SIX

CONCLUSION

State Decay, International Statebuilding, and Institutional Design

INTRODUCTION

The international community played an important part in ending the civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire. While the configuration of external actors—whether from the subregion, the continent, the United Nations (UN), or former colonial powers—differed in each context, they all moved in to end the conflicts and protect at-risk populations. However, bringing an end to the fighting is easier than consolidating peace by building inclusive and democratic states on a path to sustainable peace and development.

In the case of Sierra Leone, the civil war played out in a single phase that lasted almost eleven years, from March 1991 to January 2002. It ended after the British armed forces, acting with UN troops under a renewed UN mandate, took control of Freetown, defeating the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) insurgency. The civil war in Sierra Leone led to a significant loss of life and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. After the war, the country, with significant help from the international community, made slow but steady progress in terms of democratic governance and economic development. Yet, it remains extremely poor in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI), and its democracy is becoming increasingly tenuous; corruption and the ethnic and regional political divide are growing, as evidenced by the controversial 2023 elections.

In Liberia, the civil war happened in two phases, with actors from Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) (primarily Nigeria) and the UN playing important roles in ending the war. The first period of the civil war began with the invasion by Charles Taylor’s forces in December 1989 and lasted through his eventual election as president in August of 1997. The second phase of the conflict lasted from April 1999 to August 2003, when Taylor was removed from power. Since the end of the war, Liberia has maintained democracy, albeit with significant struggles. Overall, Liberia has maintained low economic growth and has not properly recovered from its brutal civil war. It remains one of the poorest countries in the world based on HDI rankings, and its democracy is marred by deep suspicion, animosity, and corruption among the political elite.

Côte d’Ivoire enjoyed decades of relative peace and prosperity, but then came its civil war, which also played out in two phases. During the first conflict, which began in September 2002 and ended in March 2007, the country experienced intermittent but brutal fighting. The subsequent peace process failed to result in permanent institutional accommodations between the warring factions, leading to significant postelection violence in phase two of the conflict, which lasted from November 2010 to April 2011. The international community, led by France, played a significant role in ending the violence during both phases. Yet, the international community remained sidelined for much of the peace process. Today, the situation has stabilized largely due to the military defeat of the southern supporters of Laurent Gbagbo. However, the Ivoirian peace process has stalled.

These three West African civil wars provide us with excellent opportunities to explore our central themes in this book, and taken together with the pursuant peacebuilding and postwar reconstruction efforts undertaken by the international community, they raise important questions about the challenges of building states after war in Africa and beyond. Our overall goal in this research is to spark a discussion on future policymaking concerning the nexus between international peacebuilding and statebuilding. Additionally, we hope to stimulate and focus the debate around the interconnections between the causes of civil wars and postwar institutional design as a way to gauge the prospect of consolidating peace and building an inclusive and democratic multiethnic postcolonial state. We are guided by the desire to shed light on the idea that civil wars can potentially bring positive opportunities, even given the horrors that such conflicts undoubtedly produce. However, the critical question is whether postwar reconstruction entails creative and robust institutional design efforts to address the root causes of the civil wars. The interconnections between state decay, international humanitarian intervention, and statebuilding in war-torn postcolonial multiethnic states are the crux of this book.

As a starting point, it is important to point out that over the past three decades, intrastate conflicts have emerged as the most prominent form of warfare on the planet. Put more specifically, empirical evidence shows that there has been a sharp rise in the number of civil wars since the end of the Cold War. Such civil wars across Africa, as well as those outside the continent, are terribly devastating. They destroy infrastructure and cause human suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. The wars in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone cost countless human lives and created legacies of violence that outlive the fighting. These types of horrendous events are incredibly difficult to overcome and more often than not require major peacekeeping, peace-mediation, and peacebuilding efforts on the part of the international community. Robust international humanitarian interventions to help end war and undertake significant postwar reconstruction designed to keep such civil wars from reoccurring are clearly necessary, given the realities and research on the topic. As we see in these three West African cases, not to mention others, the international community can play a pivotal role in ending the fighting, forging a political solution to the fighting, and providing critical assistance to help build peace.

