ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief historical context of the rise of conflict-related transitional governance in the post-Cold War period. It describes four key shifts that have driven the development of transitional governance into a dominant mode of international engagement in post-conflict settings: (1) the improvement in relations among the major world powers immediately following the Cold War, triggering an era of “new activism” by the UN Security Council; (2) the challenging experiences of International Territorial Administrations in East Timor and Kosovo, resulting in a call for more cost-effective processes driven by “local ownership”; (3) the turn to a “light footprint” approach in Afghanistan, which has created the model for subsequent international support to transitional governance; and (4) several important changes in the nature of armed conflict which has complicated sustainable transitions out of conflict. These related developments have allowed domestically-driven, internationally-supported transitional governance to become the preferred response to major conflicts worldwide. But this model is not without challenges, and longstanding internal conflicts in places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, and Iraq highlight the difficulties in implementing viable exit strategies. In fact, a historical perspective of the rise of transitional governance demands that many of the key assumptions of the international community when undertaking post-conflict peacebuilding be fundamentally questioned.
