Symposium on Democracy

This conference brings together experts on the topics of peace making, peacekeeping and peace building to explore the methods and goals pursued by states and the international community to help end violence within and between states, and to prevent such violence from occurring again.

Paul Diehl (University of Illinois) "Patterns in International Peacekeeping".

Peacekeeping is a relatively new phenomenon in international relations, but it has nevertheless changed dramatically over its short existence. This paper traces the origins of peacekeeping from the League of Nations to the present. Peacekeeping “epochs” are identified and the characteristics of those periods are presented. Data analysis in the forma of descriptive statistics is presented for post-1945 operations along the following dimensions of peacekeeping missions: (1) number, (2) type, (3) location of deployment, (4) size, and other relevant characteristics. Emphasis is placed on temporal changes and their underlying causes.

Professors Michael Greig and Andrew Enterline (University of North Texas) "Engineering Stability? Externally Imposed Polities and Political Stability, 1800-1994?"

One policy claim emerging from the current coalition occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the cultivation of democacy therein, is that democratic institutions are capable of channelling the demands of domestic political groups through peaceful conflict resolution mechanisms, thereby translating into stable political sytems. How well is this line of reasoning supported during the modern state system? Here, we explore the conditions that influence the stability of externally imposed polities for the 1800-1994 period, including, for example, the conditions under which a polity is imposed, the degree to which an imposed polity is democratic, the political culture of the nation-state experiencing the imposition, interstate occupations, economic growth, interstate alliances, and the degree of ethnic divisions. We operationalize political stability as the incidence of severe domestic conflict behavior, such as civil war. Ultimately, our analysis furnishes a generalized test of contemporary policy claims.

Prof. James Gibson (Washington University, St. Louis), "Can Truth Reconcile Divided Nations".

Throughout the world, truth commissions have been (and are being) constructed under the hope that discovering the "truth" about a country’s conflictual past will somehow contribute to "reconciliation." Most such efforts point to South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process as an exemplar of the powerful influence of truth finding. But has truth actually contributed to reconciliation in South Africa? Until recently, no one could answer this question since no rigorous and systematic assessment of the success of the truth and reconciliation process had ever been conducted. The objective of this paper is to identify the characteristics of the truth and reconciliation process that contributed to its performance. Three factors are singled out as being critical to the success of the South African endeavor: (1) that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) defined it objective as creating broad social change; (2) that "story-telling" hearings rather than formal trials were adopted as the primary means of ascertaining "truth;" and (3) that the TRC acted with considerable independence and evenhandedness in its efforts to discover "truth" and enhance "reconciliation."

Prof. Mark Mullenbach (University of Central Arkansas ) "Does State-Building Work? An Analysis of Post-Conflict Peace-Building in Intrastate Disputes, 1945-2000".

Since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, third party actors have frequently intervened during post-conflict phases of intrastate disputes in order to enhance the prospects that the disputes do not re-escalate to military hostilities and to enhance the prospects that the disputes are peacefully resolved through negotiations between the parties. As a result of these interventions, policymakers and scholars have debated whether third party peace-building (or “state-building”) efforts – including providing electoral assistance, re-establishing the rule of law, providing for displaced persons and administering territory - have generally been effective or ineffective in managing and resolving intrastate disputes. Hypotheses regarding both short-term and long-term effectiveness of third party peace-building interventions are derived from the theoretical and empirical literature on third party interventions in intrastate disputes in general, and post-conflict peace-building in particular. Hypotheses are tested using data on all intrastate conflicts in the post-World War II period.

Prof. Mark Pecency (University of New Mexico) "Can Liberal Interventionism Build Liberal Democracy?

This paper examines the military interventions undertaken by the US, UK, France, and the UN in the post-World War II era to see if they had a positive impact on democracy in target countries. Empirical analysis centers on multivariate time series, cross section OLS and logistic regressions of democratization and democracy from 1946 to 1996. The former is operationalized in several different ways as a continuous variable using the Polity IV data collection. The latter is a binary variable differentiating democracies from non-democracies. An updated version of the International Military Intervention data set (Pearson and Baumann 1993) enumerates foreign military interventions. Our findings demonstrate that target states are more likely to democratize and to develop stable forms of democratic governance in the wake of interventions by the US and the UN than after interventions by the British, the French, and other actors. At times, the prospects of democracy are advanced by the intervention of outside military forces, particularly those dispatched by Washington or by the UN Security Council.

Discussion among conference participants: Saturday, January 15 2:00 in Wooten 130