Promoting Democracy in Post-Conflict and Failed States Lessons and Challenges

Abstract

Efforts to assist democratic development in post-conflict states confront distinctive challenges. In particular, they must urgently address the vacuum of order left by the collapse of the state or the decline in its authority and capacity as a result of internal conflict. Yet, if international actors intervene directly to fill the vacuum, they face intense legitimacy problems and a tension between the imperatives of post-conflict stabilization and the logic of democratization. The experiences of Iraq and other recent post-conflict interventions suggest a number of lessons for post-conflict democracy building. These include the need to mobilize sufficient military, financial, and knowledge resources to meet the scope of the challenge, and the value of phasing in the return to democracy, so that local elections come first and national elections may be deferred until the political conditions are more suitable.