In this study, we attempt to shed light on the relationship between the practices of peacebuilding and statebuilding in the contexts of state decay and collapse across several African civil war situations. We seek to advance existing debates on the delicate interplay between these processes by closely examining the postwar reconstruction and political developments across our cases. The cases examined in this book provide clear empirical evidence about how states in Africa can be remade after civil war while getting at the nexus of the interaction between peace building and statebuilding. We pursue a clear and coherent theoretical argument in this book, stating that the processes of peacebuilding and statebuilding are linked together, with the international community playing a significant role, if it is willing to do so. That said, we also posit that postwar realities, as tough as they may be, can be viewed not just as setbacks but as opportunities for building more inclusive states. Internal violent conflicts such as the three discussed here can be seen as opportunities to construct a better future by restructuring the state and redesigning political institutions in order to better manage conflict and deal with political divisions and societal grievances. Creative institutional design practices are especially important.

There is an overarching research question in this study: How can a war-torn postcolonial multiethnic country be transformed into a peaceful and democratic state? This question provokes other related questions about the case countries: What are the causes of state collapse and the civil wars? How did the international community respond to state collapse and the civil wars? How were the causes of the civil wars addressed? What kinds of institutional arrangements have been established to ensure durable peace and inclusive democracy? These lines of inquiry provide the core focus of our book. Accordingly, our book makes three central arguments that contribute to the existing body of scholarly and policy literature: there is a clear nexus between the concepts and practices of peace building and statebuilding; peacebuilding and statebuilding are not simply domestic matters alone but are also matters of international intervention, notably under the principles of new humanitarianism and people-centered liberalism; and civil wars can be viewed as opportunities for statebuilding through creative postwar institutional design efforts. These three lines of argument are often fragmented and isolated in the extant literatures on peace and conflict, democracy, and international development.

We ask if the postwar state can become a vehicle capable of promoting peaceful and democratic governance while improving the well-being of its citizens. To answer this critical question, we need to push forward the often fragmented and isolated ideas in the existing literatures on the topic.¹ The wide variety of problems of a number of postwar African states have featured prominently in the peace and conflict, democracy, and development literature.² Yet, considerable deficits exist in each body of scholarship. Our examination of three West Africa case studies tries to address these gaps and further our understanding of the challenges and opportunities of internationally supported peacebuilding and statebuilding in the context of civil war. We aimed to reorient this discussion. This book does this by bridging the isolated discourses on peace/conflict, democracy, and development, and our work also focuses on providing new theoretical and policy insights to arrive at a better understanding of the links between the three.

The causes of civil wars and their tremendous humanitarian and security implications have been well examined in the peace and conflict literature.³ However, this body of scholarship often fails to examine the link between civil wars and the transformation of the postwar state in order to avoid future relapse into violence. That is to say, apart from the deplorable humanitarian tragedy that civil wars produce, such conflicts can potentially act as catalysts for ending state decay, reworking failed states, and facilitating difficult intergroup dialogue and bargaining needed to promote democracy. Peacebuilding cannot just be about ending war; it must be about creating sustainable and positive peace, and therefore creating situations and institutional frameworks that can help negotiate conflict, avoid a relapse into violence, and consolidate democracy. Accordingly, we argue that civil wars can be opportunities for statebuilding, mainly through creative postwar institutional design.

Some of the critical questions in the democracy literature, as it applies to peace building and statebuilding, relate to the manner in which civil wars are resolved, the kinds of political and institutional arrangements that are put in place to address the underlying cause of conflict, and the extent of postwar reform that is aided by key external actors.⁴ Designing democratic institutional arrangements that can facilitate peaceful intergroup bargaining constitutes a pillar of peacebuilding activities focused on resolving armed conflicts, and democratization and the establishment of the rule of law are important elements. The UN and most international donors clearly view democratic reform as a critical part of peacebuilding and postwar statebuilding. However, there is debate as to what extent democratization can be aided from the outside by the international development community, especially when it is overly based on orthodox liberal notions of electoral democracy.

