are mostly based on small- andmedium-N studies on the Gacaca courts in Rwanda and the InternationalCriminal Court (ICC). A contested area in the research on the judiciary isthe role of the international community in postwar justice. Some scholarssay international judiciaries are most promising for building peace, as theyremove the judiciary from the conflict context. Others conclude that dis-embodied institutions do not have influence on the ground and lose anykind of domestic context.Research on the impact of security sector reform (SSR) on peace inpostwar societies also largely consists of case studies and policy-orientedreports. Not only lacking are more comparative, quantitative, and cross-regional or cross-temporal studies, but also better knowledge of thesequencing effects between SSR and other institutional reforms on peace.For instance, some argue that SSR needs to come first and a liberalizationof politics in elections has to follow. But the recent case of Libya, whererelatively peaceful first post–Muammar Qaddafi elections were held with-out an SSR program in place, opposes this point. Supposedly, a “zic zac” or“clustering” approach between SSR and liberalization may be the most use-ful; however, detailed research on this point remains missing. We also lack knowledge of the dynamics and hybridity between formaland informal institutions. Researchers often only examine formal institutionson the one hand and informal arrangements on the other hand. However,there are many hybrid forms of institutional arrangements; for example, inthe security sector. Frequently much academic emphasis is given to thereform of the national army or police as a main building block of security,but ethnic militias and neighborhood watches continue to operate—and aretacitly accepted—because they may more effectively guarantee security forthe local population. Additionally, international organizations assume differ-ent degrees of authority in the provision of postwar security, from assistancein implementing disarmament and demobilization programs to deploying22 Institutions for Sustainable Peacepeacekeepers and international police. The way in which internationalpeacekeeping, national and reformed institutions, and local and continuousinstitutions interact in their effect on building peace and providing securityis not on the research agenda, however.Last, the academic community should explore more extensively thedynamics and interactions between contextual factors and institutions intheir joint effect on peace. Societies may be divided along different politi-cally salient group identities—ethnic, religious, ideological, or even socio-economic. Consequently, which institutions best regulate what type of soci-etal antagonism? And how can institutions react to changing group compo-sition dynamics in divided societies? The example of Lebanondemonstrates the significance of this potential research question. Here,power sharing between the Christian and Muslim groups proved to be a toostatic solution because differential growth between the religious communi-ties turned the former Christian slight majority into a minority in theLebanese society, whereas the Shiite community became the largest. Thefixed quotas in the power-sharing arrangement, however, were not renego-tiated according to the changing dynamics in the country’s divisions, andthe resulting grievances played a large role in the escalation of the civil war(1975–1990). Data Gaps and Methodological Challenges The shortcomings in the study of effects of institutions on peace point toanother aspect of research on sustainable peace: methodological challengesand related gaps in empirical data.Methodologically, a possible explanation for ambivalent and inconclu-sive findings on institutional engineering can be a bias in the selection ofcases for the study of institutional effects on sustainable peace. Researcherstend to examine situations that have previously been affected by organizedviolence, instead of additionally considering “the dogs that never barked”in their research designs: the cases where we would expect armed conflictto break out, but that instead remain at peace. The nonescalation couldpoint to the fact that institutions are in place that provide for successfulconflict management and sustainable peace. Moreover, many studies do not systematically include the conditionsunder which postwar institutions emerge in their analysis of the effects ofinstitutions on peace. Yet institutions are most likely endogenous to conflictrisks. Thus, more methodologically rigorous research is needed to isolatethe independent effects of institutions. Concerning data gaps, many of the outlined research questions may noteven be possible to address, because for some topics, time spans, and geo-Nadine Ansorg, Felix Haass, and Julia Strasheim 23graphical areas, empirical data are not yet available. The scholarly commu-nity is likely eager to use valid, reliable, transparent data with the broadestpossible temporal and geographical scope, and with—at best—no singlecell in a data file coded as missing. But only a few researchers actuallyembark on the painstaking process of collecting such information. Someresearch topics on institutions in divided societies thus cannot draw onquantitative data usable for statistical analysis. For instance, we are stilllacking global databases on security governance in postwar societies, suchas SSR programs. The evidence on this concept often remains anecdotaland we are virtually unable to conduct a global, statistical analysis of theimpact of different SSR designs on postwar peace. For other institutional arrangements, much of the quantitative data athand are available only in the traditional country/year format. The currenttrend of disaggregation