Role of Political Actors in the War-Torn States
The Priorities for Actors Seeking To Rebuild Political Institutions in the War-Torn States
Political institutions are organizations frame in government to build, enforce, and apply laws of a country in a bid to mediate conflicts. Most of the war-torn state has challenges that usually spark conflicts (Mac Ginty, & Richmond, 2013). However, in an effort to address the challenges, the center of the discussion should be based on all the mechanisms that are focused on solving problems that are creating instabilities. Actors who are at the forefront in addressing Jus Post Bellum and building political institutions should focus on the factors that are necessitating wars in countries experiencing political instabilities.
Political interference is an external factor that always influences political institutions. It is, therefore, necessary for actors who are seeking to build a political institution to address challenges that are embedded in political interference. Political interference for both external and internal end always plays an integral role in the political sphere, usually push their agendas instead of what affects the ordinary people (Sheafer et al., 2014). Political interference has been categorized as common factors causing political animosities. It is, therefore, vital for political actors to address political interference in building political institutions.
Poor governance is also a factor that is integral when building political institutions. Political institutions should address the major causes of political instabilities. It is necessary for political institutions to work and address the challenges affecting politics (Dellepiane-Avellaneda, 2010). Since poor governance has been pointed out as a significant challenge in the political sphere, it is fundamental for political institutions to address these challenges in order to come up with a coherent understanding of the problems.
Competition for resources is also a factor that influences politics. Political institutions should, therefore, strive to address competition of resources in pursuit of political stability (March & Olsen, 2010). Actors who are building political institutions should discuss how economic resources in a country should be spread amongst the people in order to develop understanding. Economic resources have categorized as the number one cause of political unrest in many nations. Therefore it is necessary for political actors to find a solution to the manner of distributing economic resources in order to formulate unity. In an attempt to address these challenges, this paper will incorporate different theories that encompass different thoughts and ideas.
There are two types of postwar recoveries that nations may undergo. There is the autonomous recovery described as the process through which nations gain a stable sense of peace, an orderly decrease in violence, and after war economic and political growth minus the aid from international sources. On the contrary, aided recovery is whereby international involvement is very vital in bringing the war to an end, ensuring the guarantee for settlement is honored by the conflicting nations and helping in the process of recovery for the afflicted nations. Basing on observations from various nations, occasionally, it is more sensible to let wars run their course. In this case, rather than providing unbiased intervention, decisive intervention is offered to competent and legitimate military forces that are almost winning.
According to Winston, there are two excellent reasons for not interfering in an ongoing war. To begin with, he supports Luttwak (1999), who argues that conflicts reach an end when one of the warring groups overpowers the opponent and wins the war decisively, or when the two groups at war become tired of fighting that they decide to coexist peacefully. On the other hand, truces and peaceful settlements allow the parties at war to rebuild their forces. Such parties decide on this measure, mainly when they are unsure of the duration that the agreement will last. Secondly, he points out an essential consolidating value in the process of making war, possibly appropriate for establishing a stable making of the state. They achieve this stability by using operational, representative, independent governance systems. The requirement for this result is that factions or countries encounter a substantial danger to their existence. The threat is apparent because there is a significant local necessity for revenue while being faced with the inadequacy of foreign resources to decreases the costs associated with the war.
Out of all of Weinstein’s findings on autonomous recovery, the most interesting one is profoundly democratic. This finding highlights the connection between privileged partisan and the remainder of a state’s population. In his words, the process of making war can significantly incite the groups in contention to obtain the governed group’s consent, get over dogmatic inclinations favoring identities that have a more national appeal, and develop the required administrative capability to ensure that the constituents receive public goods. On the other hand, aided recovery involves foreign authenticity and capabilities. This scenario results from the involvement of international actors in negotiations of power deals with privileged partisans and non-governmental organizations. Also, global entities offer a helping hand in terms of facilitating the delivery of social services. Weinstein holds strong beliefs that autonomous recovery should gain consideration alongside other state-building options. His idea comes from the fact that autonomous recovery is the only form of state-building that offers a combination of local sources of authenticity and capabilities.
