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The effort to improve state institutions in post-conflict societies is a complicated business. Even when foreign intervention is carried out with the best of intentions and the greatest resources, it often fails. What can account for this failure ? The author argues here that the international community's approach to building state institutions needs its own reform. In contrast to the common strategy of foreign interveners - imposing models drawn from Western countries - the author shows how pursuing incremental change that accommodates local political interests is more likely to produce effective, accountable, and law-abiding institutions. Drawing on extensive field research and original interviews, the author examines efforts to reform the central government, military, or police in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq, and Timor-Leste. Based on his own experience in defense reform in Ukraine after 2014, the author also draws parallels with efforts to improve state institutions outside of post-conflict societies.

POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION --- NATION-BUILDING --- INSTITUTION BUILDING

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The book aims to answer the central question : 'What went wrong, more precisely, in the decision chain during the reconstruction of Iraq's military institution ?' The holistic character of the approach is ensured through a series of background analyses. Although most researches concluded already that Iraq's reconstruction was a failure, answering the question implied the design of an appropriate research method and data collection/analysis, in order to frame particular characteristics of the reconstruction process. Despite the complexity of the topic and theoretical Security Sector Reform principles, which can hardly be applied to Iraq's case, the thesis emphasizes on actors involved, their actions and connections between events, as part of a unique process.

NATION-BUILDING--IRAQ --- POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION--IRAQ --- IRAQ--POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

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Military assistance, American --- Postwar reconstruction --- Peace-building --- Democracy --- Evaluation. --- United States. --- United States --- Armed Forces

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The U.S.-led international coalition to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has achieved substantial progress over the past several years, but the counter-ISIS campaign is not over. The authors assessed humanitarian needs in Eastern Syria's Middle Euphrates River Valley (MERV). They also examined how locally focused stabilization efforts might be orchestrated to help preclude the Islamic State's recapture of territory, even as Syria's larger civil conflict continues unabated and is growing more complex. This report opens with a sociocultural perspective on the MERV's human terrain, explicating long-standing divisions within and among the Valley's Sunni Arab tribes that may pose challenges to restoring broadly accepted local governance. The authors then assess the region's most urgent post-ISIS needs, focusing intensively on the status of its critical infrastructure—e.g., bridges, hospitals, transit facilities—as well as its natural resources, human displacement, and economic activity. In the political sphere, the authors examined how stabilization efforts might be pursued in a region where both the Syrian government and nonstate actors are filling a vacuum left by a common enemy's loss of territorial control. The authors then analyzed the pluses and minuses of attempting to overcome these challenges via either a separated division of labor approach to stabilization (i.e., a "steer clear" approach) or a more collaborative "interactive" approach. The authors recommend that both sides should start with a minimalist steer clear option but incrementally move toward a more interactive approach, as conditions permit.

IS (Organization) --- Postwar reconstruction --- Social aspects --- Syria --- History --- Participation, Foreign. --- Social aspects.

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Does socioeconomic justice belong within transitional justice? Daniela Lai provides the first systematic analysis of experiences of socioeconomic violence during war and how they give rise to strong, but unheeded justice claims in the aftermath. She redefines socioeconomic justice as the redress of violence rooted in the political economy of conflict, and transitional justice as a social practice that belongs among grassroots activists as much as it does in courtrooms and truth commissions. Furthermore, she examines the role of international actors that rely on narrow, legalistic approaches to transitional justice, while also promoting economic reforms that hinder the emergence and pursuit of socioeconomic justice claims by conflict-affected communities. Drawing on a unique set of in-depth interviews with Bosnian communities, international officials and grassroots activists, this book provides new theoretical and empirical insights on the link between justice and political economy, on international interventions, and on Bosnia's post-war and post-socialist transformation.

Postwar reconstruction --- Transitional justice --- Social justice --- Yugoslav War, 1991-1995 --- International cooperation. --- Social aspects --- Equality --- Justice --- Human rights --- Post-conflict reconstruction --- Reconstruction, Postwar