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Transformative peace operations fall short of achieving the modern political order sought in post-conflict countries because the interventions themselves empower post-conflict elites intent on forging a neopatrimonial political order. The Peacebuilding Puzzle explains the disconnect between the formal institutional engineering undertaken by international interventions, and the governance outcomes that emerge in their aftermath. Barma's comparative analysis of interventions in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan focuses on the incentives motivating domestic elites over a sequence of three peacebuilding phases: the elite peace settlement, the transitional governance period, and the aftermath of intervention. The international community advances certain forms of institutional design at each phase in the pursuit of effective and legitimate governance. Yet, over the course of the peacebuilding pathway, powerful post-conflict elites co-opt the very processes and institutions intended to guarantee modern political order and dominate the practice of governance within those institutions to their own ends. This title is also available as Open Access

The Asia Pacific region is renowned for its natural resource abundance, from exhaustible petroleum and mineral reserves to renewable stores of timber, agriculture, and fisheries. It is a well-known paradox that, instead of serving as the blessing they would appear to be, these resources are often experienced as a political and economic curse.

Hun Sen, the longtime leader of Cambodia, has used almost every tool in the authoritarian playbook to consolidate his grip on power over the past three decades. Things came to a head early this month when one of Cambodia's two premier English-language newspapers, The Cambodia Daily, was forced closed after being blindsided by the government with a $6 billion tax bill that it couldn't possibly pay. Rendering an extraordinary confluence of dictatorial strategies, the newspaper's final issue on September 4, 2017, headlined with the news of the midnight arrest of the leader of the country's only real opposition party.

The document of record may be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316718513. ; Transformative peace operations fall short of achieving the modern political order sought in post-conflict countries because the interventions themselves empower post-conflict elites intent on forging a neopatrimonial political order. The Peacebuilding Puzzle explains the disconnect between the formal institutional engineering undertaken by international interventions, and the governance outcomes that emerge in their aftermath. Barma's comparative analysis of interventions in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan focuses on the incentives motivating domestic elites over a sequence of three peacebuilding phases: the elite peace settlement, the transitional governance period, and the aftermath of intervention. The international community advances certain forms of institutional design at each phase in the pursuit of effective and legitimate governance. Yet, over the course of the peacebuilding pathway, powerful post-conflict elites co-opt the very processes and institutions intended to guarantee modern political order and dominate the practice of governance within those institutions to their own ends.

The article of record may be found at http://blog.oup.com/authors/naazneen-h-barma/ ; Featured image credit: New Era Foreign Policy Project by Bridging the Gap.

Transformative peace operations fall short of achieving the modern political order sought in post-conflict countries because the interventions themselves empower post-conflict elites intent on forging a neopatrimonial political order. The Peacebuilding Puzzle explains the disconnect between the formal institutional engineering undertaken by international interventions, and the governance outcomes that emerge in their aftermath. Barma's comparative analysis of interventions in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan focuses on the incentives motivating domestic elites over a sequence of three peacebuilding phases: the elite peace settlement, the transitional governance period, and the aftermath of intervention.

AbstractCountries rich in natural resources do not all experience the resource curse in the same way. The rentier state logic holds that the main political–economic impacts of resource dependence rest on how the state handles windfall resource rents. I differentiate how countries experience the resource curse by disaggregating the rentier effect into how governments generate and distribute resource rents. A simple typology of variation in rentier state experiences explains how the overall credibility of intertemporal commitment and degree of political inclusiveness in a country determine its distinct experience of the resource curse. Four brief country cases—comparing the micro political economy of natural resource governance in Laos, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, and Timor‐Leste—illustrate how intertemporal credibility and political inclusiveness affect patterns of resource rent generation and rent distribution. Different countries experience the resource curse in different ways, with implications for policy attempts at mitigation.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/app5.26 ; Countries rich in natural resources do not all experience the resource curse in the same way. The rentier state logic holds that the main political–economic impacts of resource dependence rest on how the state handles windfall resource rents. I differentiate how countries experience the resource curse by disaggregating the rentier effect into how governments generate and distribute resource rents. A simple typology of variation in rentier state experiences explains how the overall credibility of intertemporal commitment and degree of political inclusiveness in a country determine its distinct experience of the resource curse. Four brief country cases—comparing the micro political economy of natural resource governance in Laos, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, and Timor-Leste—illustrate how intertemporal credibility and political inclusiveness affect patterns of resource rent generation and rent distribution. Different countries experience the resource curse in different ways, with implications for policy attempts at mitigation.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2012.703535 ; International peace-building interventions in post-conflict countries are intended to transform the socio-political context that led to violence and thereby build a stable and lasting peace. Yet the UN's transitional governance approach to peace-building is ill-suited to the challenge of dealing with the predatory political economy of insecurity that often emerges in post- conflict societies. Evidence from peace-building attempts in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan illustrates that the political economy incentives facing domestic elites in an environment of low credibility and weak institutionalization lead to a cycle of patronage generation and distribution that undermine legitimate and effective governance. As a result, postconflict countries are left vulnerable to renewed conflict and persistent insecurity. International interventions can only craft lasting peace by understanding the political economy of conflict persistence and the potential policy levers for altering, rather than perpetuating, those dynamics.

Contemporary political economy research suggests that whether a country falls prey to the resource curse depends on a number of structural and economic factors. The cumulative body of large-N analyses of resource-rich developing countries indicates that the quality of existing institutions is perhaps the key factor that mediates a resource-rich country's economic outcomes. Yet there is a gap in the political economy literature in terms of the subsequent causal reasoning about why institutions play this crucial intervening role in the resource curse. In this chapter, I examine the micropolitics of petroleum in Cambodia and East Timor through a framework rooted in the natural resource value chain to develop a sense of the mechanisms underpinning the resource curse in fragile nations. Postconflict states offer fertile ground for generating hypotheses about the causal interplay between fragile political institutions, limited state capacity, and resource riches as they impact economic outcomes.