Louis-Alexandre Berg’s Governing Security after War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector provides an interesting take on an old question: Under what conditions can external actors (EAs) such as the United Nations or the United States help states coming out of a civil war establish a measure of order and stability at its conclusion? Berg’s dependent variable is relatively understudied: it is neither whether civil strife or war reappears nor whether the state can establish liberal democracy within. Instead, it is the degree of “security governance” that emerges within the state, measured essentially by the level of institutionalization of policed order and the degree to which a government’s police force is held accountable for its actions and its ability to sustain order.
Berg explores three in-depth post–Cold War case studies: Liberia from 2003 to 2010, Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1995 to 2007, and the island nation of Timor-Leste from 2000 to 2010. He argues, and shows through evidence largely gathered on the ground, that the aid and support provided by EAs are likely to be effective in creating strong security governance only when two conditions are met: the government in power in such post–civil-war states is suffering both from the threat of fragmentation (the loss of internal cohesion caused by competing social groups) and the lack of resources/money needed to build a strong centralized coalition.
Berg’s reasoning, although at times difficult to follow, is essentially this. Government leaders who take control in the wake of a civil war will seek to protect their factions and allies and, of course, stay in power. Hence, if they have sufficiently consolidated power and have the resources/money to keep paying their factions and allies, they will ignore efforts by EAs to restructure the state—efforts that invariably require that they share power and give competing groups a substantial say in the makeup of the police forces, those forces tasked with keeping the peace. It is only when a government in the early postwar stage lacks both centralized power and resources that it will feel vulnerable enough to accept the advice of the EAs as the price needed to obtain the financial support and foreign troops/police required to secure the order.
In the case of Timor-Leste, for example, in the initial period of 2000–5, the government worried about growing fragmentation between factions and lacked the money to build a strong coalition, so it accepted both UN aid and soldiers. But once oil revenues started to come into the state coffers, the government felt it no longer needed the UN and that any further concessions to demands for restructuring would weaken its hold on power. The Liberian and Bosnian cases, as well as a more general large-N test, similarly show that only under rare conditions are the desired ends of the EAs realized and any positive results are more than temporary.
The strengths of the book lie primarily in its contribution to the growing literature on how peace can be maintained in war-torn states and for how long. Berg nicely shows that it is not enough simply to have outside third parties intervene to overcome commitment problems and mistrust between the warring factions (see Barbara Walter’s seminal book, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars, 2002). Instead, external actors must be very attentive to the political interests of new governments and the trade-offs those governments see in accepting their aid and advice. After all, EAs have their own agendas, based on their visions of “what will keep the peace” and establishing a measure of political and economic justice. These agendas will likely conflict with those of governments whose primary interests are to protect the wealth, property, and lives of government elites and faction members, and not simply to reduce the probability of a renewed civil war.
There are three areas, however, that are underdeveloped in the book. The first is the question of endogeneity. One of the book’s two core independent variables is the level of factionalization (fragmentation) within a state. Yet Berg acknowledges that the aid efforts of EAs can directly affect this level—sometimes causing it to go down and thus giving governments over time less reason to listen to the EA’s advice, and sometime causing it to rise, making governments question the continued value of the EA itself. The former was especially true of the Bosnia-Herzegovina case. By claiming that such endogeneity was “unintended” (p. 149), Berg may be able to suggest that, at least at the start, his independent variable of factionalization was working as expected (as a structural factor conditioning the way security governance would play itself out). Yet, smart officials within an EA will likely anticipate the effects of their agency’s help on the internal dynamics of the state and indeed sometimes tailor their efforts to create more cohesion (less fragmentation) precisely to stabilize the state to either “keep the mission short” or to serve the interests of the main donors within the EA. The significant involvement of the United States, for example, in the stabilization of Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1995 cannot be separated from Washington’s desire to stabilize Central Europe and extend NATO into the region to counter a potentially resurgent Russia. However, the larger geopolitical aspects of EA involvement are not discussed in the book.
The second aspect that future work must address is the way Berg’s variables play different roles depending on the type of civil conflict a state has been going through and might expect in the future. Berg’s cases involve heterogenous states divided by warring ethnic groups. He ignores civil wars in relatively homogeneous ethnic states where historic conflict has been largely centered on class struggle and competitions for larger slices of the economic pie. Here we might expect, for example, governments after a civil war to seek EA help in rebuilding the export-led economy and to ensure that economic elites continue to control (or repress) the parties that express class interests. This role, of course, was especially important during the Cold War, when the Americans and Soviets played the primary roles of EAs for many war-torn countries of the Global South. Although all of Berg’s cases focus on periods after the Cold War, this does not mean he should ignore the often powerful political-economic drivers of factionalization, or indeed of coalition-building between the middle and upper classes to prevent future upheaval by working-class and peasant-based parties. Comparative politics has been traditionally dominated by arguments about modernization and class conflict as variables driving levels of internal conflict and authoritarianism. A fruitful area for future research would therefore bring some of this literature to bear on the questions of security governance that Berg explores.
Finally, although Governing Security after War provides a useful first cut at the role of resources as a variable shaping the willingness of governments to resist the advice of EAs, future research must explore how different types of resources affect a government’s ability to push back against EAs seeking to shape states’ postwar security governance. Berg effectively shows how Timor-Leste’s exporting of oil after 2004 reduced the relative impact of UN agencies on the country’s internal institutions. Yet, oil is a distinct type of commodity; its generally high price since 2000 has allowed many authoritarian governments to resist outside pressures to reform or change their policies. The exporting of agricultural products that many states in the Global South rely on to grow their GDPs leaves their governments with comparatively much lower financial independence and leverage. By Berg’s logic, they should be more accommodating to EAs trying to help them reduce the chances of future civil strife. In short, Berg’s book not only gets us thinking about these and other such questions but it also opens up crucial research questions for further investigation.
