ABSTRACT
Most civil wars today end in negotiated settlements, and in most instances an essential part of such agreements are provisions that outline a defined political pathway through which a transitional process to consolidate peace is to unfold. These transition paths often feature the formation of interim governments, sometimes create constitution-making processes, and, at some point, envisage an electoral process to imbue postwar governance with popular legitimacy.1 This chapter argues that the political pathway of transition and especially the initial, postwar electoral process matters significantly for statebuilding over the long-term. The transition sequences and institutional choices made in war-settlement negotiations often determine the nature and timing of initial postwar elections; in turn, these initial electoral processes deeply affect the nature of the state that emerges for years to follow. In sum, elections are the principal means by which war-terminating peace agreements are democratically legitimated by the affected population, and the outcomes of elections determine initial control of state institutions by either affirming existing patterns of power or ushering in new elites and by re-arranging state-society relations. Generally, those electoral processes that are broadly inclusive and that
pair proportionality with accountability have the best chance of creating the legitimacy needed for effective postwar governance because they create the conditions for mutually empowering state-society relations. When states have the support of their societies, they can more effectively act to address social challenges (such as providing security or facilitating development), thereby strengthening society’s capacity to effectively participate in governance (Migdal et al. 1994). Employing a perspective of path dependencethat is, focusing on the antecedent events that lead up to initial postwar elections and the conduct and outcomes of electoral processes-this chapter discerns the effects of initial electoral process on statebuilding after civil war. The chapter’s findings are based on a structured, focused comparison of
four cases arranged chronologically: Cambodia, South Africa, Afghanistan, and Liberia. The cases chosen for analysis have all had United Nations involvement either in the design of the sequencing of events in critical moments of negotiation, or UN monitoring and observation of the elections, and in each
of them the initial transitional electoral process has more or less run its course. While the cases chosen do not allow for a truly long-term assessment of the effects of elections on state viability measured in more than decades, they are sufficiently advanced along a continuum of “progress” toward normality in politics that the issues and concerns about the viability of the new states can be discerned. Cambodia is an example often cited about how initially problematic elec-
tions set up conditions for a weak, captured state; South Africa’s 1994 polls are seen as an example of elections that empowered the state (albeit an ANC-dominant one) by rearranging the relationship of the state to its society. In Afghanistan, the inclusion of “warlords” in electoral processes has produced concerns about the ability of the new state to wield monopolistic authority; at the same time, such inclusion did not remove all spoilers from the scene, and escalating violence there suggests that the elected government is insufficiently legitimate to prevent or manage violent challenges. In Liberia, the choice for a presidential election with a runoff raised concerns about whether the loser in the poll would acquiesce to the new government or whether civil war would re-emerge; surprisingly, on the contrary, a newly-empowered state appears to have emerged following voluntary power sharing. These cases illustrate the central finding of this research: electoral pro-
cesses are necessary in moving beyond civil war, but path-dependence matters. Sequencing, design, and the extent of international oversight are the key variables explaining the degree to which electoral processes contribute to capable, responsive states and to other alternatives such as captured, fragmented, or weak states. The success of the statebuilding enterprise itself is thus predicated on an electoral process that generates exceptionally broad legitimacy for the immediate, postwar ruling coalition; absent the contingent consent of all parties with the military capacity and ideological or power-seeking interest to spoil the postwar peace, progress toward effective statebuilding remains elusive. The implication is that those in the international community involved in the
peacebuilding-as-statebuilding projects must directly confront the difficulties, contradictions, and dilemmas that postwar electoral processes pose and see them as the principal instrument for defining anew mutually empowering relations between states and societies after civil conflict. On the other hand, getting the initial electoral process “wrong,” or being satisfiedwith a suboptimal process, sets the stage for significant problems in long-term peacebuilding. The task for effective statebuilding is thus not whether or even when to have elections to build effective states for sustainable peace after civil war, but how and how long to stay engaged once the first election has passed.