Finally, much of the development literature is concerned with the role of external actors in restoring and rebuilding the state in postwar situations. Rebuilding after war is clearly an expensive endeavor that frequently outstrips the available resources of the afflicted country. Nevertheless, given this reality, what role should the international development community play in peacebuilding and statebuilding after conflict beyond simply financing reform? While the international community has been involved in these activities on behalf of a number of postwar states in Africa and beyond, some authors argue that donors should be aware of the limits of externally driven postwar development.⁵ This point of debate in the literature is clear. However, we conclude that outside actors from the international community can clearly play an important role in facilitating change after a civil war, and we agree with the widely shared analysis that, in many cases, the root causes of conflicts involve the fragility of governance, which necessitates extensive economic development assistance and significant contributions from international actors. Together, local domestic actors and their international partners can create opportunities to build a new regime based on inclusive democratic governance while addressing the underlying problems of corruption and the fundamental injustices plaguing the particular society, not to mention promoting economic and social development at the same time.

THE PEACEBUILDING/STATEBUILDING NEXUS

With this book, we aim to further the discussion about how the three West African countries examined here exemplify how the wider issues of poor governance and corrosive ethnicity-driven democracy can exacerbate underlying state decay and lead to state collapse under the weight of civil war. Such civil wars are ultimately the manifestation of fundamental problems underlying the state, especially in Africa but not exclusively so. These conflicts arise from deep questions about statehood, colonial/foreign institutional origins, and the underlying lack of political freedoms, social justice, economic opportunity, and so on. Civil wars most frequently emerge in places suffering from significant levels of state decay. Weak authority and unresponsive states (including strong states) can further increase the likelihood of civil war. At the same time, violent internal conflict can exacerbate the characteristics of a decaying state and state collapse. State decay may cause civil war, and inversely, civil war may exacerbate state decay and lead to collapse; clearly, there is a complex relationship between the two. Civil wars not only expose the instability of some states but also bring forth the issues that impede the development of reasonably stable, democratic, and prosperous states, particularly in Africa. The interrelated concepts and practices of peacebuilding and statebuilding represent efforts to overcome the problems of state decay, civil war, and state collapse.

As a starting point, peacebuilding is primarily about creating situations of nonviolent coexistence despite prevailing incompatibilities. It is a response to and a consequence of civil war. According to a definition provided by the UN, peacebuilding involves a range of measures to reduce the risk of the outbreak or relapse of conflict, to strengthen national capabilities at all levels for conflict management, and to provide a foundation for sustainable peace and lasting development.⁶ Furthermore, the most successful peacebuilding strategies should be coherent and tailored to meet the specific needs of the country concerned, be based on the idea of national ownership of the process, and be comprised of a carefully prioritized, sequenced, and therefore relatively targeted set of activities aimed at securing sustainable peace.⁷ In the cases we examined, peacebuilding was driven by new humanitarianism and involved robust peacekeeping missions, mediation geared toward holding multiparty elections, and postwar reconstruction.

In a related manner, the contemporary state can be conceptualized as primarily being designed to deliver benefits, such as key goods and services, for the people within its borders. The state’s ability to manage expectations and conflicts as well as statebuilding processes is strongly influenced by the degree of legitimacy it has in the eyes of its population. That is to say, statebuilding is at its simplest the development of state capacity constructed on top of legitimacy. Accordingly, it is a process designed to enhance capacity, institutions, and the overall legitimacy of the state. The term statebuilding here refers to the various types of political, economic, and social institutional arrangements that can be used to ensure a durable peace and inclusive democratic governance. Statebuilding practices in part involve reciprocal relations between a state that delivers services for its people and social and political groups who constructively engage with their state. The overall goal is to create inclusive political-institutional arrangements and processes that can build bargaining relationships able to negotiate potentially difficult interactions between the state and society. In the three case countries, ethnic inclusion in the political system and institutions of the state is critical, because ethnic marginalization has been a key factor in state decay. The overarching question here is how a postcolonial multiethnic country wracked by civil war can be transformed into a peaceful and democratic state. This is the crux of statebuilding. The three cases examined here allow us to explore these processes.

