ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 reviews the standard explanations for stalled post-war transitions to peace and democracy in the literature. The first part explores the two most prominent explanations emphasising international capacity and local resistance. Neither approach fully explains the stalled transitions, nor do they conceptually account for external-domestic interactions in peacebuilding. In the second part, recent interaction-based approaches are presented. While strategic interaction explanations offer a convincing argument for how interactions might produce stalled transition outcomes, these accounts still lack in-depth empirical studies that carve out causal mechanisms linking the interaction process with results.
