This overview article looks at the emergence of failed and post-conflict states on the international relations and assistance agenda, and at the importance of governance in establishing peace, pursuing state reconstruction and preventing conflict. It introduces the topic of the special issue, how effective governance can be re-established following societal conflict or war. After a brief review of the terminology of failed states, post-conflict and governance, the article discusses governance reconstruction in terms of three dimensions: reconstituting legitimacy, re-establishing security and rebuilding effectiveness. The article summarises key points made by the contributors to the special issue, who look at donor governance reconstruction agendas, security-sector governance and subnational governance. Several common themes emerge and are elaborated upon: similarities between development and post-conflict assistance; linkages among governance's legitimacy, effectiveness and security dimensions; rebuilding versus creating governance systems; local versus national governance reconstruction; formal versus informal governance. The article concludes with a call for further work to elaborate frameworks that can incorporate the particulars of individual countries in addressing legitimacy, security and effectiveness. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Rebuilding governance in failed states and post‐conflict societies: core concepts and cross‐cutting themes

Political theorists from Machiavelli to Huntington have denied the possibility of popular government arising out of the chaos of civil war, instead prescribing an intermediate stage of one-man rule by a Prince, Leviathan, or a military dictator. Based on recent empirical evidence of post-civil war democratization in El Salvador, Mozambique, and elsewhere, I show that democracy can arise directly from anarchy. Predatory warring factions choose the citizenry and democratic procedures over a Leviathan when (1) their economic interests depend on productive investment by the citizens, (2) citizens' political preferences ensure that power allocation will be less biased under democracy than under a Leviathan, and (3) there is an external agency (e.g., the United Nations) that mediates and supervises joint disarmament and state-building. Ultimately, I discuss the implications of this argument for the basic intuitions of classical political theory and contemporary social theory regarding democratization and authoritarianism.

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The Paradox of "Warlord" Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation

What are the determinants of democratization? Do the factors that move countries toward democracy also help them refrain from backsliding toward autocracy? This book attempts to answer these questions through a combination of a statistical analysis of social, economic, and international determinants of regime change in 165 countries around the world in 1972–2006, and case study work on nine episodes of democratization occurring in Argentina, Bolivia, Hungary, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, and Uruguay. The findings suggest that democracy is promoted by long-term structural forces such as economic prosperity, but also by peaceful popular uprisings and the institutional setup of authoritarian regimes. In the short-run, however, elite actors may play a key role, particularly through the importance of intra-regime splits. Jan Teorell argues that these results have important repercussions both for current theories of democratization and for the international community's effort in developing policies for democracy promotion.

Determinants of Democratization: Explaining Regime Change in the World, 1972–2006

Why do some countries emerge from civil war more democratic than when they entered into it, while others remain staunchly autocratic? Observers widely depict internal conflict as a pathway to autocracy or state failure, but in fact there is variation in post-civil war regimes. Conventional accounts focus on war outcomes and international peacebuilding, but Huang suggests that postwar regimes have wartime origins, notably in how rebel groups interact with ordinary people as part of war-making. War can have mobilizing effects when rebels engage extensively with civilian populations, catalyzing a bottom-up force for change toward greater political rights. Politics after civil war does not emerge from a blank slate, but reflects the war's institutional and social legacies. The Wartime Origins of Democratization explores these ideas through an original dataset of rebel governance and rigorous comparative case analysis. The findings have far-reaching implications for understanding wartime political orders, statebuilding, and international peacebuilding.

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The Wartime Origins of Democratization: Civil War, Rebel Governance, and Political Regimes

This article focuses on the role that power-sharing arrangements play in making it possible for some countries to make the transition to democracy successfully after civil war. The authors hypothesize that the adoption of multiple forms of power sharing, measures constructed to end particularly difficult civil wars, facilitate the emergence of a minimalist form of democracy following some intrastate conflicts by helping to assuage warring groups’ security concerns. The authors use a bivariate probit model to account for the possibility that the decisions by wartime rivals to engage in power sharing and whether to adopt democracy or not are interrelated. Employing panel data for all civils wars concluded between 1945 and the end of 2006, they find support for their hypothesis.

The art of the possible: : power sharing and post-civil war democracy

Herodotus was probably right when he argued that wars make history, but whether and when wars make democracy remain open questions. The classics in the democratization literature are surprisingly reticent about the links between war and lasting democracy. Most of our theoretical literature on democratic transitions or democratic consolidation leaves the connection to war either wholly neglected or seriously undertheorized. This is perplexing because so many new and renewed democracies emerge in the context of war. Of the seventy-three democracies founded after 1945 that still exist today, over half emerged either in the immediate aftermath of a war or as a means of bringing an ongoing war to an end. Table 1 shows how many electoral democracies emerged in a postwar setting. The cases in Table 1 are electoral democracies--meaning that they are regimes in which leaders are selected in competitive elections. If we define democracy more strictly and consider only cases in which a full (or nearly full) range of individual liberties is provided, the pattern is the same. Half of all "free" regimes formed after World War II that are still in existence today were formed in the immediate aftermath of war (see Table 2). The percentage of free regimes that were founded in postwar settings was as high ten years ago as it is today, so the existence of "postwar" democracies is far from new. (1) The subject of democratization after war is clearly worthy of close attention. What do we currently know (or think we know) about how war affects democratization? What does the democratization literature teach us about building democracy in postwar settings? I sketch brief answers to both of these questions in the following sections. For the purposes of this article, my definition of democracy corresponds to the definition used most often in the canon of democratization literature: democracy "is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable . . . by citizens acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives." (2) Though I acknowledge that this is a minimalist version of a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon, I focus on electoral democracy because it defines a politically important and numerically large subset of regimes. Can War Be Good for Democracy? The democratization literature portrays the association between war and the transition to democracy as broadly positive. Indeed, wars seem to be associated with democratic transitions whether the state in question is vanquished, victorious, or simply a partner in an inconclusive struggle. It is ironic that a devastating defeat seems to be an especially propitious setting for a transition to be made. Yet several scholars have marshaled sound evidence in favor of this proposition. They remind us that "the great majority of historical examples of successful redemocratization ... are ones in which warfare and conquest play an integral part" (3) that conquest by a democratic power allows for the dismantling of problematic military and political institutions; (4) "that military failure contributed to the downfall or weakening of at least five authoritarian regimes between 1974 and l989" (5); and that "defeat in warfare" often precipitates the elite settlements that lasting democracy requires. (6) The defeats that l ead "most readily" to a democratic regime change are the devastating ones in which "elites are thoroughly replaced." (7) Authoritarian regimes that conduct a war successfully may be toppled too. Victory in wars against "subversion" can eliminate a dictatorship's raison d'etre and provoke a crisis of legitimacy. (8) Surprisingly, elites who face neither victory nor defeat may still make the transition to democracy if their armed struggle appears to be both "costly and inconclusive." (9) Theorists insist that the elite compromise that democracy requires emerges when leaders recognize "that the next round of conflict is likely to visit disaster on all sides. …

Nancy Bermeo

Papers

What the Democratization Literature Says?or Doesn't Say?About Postwar Democratization