The practices of statebuilding are closely linked with political interactions and power relations between the elite holding the reins of power in a given country and the organized groups that oppose them. The way that they negotiate and manage any conflicts has a huge impact on the nature of the state. Throughout history, this process has often been extremely violent; nonetheless, it has still provided the fundamental basis for developing the scope of capacity and even the overall legitimacy of the state. Yet, at times, the various groups involved in these processes can identify, or even be encouraged or helped to identify, a critical number of interrelated common interests and negotiate ways to pursue them in a mutually beneficial manner. This not only reinforces statebuilding; it can provide the core of it. Even more, such practices and institutions of accommodation and consociation can be critical ingredients of postwar institutional design arrangements.

As we argue here, statebuilding has been fragmented and undermined by a wide variety of contradicting agendas and interests. The key elements of statehood, such as defined territorial boundaries, central government, and security apparatuses, were established during colonial rule. It goes without saying that the imposition of a state and its institutions with foreign origins has had a significant impact on many of the countries on the African continent, not to mention colonial entities everywhere. Despite their distinctly different colonial experiences, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire faced very similar predicaments. In all three cases, the state was an alien political and economic structure brought in from the outside. As independent countries, they adopted models of Western state institutions but mostly failed to foster the common national identity needed to transform the multiethnic state into a cohesive nation. All three countries eventually strayed from more democratic norms of political behavior toward an ethnicity-driven dictatorship. This undermined the legitimacy of the state and intensified interethnic and regional animosities. These states were simply not conceived as cohesive cultural units that could be transformed into nations. Instead of promoting nationhood, the colonial agenda undermined it. This made arriving at a national consensus on how to build a state, what the state should be, and how state power and resources would be distributed extremely difficult. This book examines how such a consensus can be helped via comprehensive peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts geared toward a creative institutional design aimed at fostering an inclusive democracy, especially after devastating and divisive civil wars. Our work shows the limit of winner-takes-all multiparty elections in the multiethnic postcolonial state. This should be an impetus for more inclusive models of democracy that are consociational in nature. Even more, such inclusivity needs to go beyond mere power-sharing governments and conventional electoral models of proportionality in representation. Inclusivity has to encompass the totality of the state institutions and be designed in a deliberate manner to fit the historical and cultural contexts of the country and the contemporary social and economic development needs of the citizenry.

The concepts of peacebuilding and statebuilding have evolved considerably in international policymaking and scholarly communities recently. There are clear conceptual convergences and linkages between these two practices. Both represent the development of institutional capacity and the growth of domestic legitimacy in order to further effective governance and sustainable development. Peacebuilding is also closely associated with the process of statebuilding through the mutual development of institutional conflict-management mechanisms. One of the objectives of both practices is to facilitate bargaining and build situations within which this type of interaction can lay the basis for future institutional arrangements that inculcate an inclusive and democratic multiethnic state.

Here, we argue that there is a clear relationship between peacebuilding and statebuilding. Furthermore, the two not only go together in tandem but are in all actuality mutually reinforcing processes. Building peace means increasing state responsiveness and its ability to manage conflict. This is necessary not only during wartime but even more so after a brutal civil war. Put another way, along with addressing the root causes of social and political conflict, these practices strengthen governmental structures as well as build more peaceful intergroup relations through creative institutional design arrangements.

The objective of contemporary statebuilding is to reconstruct the state and its institutions so that it can be more responsive and facilitate intergroup bargaining, thereby avoiding future violent conflict. Peacebuilding aims to transform the interrelations between the state and the various societal groups that might be at odds with each other. Both practices attempt to ameliorate the bond between state and society. They also try to build inclusive political systems that can unite a fractured society after war. In reality, both interact in an extremely complex but interrelated manner and have a clear impact on state-society relations. The three cases discussed here present illuminating opportunities for understanding the nexus between civil war and international statebuilding across Africa and beyond.

