Negotiating Someone Else's Peace Agreement: A Sisyphean Task? Open Access

In ancient Greek and Roman mythology, King Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to an eternity of hard labor, only to see his efforts undone time and again by his tormenter's curse. Perhaps more than many of us care to admit, the image of the condemned Sisyphus, futilely heaving his boulder up a mountainside, resonates with our own experiences trying to change the world around us. And yet, just as Sisyphus was condemned to toil for all eternity, so too do most of us keep right on pushing, even in the face of what might look like impossible odds.

The Sisyphean analogy resonates also for activists and international legal experts seeking to intervene in societies other than their own. Particularly in postconflict societies, establishing the rule of law often seems like an impossible goal, and yet an entire field has evolved whose members claim expertise on how to shepherd societies from the depths of violence toward a brighter, more prosperous, stable, and democratic future. Precise numbers are notoriously difficult to come by, but between 2008 and 2010, international development donors collectively spent, on average, more than four billion dollars annually in development aid to combat corruption in developing countries.¹ And yet a majority of respondents globally perceived that corruption had increased in their communities during this same time period (Riaño, Heinrich, and Hodess 2010). Thus, it seems entirely appropriate to question whether the enormous effort to rid other countries of their corrupt governance habits is worth the effort, and — if it is — what lessons we still need to learn about how to effectively facilitate such change.

In the world of international development, such introspective questioning can be risky. What some intend merely as constructive criticism can easily be used by skeptics to justify cutting development expenditures entirely, especially in times of recessionary budgets and austerity measures. Conversely, some development practitioners become so consumed by the noble narrative of their profession that they fail to recognize that even a virtuous enterprise must learn from its own experience. Thomas Carothers, himself a noted expert on democracy promotion, has remarked that “[m]issionary zeal pervades the field, bringing with it a disinclination for self‐doubt and reflexive belief in the value of the enterprise” (Carothers 1999: 8). Nonetheless, it is important that such critical analyses be made, and not only by those skeptical of the development enterprise but also — and especially so — by those who still believe in the value of international solidarity.

Bertram Spector's book Negotiating Peace and Confronting Corruption makes a valuable contribution toward that end, although not, ironically, in the way the author had intended. The book mixes quantitative and qualitative methods to draw conclusions about the effects of so‐called integrity provisions in reducing corruption after violent conflict. These provisions are clauses or institutional design road maps negotiated as part of a peace agreement that “aspire to make public officials accountable for their actions, enforce the rule of law, make it more difficult for authorities to abuse the public, and ensure that government operates on a level playing field for all” (p. 3).

Spector highlights the experiences of six postconflict countries that wrote such integrity provisions into peace agreements negotiated between 1992 and 2003. Examples of such integrity provisions include, for example, the creation of an electoral reform commission as part of the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Agreement (see Annex 2, p. 151), or the enumeration of good governance principles in the 2000 Arusha Agreement (Burundi — Annex 2, p. 158). Spector offers advice to stakeholders and mediators on how to structure peace agreements to include effective integrity provisions, and also advises development practitioners on how to promptly support the implementation of such measures once the ink on the peace treaty has dried.² Spector's analyses provide a welcome, albeit still cursory, contextualization of his discussions of each country's efforts to curtail corruption and the international community's commitment to support those reforms.

Spector compares his six cases with those of seven other postconflict societies that ended their internal conflicts between 1988 and 1997, but did so without inserting any significant integrity provisions into their peace agreements. According to the book, this comparison demonstrates “that post‐conflict countries that included integrity provisions in their peace agreements generally fared better in the medium term” (p. 104).

The author bases this conclusion on four separate indicators. The first indicator compares the two groups of countries based on how much development assistance each country received immediately following the peace agreement. He reports that those countries that incorporated integrity provisions into their peace agreements received more significant increases in development funding than did their counterparts without such integrity provisions. The book does not, however, make explicit why we should accept this indicator alone as a sign of underlying good governance credentials. This assumption seems to be that international donors prefer to lend their development dollars to well‐run governments, but history tells us that many more factors play into these decisions; some that may have little to do with the underlying governance fundamentals of a recipient country.