However, many people can raise questions or object to the autonomous recovery proposition by Weinstein (Rutazibwa, 2013). The first thing that leads to this uncertainty is the functionalist stance on war-making. It appears essential to have a thorough reflection on the apparent necessity for bringing stability to cases of conflict and war, while ultimately reaching operational communal structures. Nonetheless, Weinstein’s examination of the advantageous components of war-making is still valuable and intuitive, mainly because it talks about self-reliance. The attribute of self-reliance surpasses the necessity for war-making. In this case, one has to consider other scenarios that pose a risk to the continued existence of a group. These scenarios include natural disasters such as drought and famine. People do not look at these scenarios as being beneficial in any way; instead, they offer a challenge that should prove as uniting factors for the people that face the challenges together. From an autonomous pint of view, people should work together towards overcoming the problem together. Therefore, as they emerge from the calamity, there should be a visibly strengthened cohesion between the groups of individuals. Some aspects that the individuals should improve on after this period include both financial and material independence, which facilitate the positive organization of society. Claude Ake was a partisan philosopher on the democratization and statehood of Africa. He openly campaigned for self-reliance as a requirement for achieving democracy and development in Africa (Adebanwi and Obadare, 2011). Also, he stated that achieving self-reliance would be a massive step towards untying themselves from depending on international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Irrera, 2010).
The second objection carries more weight and highlights Weinstein’s endorsement to get behind the strongest party involved in a war. He assumes that the strength of this party would eventually lead to the party emerging victorious. People find problems with this measure because it contradicts his democratic intuition from autonomous recovery. This intuition dictates that conflicts that reach an acceptable end without external intervention will ultimately end as a result of limited war resources and fatigue for the war events. Also, such wars force the conflicting parties to search for prevalent support for their aspirations, resulting in the creation of domestic legitimacy rather than foreign legitimacy.
The final question that one could raise concerning the autonomous recovery framework is the unlikelihood of the framework to become substantial as a sensible option in the contemporary global perspective in the short-term. Such concerns stem from power and control-related issues and the fact that the public opinion has a major influence on a society’s view on the apt course of action following incidences of human suffering. Weinstein focuses on the matter of power and control, citing that autonomous recovery may not be very popular among foreign actors because it offers a very low degree of control on the type of governance structure that will come in the aftermath of the war activities. In agreement with his sentiments, it is obvious that external moral policy brings an elaborate plan based on western comprehensions, idealized versions of mirroring its familiarities in the formation of a democratic state. Based on these findings, Cyril Obi, an African philosopher on democracy, describes this as a process of global homogenization. In the same line, Merlingen warns on the temptation of homogenization in the process of establishing peace and the aspects brought together in its pursuit. The public view on the matter is that the policy of autonomous recovery goes against the ideals of humanity as it advocates for war to continue, yet it is a known fact that periods of war result in major spells of suffering for individuals. Also, times of war offer a threat to the security of human beings. Paris and Sisk write against the option of retreating from war because abandoning the post-war process of building the state would be equivalently forsaking millions of individuals in a state of predation, lawlessness, fear, and disease (Mac Ginty, and Richmond, 2013). In the same way, autonomous recovery seemingly does not provide a satisfactory short-term solution to the communal desire to offer a helping hand to individuals that suffer as a result of the war in their countries, along with other cases of human misery.
Poignantly, the disagreement with widespread sentiments on global care may be the most important theme in Weinstein’s viewpoint on autonomous recovery to the notion of moral retreat. Aside from associating lack of global intervention with prolonged stability, peace, and the development of operative institutions, he most notably draws people’s attention to one of the most challenging postulations in the public view and modern western ethical foreign dogma. This assumption states that when all is said and done, non-western actors are incapable of coming out of a domestic crisis on their own, while equally foreign intervention in the form of peacekeeping, mediation, and peacemaking, is an essential tool that enhances the reversal of the economic and political decline of poorly ruled nations (Weinstein 2005). This notion comprises of an existent division of the global population into individuals that are capable of self-help and those that are not. This categorization forms the basis of ascendancy and disparity in modern western moral foreign policy.
Many individuals, along with Weinstein, have come to the realization of the existing bifurcation created among global civilizations by morally inspired foreign policies. These policies describe a section of the population as being able to handle themselves in difficult situations due to the presence of a dedicated agency (Ray, 1998). On the other hand, there is a section of the population that does not have the means to help themselves in such difficult times. Such individuals fall in this category based on two reasons, and their situation may be very calamitous to the extent that their capability or agency is not even a part of the debate, or that their nationality and agency is theoretically acknowledged but anticipated in future developments. They reach the projected levels after the relevant participants have built their capacity to be vocal and coming up with the appropriate decisions. In the state-building and peacebuilding contexts, this division occurs at both the individual and state levels. The perception at the state level occurs via shifts in the meaning of supremacy in the setting of humanitarian intrusions and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
Initially, the dominance of a state, along with the associated concept of non-interference, was the core shaping values in global interactions and democracy (Chandler, 2013). However, in contemporary society, people consider dominion as a capability and an element that an individual or state has to earn. On this front, countries that are incapable of safeguarding their citizens or offering them the basic minimum maintenance services do not have sovereignty. Therefore, this scenario leaves such countries open to receive aid from other sovereign nations with the aim of achieving sovereignty. Also, contemporary society has witnessed a growing focus on prevention. This notion appeared based on the setting of excessive human suffering, such as massacres and genocides. The increased focus on prevention has resulted in the dragging of the plan of the efforts toward long-term state-building into the discussion and implementation of R2P (Paris, 2004). The element of division stems from the fact that the situation of lacking is detectable only in non-western countries, yet the definition of this situation stems from western countries. At the level of the individual, the manifestation of the division happens via the limited representation of people from the south as victims, or by restraining the capacity to help themselves to the future, after a process of capacity building by the intervener.