Since the end of the Cold War, now some three decades ago, statebuilding has been an integral part of the peacebuilding process and has seen a growing collaboration between domestic actors and the international community. The UN and various regional and subregional organizations and other major international actors all play critical roles in the effort to help reestablish peace and rebuild the state in war-torn countries. They do so by introducing comprehensive peacebuilding and statebuilding strategies. In our three case studies, as with other similar cases across the planet, we clearly see a delicate interplay between peacebuilding and statebuilding, both on a domestic and international level.

NEW HUMANITARIANISM AND PEOPLE-CENTERED LIBERALISM: THE INTERNATIONAL PRAXIS OF PEACEBUILDING AND STATEBUILDING

Peacebuilding is commonly perceived as being an internal matter designed to build up the state, improve state-society relations, and provide conflict-management mechanisms to ease intergroup relations. Similarly, statebuilding is frequently viewed as being exclusively a domestic affair. The efforts to redesign the state internally can be the result of a new homegrown political and civic awareness that emerged out of the horrors of war. However, we argue that peacebuilding and statebuilding are not just matters confined to the domestic arena but are intrinsic elements of international military and humanitarian interventions, especially under the banner of new humanitarianism. Alone, states emerging from civil war are severely limited in their ability to build peace and come back from violent conflict. Furthermore, outside players, acting both in a multilateral or unilateral manner, frequently have a higher level of capacity, increased resources, and at times the will to intervene and stop widespread human rights violations from happening. Given the destructive nature of such conflicts, the affected states often lack the capacity to get themselves back on track. In this light, peacebuilding and statebuilding can be seen as exercises of administrative assistance provided by the international community to facilitate peaceful intergroup relations, build good governance, and develop institutional capacity in countries impacted by civil war.⁸ Intervening in such civil wars where institutions of authority have been destroyed or significantly disrupted can be exceptionally challenging for outsiders. However, in the cases of Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, the international community felt that human security and local, regional, and international order were being frayed so much that it was necessary to intervene. As a part of the concept of new humanitarianism, the international community has a collective responsibility to confront such problems of human security and order. The fear that the state decay-conflict spiral could further undermine human security and therefore pose a substantial threat to international order led regional and global players to eventually intervene in all three conflicts discussed here. Those interventions epitomize what we have termed new humanitarianism and people-centered liberalism in international peacebuilding and statebuilding.

As we argue, the international community can definitely play a critical role in countries on the verge of state collapse. For decades, the international community has been deeply involved in postwar reconstruction aimed at protecting at-risk populations, restoring state capacity, and providing the foundation for democracy and economic development. Foreign aid agencies in many instances have gone on to provide a wide number of critical services on the part of the state. The actions of the international community may be mixed, however. They are frequently motivated by a combination of both liberal morality and their own realist security interests. These humanitarian interventions propelled by new humanitarianism and people-centered liberalism have accordingly been viewed by many with some skepticism. Furthermore, the results of many of these actions on the part of the international community have been questionable at best. The international community has frequently been accused of failing to build peace by not properly targeting the underlying causes of conflict and of not being able to push forward peace processes toward a negotiated settlement that adequately addresses the fundamental causes of conflict and eventually leads to sustainable peace. The overarching interests of the international actors involved are seen by some as coming before those from the affected country. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the various players that make up the international community are critical in contemporary peacebuilding and statebuilding for the previously mentioned reasons.