in conflict data (where, in recent years, many georef-erenced event databases have emerged, such as the Armed Conflict Locationand Event Dataset [ACLED], the Social Conflict in Africa Database [SCAD],or Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s Georeferenced Event Dataset [UCDPGED]), has not yet reached the classic institutional data. Additionally, disag-gregated conflict databases are often available only for sub-Saharan Africa,leaving out other geographical areas. Not only does this mean that we haveno access to robust, interregional comparisons of the causes and effects ofsingle conflict events, but this data gap makes it effectively impossible toanswer more nuanced research questions on the impact of institutionaldesigns on sustainable peace. Yet it is the subnational institutions—the localelections, the village council, the district administration—that individuals inconflict-prone societies are primarily in day-to-day contact with and thatcould be a direct cause or effect of organized violence.Finally, in the area of data on diverse and divided societies, even themore sophisticated studies on the impact of divisions in a given country canoften draw only on snapshot or outdated data, such as the notorious AtlasNarodov Mira from 1964. Hence, with these data at hand it remains impos-sible to answer a research question on the dynamics of divisions or onchanges in a country’s composition of identity groups, for example, afterarmed conflict and forced displacement. The above-mentioned case ofLebanon demonstrates, however, the importance of such divisional dynam-ics in the study of institutional effects on sustainable peace.New Frontiers for Research on Institutions for Sustainable PeaceWe still know too little about the origins of postwar institutions, theirrespective effects on sustainable peace in societies emerging from violent24 Institutions for Sustainable Peaceconflict, and the relationship between the roots of institutions and their per-formance. Often, we lack high-quality data to address a substantial part ofthese questions. Therefore, future research must more rigorously addressthe causes and dynamics of war, the internal elite dynamics of domesticpolitics, and the external influence of international actors in the study of theemergence of postwar institutional design. We must furthermore criticallyexamine how these elements relate to the performance and effects of post-war institutions, and we need to better understand under which conditionsthe concert of political institutions results in a violent cacophony or peace-ful harmony.Not only the recent events of the Arab Spring but also ongoing violentconflicts in places such as Afghanistan or South Sudan point to the per-sistent relevance of finding answers to these questions. More integrativeresearch in the field of institutional engineering is thus needed in order toclose the highlighted gaps, to provide relevant policy advice to domesticand international actors engaged in peacebuilding, and to contributetoward improving the lives of people affected by armed conflict.  NoteHere we have highlighted the results of the debate of the first Institutions for Sus-tainable Peace (ISP) network conference in Berlin in September 2012. The inter-national research network ISP aims to close at least some of the gaps identifiedabove through joint research projects and publications, academic exchange, aseries of conferences and workshops, and a collection of missing data. Based onthe results of these engagements, the ISP network seeks to inform policymakingand national and international practitioners. ISP is funded by the Leibniz Gemein-schaft and hosted at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) inHamburg, with core cooperation partners at the University of Oslo/Peace ResearchInstitute Oslo (PRIO); Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala Uni-versity; School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), London; and GraduateInstitute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. For more information,see www.giga-hamburg.de/isp.This article is based on the contributions of the following conference partici-pants (in alphabetical order): Nadine Ansorg, Matthias Basedau, Helga Malmin Bin-ningsbø, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Susanna Campbell, Phil Clark, Marianne Dahl,Hanne Fjelde, Felix Haass, Sabine Kurtenbach, Andreas Mehler, Anika Moroff,Martin Ottmann, Benjamin Reilly, Stephan Rosiny, Gerald Schneider, ClaudiaSimons, Timothy Sisk, Julia Strasheim, Johannes Vüllers, Tore Wig, Stefan Wolff,and Franzisca Zanker.Nadine Ansorg is project coordinator and research fellow at the GIGA in Ham-burg. Her research interests include regional conflict systems in sub-Saharan Africa,causes of armed conflict, zones of peace, and postwar peace consolidation. She hasconducted several research visits in India, Nepal, and Tanzania. Felix Haass is junior research fellow and PhD candidate at the GIGA in Ham-burg. His research focuses on UN peace operations, postwar institution building,Nadine Ansorg, Felix Haass, and Julia Strasheim 25and peacebuilding. He previously worked with the UN Institute for Training andResearch in New York.Julia Strasheim is junior research fellow and PhD candidate at the GIGA inHamburg, where she works on postconflict interim regimes, democratization, andsecurity governance. She previously worked in democracy promotion and crisismanagement in Kosovo and Vietnam.Nadine Ansorg, Felix Haass, and Julia Strasheim 26

Institutions for Sustainable Peace: From Research Gaps to New Frontiers

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Institutions for Sustainable Peace: From Research Gaps to New Frontiers

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