African American scholars have raised a similar process of incomplete representation and incapacitation of subjects. Their concerns stem from their experiences of being black in America. According to Cornel West, diasporan Africans had everlasting and hereditary sovereignty at birth (Asante, 2015). This domination essentially resulted in the creation of the modern problems that these individuals face. These problems include the namelessness and invisibility of the Black community. The Whites at the time openly undermined black people’s abilities, character, beauty, and intelligence. Consequently, black individuals had difficult spells where they had to battle against strong feelings of self-contempt, self-hatred, and self-doubt. It took a lot of effort from them to effectively suppress these negative feelings. Scholars that came after the colonial period have shed much light on some of the situations such as the subalterns’ ability or lack thereof to air their views and get an audience concerning pressing matters such as in the context of civilizing aid. David Chandler examines this process into the contemporary world and claims that nothing much has changed despite the amount of time elapsed.
Instead, the only difference is the way at which people decide to look at the situation. This notion gains prominence because the colonial era relied on racial differences as the basis for this, while contemporary society has evolved to cite cultural differences. Moving further forward, society’s focus is on the individual by legalizing the involvement of the civil community in shaping the preferences of a person. The discrepancy between these two is evident in the fact that interventions aimed at promoting peace take up a cultural and ethical division between the post-colonial individual and the open-minded democratic individual of the West (Merlingen and Ostrauskaite, 2008). At the same time, the legal democratic custom presents an argument people can effectively resolve conflicts via logical negotiations and by engaging members of society. Based on this theory, there is a postulation the civil society in non-western countries is devoid of the logical or civil values present in western states (Chandler 2010, 383).
At this point, it becomes essential to realize that the major problem facing modern western moral foreign policy is not a result of the differences between individuals and communities. Instead, the most significant problem arises from the perception of people regarding these differences. In such cases, the linking of unwillingness, incapacity inferiority, or lacking to the difference makes the involvement of external forces feasible and framed in ethical discourse. Based on this finding, any chronicle of abnormality is part of any developmental projects, regardless of the nobility of its intent.
The categorical interpretation of the disparities results in a significant problem stemming from the fact that it effectively categorizes the global population into victims and saviors while exhibiting a homogenizing impact on the subject of moral agenda and those considered to be the most crucial drivers to its accomplishment. Western incidences and accomplishments effectively influence the homogenized moral agenda, resulting in the widespread mimicry of western practices in various parts of the world. Therefore, the incorporation of western countries on the agenda becomes essential (Dellepiane-Avellaneda, 2010). The consolidation of the western agenda gained consolidation over time, owing to the dynamic nature of western societies and the general perception of the elements that constitute a good life. Also, the consolidation further gained prominence due to the fact that the proposed agenda almost always fails to meet the requirements of the recipients, effectively failing to take root.
Modern moral foreign policy advocates for multiparty polling liberal democracy using variable levels of intimidation, which include recognition. Multiparty democracy is a western practice that has rapidly spread across the majority of the world. ( Bradley, 2005, 410) openly notes that African states have received directives from the west regarding the levels of democracy that the country has to practice to gain consideration as a democratic state. African democracy scholars indicate that advocating for multiparty liberal democracy amalgamates the necessity for the involvement of western actors in the process. Additionally, this practice has failed to bring true democracy to the African continent, as the style of democracy practiced in western countries does not fit the reality that exists in African states. Ake 2000) states that this type of democracy disempowers voters as it focuses on strengthening the rule of the governing political party rather than listening to the actual needs of the voters.
Conclusion
This piece has focused on two frameworks that are instrumental in helping wars reach conclusions, thus effectively resolving the conflict between the warring parties. The paper examined Weinstein’s autonomous recovery and the politics of difference. Although there are distinguishable differences between the two, it is evident that each set of principles bears significant advantages to the involved populations, depending on the viewpoints of different individuals.
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