In fact, a comparison between Spector's first two indicia underscores that point. As a second indicator of the success of integrity provisions in reducing corruption, the author compares the two sets of postconflict countries based on changes in their ratings on the World Bank's control of corruption index. In comparing the two data sets, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the two indicia are not always correlated. Nicaragua (which did not include an integrity provision in its 1988 peace accord) is one example: Spector reports that it experienced a 14.4 percent drop in its control of corruption index score — indicating a drop in the country's ability to control corruption — during the same period that it enjoyed a 29 percent increase in development funds. Croatia, on the other hand, saw its control of corruption index score rise by 11.6 percent in the five years following its peace agreement (similarly signed without integrity provisions), but saw a corresponding 4.0 percent decline in development assistance. (The same inverse relationship between development assistance flows and changes in a country's ability to control corruption is true also for two of the six countries that did include integrity provisions in their peace accords, El Salvador and Papua New Guinea). Thus, the notion that the international community's willingness to provide development assistance to a postconflict country should be seen as a measure of that country's good governance credentials clearly needs further study to withstand critique.

The book's discussion of the relationship between the inclusion of integrity provisions into a peace agreement and that country's later ability to control corruption also merits some concern. Both indicators rely on the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, which measure a number of governance standards across 213 different global economies. But the World Bank's control of corruption index goes back only as far as 1996.³ This means that for all but one of the control‐group countries as well as for one of the integrity‐provision countries — all of whom signed their peace accords prior to 1996 — this indicator would not appear to be a valid gauge of success or failure during the five years following the signing of each country's peace accord. If the author was able to find the comparable data elsewhere, there is no citation in the book indicating that. Furthermore, even when the data are available, the margins of error for these indicators are extremely broad, given that each country figure relies on disparate sources of information that make cross‐country comparisons an imperfect science at best.

As for Spector's third indicator of success, whether or not the country managed to achieve economic growth, the author himself asserts that the differences between those countries with integrity provisions and those without are “very small” (p. 102). Thus, one walks away from the book's quantitative analysis wondering whether it adds clarity to Spector's argument about the impact of negotiated integrity provisions.

Rather than quibble over whether Spector's data and analysis effectively prove his hypotheses, however, I will instead focus on the more fundamental question this book raises — one having to do with the proper role of outsiders in helping to bring change to other societies. In discussing Sierra Leone, for example, Spector discusses why “reforms stagnated many years into the peace implementation process,” noting that “the government's commitment and capacity to address difficult governance and institutional reforms envisioned by the peace agreement was questionable,” and that instead it was “international consultants who tended to be the prime movers in implementing reforms, signaling an absence of local political will” (p. 56). Similarly, in discussing Guatemala, the author explains how “. . . it is important for the implementation [of peace agreements] to happen quickly, . . . because international actors and donors, as well as domestic factions, have limited attention spans” (p. 48),⁴ and that the failures in Guatemala's anticorruption efforts could be attributed to the postconflict government's insistence on using “traditional democratic approaches of inclusion and discussion, which turned out to be ineffective in a context that required quick and dramatic, not evolutionary, change” (p. 48). Finally, Spector reminds negotiators that they should be wary of “restoring pre‐conflict traditional authority in local governance, as this may not necessarily lead to good governance practices or legitimacy” (p. 128).

Reading Spector's analysis, one might be forgiven for buying into the flawed narrative of the unfortunate international rule of law expert who faces impossible odds while working against local actors who subscribe to less progressive notions of governance. Or, to quote Binyavanga Wainaina's biting satire of how many human rights and rule of law narratives are framed, “[t]he modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good‐hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas” (Wainaina 2005: 93).

Wainaina was writing intentional satire, but I fear I hear a similar tone throughout this analysis. The book is clearly pitched to an audience of international development consultants and technocrats. It is their concerns — and local stakeholders' resistance to them and their agenda — that predominate. This is unsurprising, given the author's background as someone who spent numerous years working as just such an international consultant with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank, among others.

But absent from that analysis is nuanced discussion of the legitimate interests that motivate other stakeholders in this picture, including those who oppose governance reform efforts. The underlying structure of this argument is one that critical legal scholars sometimes refer to as the “Savages, Victims, and Saviors” (SVS) metaphor. According to this metaphor, human rights practitioners often implicitly think of a typical human rights problem in terms of a struggle between three categories of actors: the “savages,” the local stakeholders who — for whatever selfish or unreasonable motives —wa Mutua 2001).

To be clear, I refer to the SVS metaphor not to promote its use as a meaningful, ethical, or even empirically sound construct, but rather to highlight how it often subtly bleeds into writing about international development and human rights. While descriptions of development projects built around the SVS metaphor tend to resonate with international development consultants in the global North — who view their agenda as noble, just, and empirically grounded — third world commentators and many development practitioners tend to be highly skeptical of arguments built around this framework. The problem is that the SVS metaphor implies a postcolonial role allocation between outside interveners and local authorities that systematically undermines the agency, nobility, and self‐determination of local stakeholders.

