Building peace and democracy or organizing exit: Elections and United Nations peace operations

United Nations peace operations have undergone significant changes since the Organization's intervention in the 1956 Suez Crisis. The end of the Cold War was a pivotal moment in this evolution and was marked by increasingly complex missions. These new missions have adopted the democratic reconstruction model of peacebuilding and place a strong emphasis on the use of elections in post-conflict operations. This thesis explores the evolving use of elections in UN peace operations since the end of the Cold War by analysing the commitment of parties to elections, their timing and their mechanics. It presents elections as a possible democratizing tool, a means of legitimizing international intervention and new governments while extracting interveners, and as a means of war termination. Using the cases of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia and the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor, the author argues that elections have shifted from being the central component of UN mission to being used as one aspect of a wider democratizing project. Elections are no longer used as an exit strategy and the shift has facilitated the implementation of the democratic reconstruction model. However, even in the most conducive post-conflict situations, it remains extremely difficult to successfully facilitate democratic transitions in war-torn territories.