| Recent cases of international intervention to rebuild countries after war constitute a departure from more standard cases of peacekeeping, military occupation, or state-building as used in the political science literature. This 'new politics of occupation' is marked by extensive international powers over domestic events, but unlike earlier occupations, these powers are exercised by non-military organizations, agencies, and government representatives who are loosely organized. The goals of the intervention are broad in scope, as the ultimate objective is the re-creation of a functioning state. This dissertation focuses on the most developed of these state-building cases, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to generate a series of broader lessons applicable elsewhere. The nature of domestic informal power structures is found to be crucial to the outcome of the state-building effort. By tracing the interactions of international actors and existing local power networks through the issue areas considered priorities in Bosnia's peace agreement, this dissertation outlines the general challenges of institutional development after conflict. The issue areas studied are: post-conflict elections, internal security and the rule of law, economic reconstruction and reform, and the return of refugees and internally displaced persons. In each case, informal local power arrangements opposed to the international state-building plan and the international actor themselves attempted to outmaneuver one another to determine the ultimate shape of the new institutions. |
