Search Results

This book analyses the normative framework underlying the statebuilding activities of the international administrations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor. It argues that a particular understanding of sovereignty has shaped the efforts of these international administrations, and examines the influence of this conception on three aspects of statebuilding: institution-building, the behaviour of international institutions towards local actors, and the timing and nature of the transition from international to local authority — the exit strategies of international administrations. The book argues that international administrations hold a conception of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’: states have to fulfil a set of responsibilities towards their population, in particular administrative effectiveness, the protection of human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and maintaining a free market economy. These responsibilities constitute a ‘standard of civilisation’, which legitimises sovereign authority, and failure to fulfil this standard can lead to international intervention and the denial of sovereign rights. The book shows how this ‘standard of civilisation’ is used by international administrations both to justify the denial of self-governance, and to serve as a blueprint for their institution-building activities. The restructuring of political and administrative practices to help post-conflict territories to meet this standard creates a sovereignty paradox: international administrations compromise one element of sovereignty — the right to self-government — in order to implement domestic reforms to legitimize the authority of local political institutions, and thus strengthen their sovereignty. In the light of the governance and development record of the three international administrations, the book assesses the promises and the pathologies of statebuilding, and develops recommendations to improve their performance.

Transitional administrations represent the most complex operations attempted by the United Nations. The missions in Kosovo (1999—) and East Timor (1999–2002) are commonly seen as unique in the history of the United Nations. But they may also be seen as the latest in a series of operations that have involved the United Nations in ‘state‐building’ activities, in which it has attempted to develop the institutions of government by assuming some or all of those sovereign powers on a temporary basis. Viewed in light of earlier UN operations, such as those in Namibia (1989–1990), Cambodia (1992–1993), and Eastern Slavonia (1996–1998), the idea that these exceptional circumstances may not recur is somewhat disingenuous. The need for policy research in this area was brought into sharp focus by the weighty but vague responsibilities assigned to the United Nations in Afghanistan (2002—) and its contested role in Iraq (2003—).

This book seeks to fill that gap. Aimed at policy‐makers, diplomats, and a wide academic audience (including international relations, political science, international law, war studies, and development studies), the book provides a concise history of transitional administration and a treatment of the five key issues confronting such operations: peace and security, the role of the United Nations as government, establishing the rule of law, economic reconstruction, and exit strategies. Research for the book has been conducted through extensive field research and interviews with key UN staff and local representatives in almost all of the territories under consideration. The unifying theme is that, while the ends of transitional administration may be idealistic, the means cannot be.

Since the mid-1990s, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations have been entrusted with exceptional authority for the administration of war-torn and strife-ridden territories. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Eastern Slavonia, Kosovo, and East Timor, these organizations have assumed responsibility for governance to a degree unprecedented in recent history. These initiatives represent some of the boldest experiments in the management and settlement of intra-state conflict ever attempted by third parties.

This book is a study of recent experiences in the international administration of war-torn territories. Examines the nature of these operations—their mandates, structures, and powers—and distinguishes them from kindred historical and contemporary experiences of peacekeeping, trusteeship, and military occupation. Analyses and assesses the effectiveness of international administrations and discusses, in thematic fashion, the key operational and political challenges that arise in the context of these experiences. Also reflects on the policy implications of these experiences, recommending reforms or new approaches to the challenge posed by localized anarchy in a global context. Argues that despite many of the problems arising from both the design and implementation of international administrations—some of them very serious—international administrations have generally made a positive contribution to the mitigation of conflict in the territories where they have been established.

The international administration of troubled states—whether in Bosnia, Kosovo, or East Timor—has seen a return to the principle of trusteeship: i.e. situations in which some form of international supervision is required in a particular territory in order both to maintain order and to foster the norms and practices of fair self‐government. This book rescues the normative discourse of trusteeship from the obscurity into which it has fallen since decolonization. It traces the development of trusteeship from its emergence out of debates concerning the misrule of the East India Company (Ch. 2), to its internationalization in imperial Africa (Ch. 3), to its institutionalization in the League of Nations mandates system (Ch. 4) and in the UN trusteeship system, and to the destruction of its legitimacy by the ideas of self‐determination and human equality (Ch. 5). The book brings this rich historical experience to bear on the dilemmas posed by the resurrection of trusteeship after the end of the cold war (Ch. 6) and, in the context of contemporary world problems, explores the obligations that attach to preponderant power and the limits that should be observed in exercising that power for the sake of global good. In Ch. 7, the book concludes by arguing that trusteeship remains fundamentally at odds with the ideas of human dignity and equality.

