Panel 5: External Actors in Conflict and Post-Conflict Situations
Wednesday, 16/7/2008, 16:00-17:30 | Room HOGC 03.101
Chair: Francine Jácome
Discussant: Herbert Wulf
Democracy Building in a Post-Conflict Society: The Case of East Timor
Building lasting peace in post-conflict societies has been a difficult task and often without a success. Many post-conflict countries return to conflict after a period of international peacekeeping operation. East Timor, a post-conflict country that was once a success story of UN peacekeeping activity, is suffering from newly emerged internal conflict. The democratic institutions that were put in place had been only superficially democratic and could not prevent the political crisis. The society is deeply divided, and the division is becoming fixed. The society is apparently entering a new phase of political conflict. Why is this happening? The paper examines the democracy-building efforts during the periods of the UN transitional administration and after independence. Problems lie both in the transitional policies and the internal politics of the East Timorese. The transitional policies were directed to building a functioning state, and a functioning state was largely interpreted as a functioning bureaucracy. The UN regarded the local politics as an internal matter of the East Timorese, and therefore did not try to regulate it or establish a mechanism to deliberate and settle problems that existed among the East Timorese. Meanwhile the East Timorese political leaders, still not having reconciled each other over the hegemony of the liberation struggle, revived old rivalry, and competed for positions in the government. This hegemonic war was not immediately visible for most people, because the competition was not properly institutionalized and therefore there was no transparency or accountability. The point is how to build functioning democracy in post-conflict societies. Both international and local initiatives must be strengthened.
Leonardo Paz Neves / Marcelo M. Valenca:
Issues of Regionalizing the Peacekeeping: The Somalian Crisis in 2007
This paper will discuss how the regionalization of the UN peacekeeping helps to tackle more effectively the causes of the conflicts and its consequences in the post-conflict society. The increasing participation of neighbors countries reflects the importance of legitimating the peacekeeping operation by involving countries that share similar backgrounds, development levels and cultural aspects. However, it may also provoke doubts regarding the motivation of these actors: are they trying to reconstruct the sociopolitical institutions or to threat the sovereignty of the country targeted by the peace operation? We propose that, despite the threats that neighbors countries may provoke, the regionalization of the peacekeeping process is a necessary element for the success of the intervention. In that fashion we propose to analyze the civil conflicts that led to a crisis in Somalia in early 2007 and the involvement of Eritrea and Ethiopia both in the crisis and in the process of conflict resolution, highlighting whether their presence in a possible peace operation held by the African Union would affect the probability of success of the enterprise.