In truth, some of these defensive reactions to the agendas of outside interveners come from the perpetrators of injustice themselves, who feel “called out” on their illegitimate behavior and resort to this method of counterattack. Most human rights activists would presumably ignore such protestations. After all, the human rights enterprise is built around the belief in universal principles of justice that its advocates deem worthy of defending, regardless of whether their arguments persuade perpetrators.

Other commentators, however, use the SVS metaphor as a constructively critical reminder to outsider interveners to retain their humility and recognize that any change process requires local buy‐in. This is an especially important lesson for human rights advocates, who ultimately stand to lose the most if their narrative of righteousness, justice, and rule of law loses resonance with its intended audience. In light of this, authors should be careful to not portray the outside interveners as the sole purveyors of peace, progress, and prosperity in postconflict situations, lest they open themselves up to precisely the kinds of neocolonialist critiques Makau wa Mutua and others frequently make of international rule of law consultants.

Of course, pointing this out at a theoretical level is different from illustrating what such a broadened analysis might look like in real life. This is why Spector's book, despite its shortcomings, nonetheless offers a rich starting point for discussions. My concern that the book's analysis bears an uncomfortable, if not intended, resemblance to an SVS frame should not be taken as a dismissal of what Spector has to say. From the limited perspective of an outside intervener, much of his recommendations seem sound and are presumably based on years of his and others' experience promoting anticorruption reform efforts worldwide. What it is missing, however, is a sophisticated analysis of the other parts of the puzzle. It is one thing, for example, for an international consultant to advocate for the inclusion of integrity provisions, but what local stakeholders think about that issue may be an entirely different matter. Thinking carefully about those perspectives may not only do justice to the other stakeholders involved in any postconflict transition process, but may also improve the ability of the outside intervener to interact meaningfully and collaboratively with those local actors.

The book's case studies, for example, could ground a conversation about the interplay between local and outside interests in postconflict transitions that might otherwise remain overly theoretical. Such analysis would require additional research, but it could supplement this book's existing analysis by describing the complex ways in which international development consultants struggle to build local constituencies in support of a good governance reform agenda.

Spector provides us with ample starting points for such research. When he suggests in his advice to negotiation practitioners, for example, that “[t]he best situation after agreement is to have a strong, but nonviolent, political opposition that can continue to demand implementation of the negotiated provisions” (p. 120), the reader is left wondering how to bring about such a situation. Is it the responsibility of the outsider to insist that the domestic political opposition take this shape? Presumably not, or not realistically so. If not, however, the reader might be left questioning what — if anything — one can glean from this recommendation. How do strong but nonviolent opposition parties emerge, and what — if anything — can be done to help bring about such a situation as opposed to the more violent or less effective alternatives? Similar questions could be asked throughout the book, and additional case study research could provide some tentative answers.

One possible contribution to this discussion, and the reason why the book's title holds so much promise, could be a negotiation–theoretical analysis of the process by which traditions of good governance get put in place. As I noted previously, the author focuses his analysis on intervention by outside actors. Another way to look at the issue, however, would be to focus more on underlying stakeholder interests, including, of course, those of the international consultants. Far too often, development practitioners are too hopelessly deluded by the self‐affirming simplicity of the SVS metaphor to recognize that ultimately not even the most brilliantly structured and well‐funded development project will succeed in changing local governance practices until — broadly speaking — local stakeholders believe it is in their interests to support such change.

Spector touches on this issue in the book, noting that “some analysts even view the potential development of . . . a corrupt state as a welcome and temporarily stabilizing occurrence in the state‐building process” because it can “keep essential services flowing and help business people overcome cumbersome regulations, promoting economic activity under tenuous circumstances,” or even “bring together formally opposed groups into durable multiethnic coalitions that reduce the possibility of violence.”

Instead of summarily discounting such arguments, it is worth thinking about why corruption occurs with such regularity in a postconflict environment. If the answer is that certain key stakeholder groups can better serve their interests by resorting to corruption, a subsequent question might be why the presumed alternatives to corruption — transparency and the rule of law — apparently fail to satisfy those interests with such regularity. Getting some answers to these questions might provide some additional useful guidance to development practitioners on how to target their advice and financing priorities to more effectively combat corruption in postconflict societies.