We are particularly interested in civil wars during which there has been significant international intervention under the banners of new humanitarianism and people-centered liberalism. In each of the three West African cases examined here, the international community, along with key regional actors, played critical roles in the future development of the postwar states. The peacebuilding and statebuilding practices in these three countries differ from those in cases such as Nigeria; following the Biafran Civil War (1967–1970), the Nigerian state was radically reconstructed primarily by domestic actors.⁹ On the contrary, the termination of the wars and the development of the state in each of the three cases examined in this book had major international and regional input. Actors such as ECOWAS, the UN, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the United Kingdom, and France, among others, played important roles in achieving an end to these and to the future development of the postwar state. Interestingly, while the military force provided by the international community served to bring an end to each of the civil wars, the role of outside actors to secure a sustainable peace has been equally far-reaching.

Humanitarian intervention has been frequently equated with the use of armed force by a member or members of the international community; consider the controversial actions by the United States in places like Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Humanitarian intervention by the international community has historically been defined as “the threat or use of force across state borders by a state (or group of states) aimed at preventing or ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human rights.”¹⁰ Yet, as we argue, the international community also has an important role in developing the concepts of humanitarianism, peace, and the promotion of democratic governance within war-torn countries. This goes beyond the use of military force. New humanitarianism is the global embodiment of the idea of human compassion. The notion of extending and providing care to those in need and restoring state capacity is at the heart of international humanitarian intervention in situations such as the three West African civil wars examined in this book. This is epitomized in the doctrines of new humanitarianism and people-centered liberalism that have been applied to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire.

These three massive international humanitarian interventions have been largely viewed as necessary in order to restore security within these states, as well as in the West African subregion as a whole, and perhaps more importantly to fulfill the moral obligations of the international community to protect at-risk populations. However, it is critical to note that the attention from international actors was not the same in all three cases. Interestingly, in Liberia and Sierra Leone, there were rather robust regional and international humanitarian-military interventions as well as significant postwar reconstruction efforts buttressed by extensive development aid packages from donors. Since intervening in these two cases, the international community has subsequently turned to far-reaching statebuilding efforts. In contrast, Côte d’Ivoire points not only to the possibilities for international statebuilding but also to its limitations. The international community played a critical supportive role in ending the fighting in Côte d’Ivoire and trying to forge a political solution to the conflict, albeit with limited success. The external intervention was mostly limited to securing a buffer zone, mediating a political solution to the conflict, and supporting the implementation of the various peace agreements. In this case, interestingly, the Ivoirians actually went on to sidestep the international community and eventually negotiate a fairly successful peace agreement on their own, with some help from subregional actors. However, in the end, international forces briefly intervened to oust Gbagbo after he lost the 2010 presidential election. These processes, which have led to the end of three brutal civil wars, can provide opportunities for a better, more peaceful future if the postwar reconstruction efforts can address the root causes of state decay and civil war.

INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN: CIVIL WARS AND THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR STATEBUILDING

Today, as in the past, war and its consequences have played a large role in determining the structures of states. There is a clear relationship between war and statebuilding; wars have spurred and created opportunities for statebuilding throughout history. As Anthony Giddens observes, states have transformed themselves in order to conduct war and, perhaps more importantly here, as a result of war.¹¹ In Africa and beyond, state decay and collapse connected to civil wars must be treated not only as crises to be quelled but as potential opportunities to rethink the state and build better political, economic, and social institutions that are sustainable. Advancing this discussion is at the core of our efforts in this book. Our task is not to provide a blueprint for institutional design. Rather, our work raises this issue and shows a variety of reforms efforts that have been undertaken with the hope of accentuating the importance of creative institutional design aligned to the root causes of war. Based on the current postwar state of peace and democracy in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire, the need for more creative institutional design is even greater.

It goes without saying that civil war leaves a tremendous imprint on any society. Clearly, such conflicts are first and foremost humanitarian disasters that rip societies to tatters. The legacy of such wars, in Africa and elsewhere, has mostly been tremendous human suffering that can have a major impact for decades, long after the fighting has ended. The underlying dysfunctional conditions of many states across Africa, including political instabilities, poor economic and social conditions, and divisive ethnic politics—all exacerbated by poor governance and leadership—combine to make statebuilding an extremely difficult process. These challenges are even more acute in brittle, decaying, and war-torn countries.

