Designing Multidimensional Peace Operations : the Cases of International Interim-Administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, weak or failing states have arguably become one of the most pertinent problems for the international order as they appear to be the source of many challenges the world faces today: from poverty to AIDS and from drug trafficking to terrorism. The international community responded with an unprecedented dynamic of peace operations performing state-building and reconstruction tasks mainly channelled through the United Nations system. Recently, extensive missions have been deployed in Liberia, Haiti, and Sudan and the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations currently directs and supports eighteen peace operations involving estimated costs of annually US$5 billion and over 80.000 personnel. Despite several success stories, one of the most influential evaluations of the UN peace operations, the so called Brahimi report, stated in 2000: over the last decade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge, and it can do no better today in executing its peacekeeping and peace-building tasks.Empirically, it is obvious that the conduct of a peace operation cannot be as easy as Michael Ignatieff claims. According to him, a new empire of humanitarian intervention and nation-building is needed in which a combination of American military power, European money and humanitarian motives betters the world. In addition, it is neither analytically nor theoretically helpful to simply put forward the often found normative claim that one needs better designed mandates and interested committed parties for the success of a UN transitional administration such as that in Kosovo and East Timor.The goal of scholars engaged in this field of study should rather be to theoretically explain the misfit between an operation s design as laid down in the mandate and the requirements defined by the reconstruction task. In this study, we identify two major shortcomings of the scholarly literature: firstly, most studies do not connect sufficiently the international level on which peace operations are designed and underpinned with relevant resources and guidance and the implementation level in which a mission operates. Both levels are mostly treated as closed systems each having its own dynamics and (dys)functionalities. Secondly, theoretically driven approaches that allow for general conclusions can hardly be found; rather single, narrative case studies dominate the scene.This study aims at addressing these gaps by theoretically challenging the common implicit assumption that peace operations are based on functionally derived mandates and do simply enhance their performance by shifting their priorities and changing procedures in the field. We assume rather that the design of a mission s mandate by a coalition of supposedly rational actors having the intention and the clear interest in the successful use of their invested resources does not necessarily result in a design that would fit the local situation best. We expect furthermore that the institutional context of the international level is characterized by stickiness and ambiguity rendering functionalist outcomes even more unlikely. Hence, the thesis puts forward two hypotheses: firstly, we assume that the higher the heterogeneity of the designing coalition the more heterarchical the institutional design of a multidimensional peace operation becomes. This is mainly due to the inclusion of various stakeholders, the need for compromise formulas, and the complexity of the task. Hence, the designing process is based on considerations and dynamics that are external to a proper assessment of the conflict at hand. Secondly, we expect that long chains of decision-making, the existence of complex informal structures, and the deficits in information-gathering and sharing characterize the international institutional environment as sticky and ambiguous.The designing and implementation processes of the transitional administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor serve as a basis to test the plausibility of these assumptions by analyzing the development of the mandate, the formal and the real authority structures, and the performance of the mission in its tasks to establish good governance and sustainable socio-economic structures. In a conclusion the main findings are summarized and some policy implications outlined.