This book is a study of regime change in the context of international administration, where the United Nations and other multilateral organizations hold temporary executive authority at the domestic level. Work on the politics of state-building has highlighted how these administration operations can influence nearly every aspect of politics in the country or territory in which they are deployed. This book concentrates in particular on the ‘regime-building’ practices of these missions, and examines the aims and influences of international administrations in the area of democratic development, as well as their ultimate impact on the process of regime change. Through a comparative analysis of events in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, the book demonstrates how external actors assume positions of power conventionally held by domestic elites, and in so doing gain the ability to affect democratic development in ways unavailable to international actors in more conventional settings. In particular, the case studies highlight the ways in which the democracy promotion objectives of international administrators can have both positive and negative effects on democratization processes, with the presence of international authorities helping to rule out non-democratic options in some areas, while at times undermining democratic development in others. The book identifies the key international actors involved, highlights the mechanisms of influence available to them in these contexts, and explores the crucial mediating role of domestic actors and structures.

Concentrating on the politics of the Habsburg Monarchy's self-proclaimed ‘cultural mission’ in occupied Bosnia in the period from 1878 to the outbreak of war in 1914, this book addresses two related issues: the impact of ‘Europeanization’ in a backward society, and the crystallization of the identities which have since dominated Bosnian life. On the basis of wide reading in the Austrian, Hungarian, and south Slav sources, including the Hungarian-language papers of the two leading administrators of Bosnia, Benjamin von Kállay and István Burián, this book provides fresh and wide-ranging perspectives on a whole range of issues, including the ‘Orientalist’ assumptions of Austrian policy, the struggle of administrators for the moral high ground with nascent Serb and Croat intelligentsias, Kállay's controversial policy of the ‘Bosnian nation’, and the strategy and personality of the intriguing Burián. The book also opens up the hitherto unexplored background to student terrorism in the secondary schools of pre-1914 Bosnia, from which the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to emerge. Beyond this immediate historical context, the book also sheds much light on wider issues such as the construction of Serb and Croat nationhood in Bosnia, the beginnings of the Europeanization of Bosnian Muslims, and the new divisions created by the rapid pace of social, economic, and intellectual change as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century.

This book is an extended meditation on a dimension of Islam unfamiliar to most Western readers. The mosque, this book argues, is not an analogue of the Christian church, not least because in Islam there is no priesthood and no institutionalized hierarchy. Rather, every Muslim is his or her own priest, and most religious obligations are performed in the home. The function of the mosque is thus dispersed throughout society and, indeed, throughout the natural world as well. The Arabic word from which English mosque derives means literally “place of prostration”—the place one performs the daily ritual prayer of submission to God, so as to become a guest at the table God has sent down to manifest himself. That table is also the world's mosque, the world as mosque. Among the many tragic victims of the Bosnian genocide are its mosques; more than a thousand were destroyed. A part of the essential fabric of Bosnian life was changed. This book seeks to rebuild the spirit and majesty of each mosque that was destroyed, the spiritual grace it lent the Bosnian landscape.

Written on the basis of a wide range of South Slav sources and previously unpublished, often confidential documents from communist state archives, as well as on the author's own on‐the‐ground experience as a journalist, this book explores the political role and influence of religious organizations, namely, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church in Croatia and Bosnia‐Herzegovina, and the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (Islamic community) over the course of the last century. The author emphatically rejects the notion that a “clash of civilizations” has played a central role in fomenting aggression in the former Yugoslavia. He finds no compelling evidence of an upsurge in religious fervor among the general population. Rather, he concludes, the primary religious players in the conflicts have been activist clergy. What emerges from the book, which aims to be the first political history of religion in modern Yugoslav states, and combines narrative and analysis, is a deeply nuanced understanding of the history and troubled future of one of the world's most volatile regions. The narrative presents the process of the making, decay, and collapse of several regimes and nation‐states chronologically, highlighting the role of religion in these processes, while also presenting the history of the religious institutions mentioned above. The analysis deals with the role of religious institutions, symbols, and practices in state formation and destruction. The book starts with a chronology (1935–2002) and maps of the region as background to what follows in the 12 chapters.