Nonetheless, civil wars can provide a unique opportunity for statebuilding. There can be a positive angle to the end of civil war despite the horror it entails. Such conflicts can be an opportunity to build a better state by addressing fundamental problems. In our cases, notwithstanding all the devastation of the civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, scholars and policymakers should be seeking to understand the opportunities for transforming the state from an oppressive political and economic apparatus into a political system that fosters freedom, social justice, and economic development. These opportunities could take the form of a fundamental break with the prewar political system aimed at fostering significant postwar changes in the political culture and state institutions; this could make such civil wars catalysts for inclusive democracy and economic development. As with the three cases examined in this study, such changes could be the result of the deployment of international forces and humanitarian agencies to provoke a transformation in the domestic political culture and state institutions. Clearly, statebuilding should not be limited to restoring old institutions and setting up new social programs. It should also address existential questions of statehood (citizenship, ethnic representation, justice, rights, power, and development) by being more deliberate and creative with institutional design. It should generate a sense of local consciousness and grassroots participation in national issues, hopefully leading to a wide-ranging social transformation. These changes are frequently born out of a combination of homegrown political and civic awareness brought on by the civil war and the efforts of international actors and humanitarian agencies to foster and support such reforms.

Important opportunities for institutional design existed in all three of the cases discussed. However, successful postwar institutional reform is contingent on improving good-governance practices and the efficient use of economic resources. Enhancing good governance was a critical challenge for postwar reconstruction and the consolidation of peace. The proper management of public finance and natural endowments lies at the heart of good-governance reforms. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, where corruption was a critical factor leading to the civil war, major programs were launched to ensure proper management of revenues from minerals and overall public finances. As for Côte d’Ivoire, where cocoa revenues represent a critical source of government income, the international community helped push forward transparency in that sector.

In Sierra Leone, reconstruction and good-governance reform emphasized significant changes in the mining sector. The international community, led by the World Bank, initiated several projects in line with the Kimberley Process and with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) that were aimed at helping Sierra Leone resume large-scale mining in an equitable and sustainable manner after the end of the civil war.¹² They focused on enhancing transparency and accountability in the mining industries with the hope of enabling the country to better use its natural resources for more sustainable development. These efforts built on the 2009 Mines and Mineral Act and led to the review of mining contracts, the restructuring of the Ministry of Mines and Mineral Resources, and pressure to comply with the EITI in order to ensure that the sector contributed to socioeconomic development.

In Liberia, improvements in public finance management were a key part of postwar reconstruction. International actors such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank helped the country make important reforms relating to good governance and economic resource management. Two programs had a particularly significant impact—the Diamonds for Development program and the Economic Governance and Institutional Reform Project (EGIR). In 2005, the UNDP established the Diamonds for Development program in Liberia “to facilitate the establishment of a transparent and accountable revenue management system based on a fair and equitable distribution of revenues.”¹³ The program called for the formation of a local development fund and microfinanced mining cooperatives to benefit communities throughout the country. Furthermore, in 2008, the World Bank started the EGIR in Liberia. This project sought to “improve the efficiency and transparency in managing public financial and human resources, focusing on revenue administration, public procurement, budget execution and payroll management.”¹⁴ Special attention was directed at assisting Liberian agencies establish transparent systems for the collection and reporting of mining revenues and payments.

In Côte d’Ivoire, too, promoting good governance was a critical part of the postwar rebuilding process. The cocoa sector was of particular importance. As the largest cocoa producer, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the total world production (not to mention that the commodity represents the primary source of the country’s public revenues), Côte d’Ivoire had huge potentials that were impeded by poor governance and inefficiencies in the cocoa sector. Accordingly, the World Bank, through the Economic Governance and Recovery Grant (both EGRG I and EGRG II), sought to improve accountability and transparency.

All three countries—with help from key external actors from the international community—were able to undertake significant institutional reforms that led to important changes in economic resource management. These transformations allowed for the development of better good-governance practices that have had a clear impact. Despite these various postwar reconstruction programs, there have been significant missed opportunities for creative institutional design. Notably, none of the countries introduced consociational arrangements to ensure that the various ethnic groups and regions were properly represented in the government and state institutions more broadly. Instead, they have all continued regular winner-takes-all multiparty democracy, which is already creating problems as they slide back into pseudodemocracy and authoritarianism. The failure to design new institutional mechanisms to enhance inclusive politics is leading to significant problems that can negate the gains made as ethnically driven politics undermine the rules of law and increase nepotism and corruption. All three countries missed the opportunity to institute major constitutional reforms that would address the nature of the state and the way the different ethnic groups and regions can be meaningfully represented, despite the fact that the peace agreements and the reports of the truth and reconciliation commissions clearly noted the problems of ethnic and regional marginalization.

CONCLUSION

This book goes beyond merely connecting the literature on peace and conflict, democracy, and international development. Significantly, it offers detailed comparative case studies and developed novel concepts. While these countries have been separately discussed in the peace and conflict, democracy, and international development literatures, we provide a holist and comparative study that furthers our understanding of the case countries and a comprehensive analysis of the security and international interventions in the West African region at large. In the process, we developed novel concepts and applications in the scholarly and policy debates about civil wars, international interventions, and development. We go beyond the familiar concepts of failed states, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), peacekeeping, peace mediation, democracy, and human development. Notably, we introduce and enhance the concepts of state decay, new humanitarianism, people-centered liberalism, and institutional design. These concepts emerge out of the analysis of the historical and international contexts of the civil wars and the efforts to end the wars. They add richness to the scholarly works on peace and conflict, democracy, and development and to the international policy debates on governance, human security, and human development. In sum, the book adds to our understanding of the roots of civil wars, the complexities of peacebuilding, the possibilities for statebuilding, and the interconnections between human security, state security, and regional-cum-international security. While the book is not a blueprint for statebuilding, it provides critical lessons that local and international actors can draw from as they try to figure out practical solutions to the political, economic, and social problems that impede the development of peaceful and democratic multiethnic postcolonial states in Africa.

Moreover, the book provides a close analysis of the realities of the civil war and the international intervention in West Africa, offering important lessons for that region and beyond. The three countries examined here present illuminating cases for understanding the relationship between civil war, peacebuilding, and statebuilding in West Africa and the possibilities they bring for change. The international community has played a critical and supportive role in ending the fighting and forging a long-term political solution to the civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire. Yet, these peacebuilding efforts raise important questions about the challenges of building states in Africa after civil war. As we have argued in this work, civil wars must be treated not only as crises to be quelled but as opportunities to rethink the state and build better institutions. Indeed, we cannot ignore the fact that the horrors of war may create the potential for sustainable peace, democracy, and positive change. These countries need to continue their peacebuilding and postwar reconstruction efforts by drawing lessons from their past and exploring new institutional arrangements. Sierra Leone has been debating the need for a national conference and potential changes to the constitution in line with the Lomé Peace Agreement. However, that discussion has stalled. Côte d’Ivoire made constitutional changes in 2000 and 2016, but the changes were geared toward exclusion rather than inclusion. Both changes undermined democracy. Southerners used the 2000 constitutional change to narrow citizenship, while Alassane Ouattara used the 2016 change to violate the term limit for the presidency. Indeed, constitutional amendments can be opportunities to redesign the state, but there is the danger of changing constitutions in ways that undermine democracy; this is not what we mean by institutional design. Institutional design should lead to more ethnic and regional inclusion among other principles of democracy. In Côte d’Ivoire, the constitutional changes failed to incorporate the lessons learned about north-south power sharing under the Ouagadougou Peace Accord and the dangers of ethnic and regional marginalization. The critical point is that constitutional changes need to be deliberative processes geared toward making the state more inclusive and representative of its various ethnic groups and regions. This remains a huge deficit in the postwar reconstruction efforts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire.