Introduction: Authority Building in International Administered Territories

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special section on “Authority Building in International Administered Territories” begins by summarizing the relevant literature on international administrations. To conceptualize authority building as an ongoing process in which international and local actors confirm – or refuse – authority claims, secondly, two types of authority are differentiated: ‘interpretative authority’ and ‘performing authority’. This sociological conceptualization of authority building allows, thirdly, a discussion on the restrictions and challenges that international administrations face in their attempts to establish authority on the ground. Finally, an overview of the section’s articles is provided.

KEYWORDS:

• authority
• interpretation
• international administration
• power
• statebuilding
• UN missions

In the literature on international statebuilding in general, and on international neo-trusteeships in particular, the building of legitimate political authority is considered crucial for the success of international statebuilding efforts. The underlying assumption for this seems to be that the newly established institutions founded by them need to be perceived as legitimate by a local population in order to exercise authority without being actively or passively contested. Most studies attempting to explain the success or failure of international statebuilding, therefore, focus on the input- and/or output-legitimacy of interventions (e.g. Call and Wyeth 2008; Fortna 2008; Zuercher 2006; for an overview see von Billerbeck and Gippert 2017). However, there is a general absence of studies on the empirical process of authority building in the literature on international statebuilding. For a long time, authority was conceptualized as a pure outcome of legitimacy. Only recently, in the context of the ‘local turn’ in the statebuilding and peacebuilding literature, has the question come up of how international actors empirically create authority in institutions and vis-à-vis domestic political actors (Distler 2016; Leonardsson and Rudd 2015). The limited interest in the empirical process of authority building might be due to a particular formal-legalistic understanding of authority in the statebuilding literature. Here, authority is defined – first and foremost – as the right and ability to command or govern, especially in postwar countries like Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Cambodia, where international actors are temporarily in charge of administrating them.

Focusing on international administrations, this special section adopts a more sociological understanding of authority building in order to contribute to the literature on international statebuilding. To do this, authority building is suggested as a theoretical framework for understanding the politics of statebuilding operations on the ground. A concept of authority that goes beyond a formal approach is introduced – one in which authority building is firstly an ongoing, dynamic process in international statebuilding instead of a given command structure, and secondly a process wherein social relations between different – international, domestic and local – actors are created and constantly transformed practices of claiming and recognizing authority. Hence, in processes of authority building, international and local actors mutually constitute, but also to a certain degree delimit their authority.

However, differentiation between local and international actors – which has become extremely popular in the statebuilding literature – should not be understood as referring to static or primordial identities, but rather in terms of ‘de facto cross neat categories’ (Kappler 2015, 876) that are not necessarily linked to a spatial arena or part of a bounded territory (Debiel and Rinck 2016, 242). In contrast, they indicate different but correlated subject positions within the universe of statebuilding actors. Furthermore, empirical actors change sides, e.g. they may be perceived by the population or other actors as international, or as internationalized. For instance, in Kosovo, the nationalist opposition party and movement Vetevendosje! criticized the government for being a part of the international statebuilding effort, branding them as traitors to national interest.

Thus, authority is neither fixed nor externally imposed on a local population; rather it is flexible, negotiable and relies on reversible practices of mutual recognition because authority manifests itself in an ‘authoritative relation’ between the actor who claims authority and those who confirm the authority of the first (Friedman 1990, 68). As such, the key questions for an empirical analysis of authority building are as follows. How do international actors communicate that they are not only in authority but an authority (Friedman 1990, 80)? How do they deal with local authority claims and challenges to their authority? And, to what extent is the ability to temporarily but effectively rule a country linked to authority building?

In the following, firstly the relevant literature on international administrations is summarized for this special section. Secondly, a more sociological conceptualization of authority building is introduced. This allows, thirdly, a discussion of the restrictions and challenges that international administrations face in their attempts to establish authority on the ground. Finally, an overview of the section’s articles is provided. Each article deals with different authority-building practices and thereby analyses processes of authority building. The case studies cover more recent United Nations (UN) international administrations including Kosovo, Cambodia and Timor-Leste, as well as those under the League of Nations administrations such as the Saar Territory and the Free City of Danzig.

Statebuilding by international administration

International statebuilding is concerned with establishing legitimate state institutions to create a pathway for durable peace. In Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and Haiti, international actors have conducted very extensive statebuilding operations by interfering deeply with state sovereignty. In some cases, the UN took over temporary control of the entire territory, acting as the ruling body in ‘protectorate-style arrangements’ (Schneckener 2007). These very extensive and comprehensive forms of international statebuilding are focused on herein because they illustrate the need for creating and establishing authority in an obvious way, and are useful for exploring the complex social and political process of authority building.

This comprehensive form of external statebuilding has been formally applied six times to date: in Namibia by the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG, 1989–1990), in Cambodia by the United Nations Transitional Administration of Cambodia (UNTAC, 1992–1993), in Eastern Slavonia by the United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES, 1996–1998), in Kosovo by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK, since 1999) and in Timor-Leste by the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET, 1999–2002). Furthermore, based on its extensive mandate, the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH, 1995–2002) can be added as an additional case of international administration. Recently, calls for this type of international administration (in cases of statebuilding) have increased, most notably regarding Afghanistan and Iraq. Some scholars refer to international administrations as protectorates or neo-trusteeships in order to emphasize the continuity from decolonization administrations aimed to decolonize territories to the UN administration of post-conflict societies (Wilde 2008), while others see them as another form of a, more or less, imperial policy towards the Global South (Charbonneau 2014). Yet, a key difference between colonial administrations and the ‘new protectorates’ (Mayall and de Oliveira 2011) is that the people in these new protectorates are not considered, as in the tradition of imperial trusteeship, as ‘members of a primitive society, devoid of reason and child-like in habit and development, who must be coerced for their own good until they understand and are able to realize the conditions of their own happiness’ (Bain 2003, 149). Therefore, while international administrations are not legitimized by the consent of the governed, they derive their justification from the concept of a democratic and stable state as a necessary condition for sustainable peace.

Since this form of external statebuilding stands in spectacular contrast to the international principle of sovereignty and suggests an analogy to the practices of colonial administrations, it has become the object of numerous studies over the past fifteen years. Following the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations – published in 2000 under the responsibility of Lakhdar Brahimi, who evaluated the UN peace missions carried out up until that time – a debate has ensued regarding the legitimate extent of international responsibility (United Nations 2000). Simon Chesterman sums up the core issue of this debate by asking: ‘Is it possible to establish the conditions for legitimate and sustainable national governance – to make a state “work” – through a period of benevolent foreign autocracy under UN auspices?’ (Chesterman 2004, 339). On the one hand, such protectorates were presented as more appropriate measures for the reconstruction of states than are peace missions, especially because the reconstruction of a state is not subject to trade-offs with delegitimized war actors (Krasner 2004). On the other hand, most commentators have voiced serious scepticism about an approach that sees a state being governed by international administrators, even if only for a short amount of time. Chesterman (2004) attributes this scepticism to the contradiction between the aims of an international administration, specifically the (re)construction of democratic statehood, and the means it uses to achieve these.

Until recently, empirical evidence seemed to confirm that strong engagement from international actors leads to more success in statebuilding (Chesterman 2004; Doyle and Sambanis 2006). This has in turn led to the widespread belief that statebuilding interventions in general – and international administrations of war-torn societies in particular – establish a central, top-down authority in order to facilitate institution building or to govern the country during a limited period. In a way, this picture of international administrations as ‘Bob the builder’ (Bliesemann de Guevara 2012, 1) is shared by both the advocates for comprehensive international statebuilding and the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding and international administrations (Richmond and Franks 2009). For example, Jarat Chopra, former member of UNTAET, has criticized the mission as establishing a ‘UN kingdom in East-Timor’ (Chopra 2000: 27). In comparing the international statebuilding efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina with other statebuilding missions, Richard Caplan has stressed the disproportionate power of the former, an argument applicable to the cases of Kosovo and Timor-Leste:

Never have peacekeeping operations had the authority to make and enforce local laws, exercise total fiscal management of a territory, appoint and remove officials, create a central bank, establish and maintain customs services, regulate local media, adjudicate rival property claims, run schools, regulate local business, and reconstruct and operate all public utilities, amongst numerous other functions. (Caplan 2005, 2)

Challenging the view of international statebuilding as a top-down process are a number of studies which focus on the local embeddedness of statebuilding. The most prominent of these can be found in a 2013 special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, wherein several authors discuss the everyday legitimacy of statebuilding and advocate for a shift in focus from the agenda of liberal peacebuilding to ‘a literature proposing a more nuanced examination of the extent to which peacebuilding needs to be legitimate in the eyes of those who proffer the process as well as those who experience its edict’ (Roberts 2013, 6).

At the same time, a number of studies have shown that interventions establish social relations and special kinds of interactions between those intervening, the state political elite and the local population on the ground (Pouligny 2006; Schlichte and Veit 2007). This can also include any local resistance to international interventions (Kappler and Richmond 2011). In some cases, this could also be seen as a reversal of dependency: due to a lack of knowledge, international peacekeepers rely heavily on the cooperation of their local staff. Barnett and Zürcher’s (2009) seminal article demonstrates that local groups sometimes use negotiations of the ‘peacebuilder’s contract’ to gain legitimacy and resources for their own agenda, which may differ significantly from international expectations.

In line with the above, Andersen (2012) calls for the black box of statebuilding to be opened: ‘Overall, the existing IR literature on statebuilding is characterized by a tendency to exaggerate the power of external actors to do good (and bad)’ (Andersen 2012, 126). Researchers have tended to focus on mandates, policy documents, resources and coordination problems both to infer how statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions operate and to measure their impact on a particular country (Paris 2004; Barnett 2006; Chandler 2006; Doyle and Sambanis 2006; Page Fortna 2004). In doing so, they tend to treat the implementation level of statebuilding as a black box. Limited knowledge exists on how participants in interventions interpret situations, assess alternative courses of action, adjudicate between conflicting objectives, and make decisions (Sending 2010). It is against this background that this special section aims to contribute to the opening of the black box by focusing on the processes and practices of authority building in cases of internationally administered territories.

Authority relations

At the moment, most of the conceptualizes authority in formal-legalistic terms as the right and the capacity to command or to govern. Hence, authority is understood from the ruler’s point of view. For instance, in the context of global governance, scholars have argued that international and transnational institutions have established a certain degree of authority that results in policies beyond the control of any single state. In contrast to this, the sociological notion of authority emerged from Weber’s (1921) classical differentiation between authority and legitimacy, arguing that the former depends on a socially constructed belief in the legitimacy to rule. Capturing this, Hurd argues that authority can be seen as a particular relation of power if it is ‘(1) a relation between subordinate and superior, that is (2) recognized by both as (3) legitimate’ (Hurd 2008, 24–5). Authority can thus be defined as the mutual recognition of an asymmetric social relation of power as legitimate.

However, to emphasize the asymmetry and hierarchy of legitimate relations of power alone reduces the study of authority to a more or less fixed structure that determines the role of actors. The importance of agency, therefore, has to be taken into account when examining the dynamics of authority building to counter this. In order to explore how authority emerges in statebuilding, both in and as a social relation, a conceptualization of authority building as an ongoing process in which actors confirm – or refuse – authority claims is proposed. Claims are embedded in social structures and institutions, and are negotiable by the particular actors on the ground, e.g. between the international administration and political parties, former conflict actors and/or local authorities.

Capturing the notion of authority which Hurd (2008) has introduced, authority can be defined as a particular type of dynamic power relation constituted by both practices of claiming authority and practices of recognition that confirm these claims. Such claims are raised by international actors by referring to their mandate, generally provided by UN Security Council resolutions. These are then interpreted by the leading institutions of the missions, e.g. the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG). Part of this claim is the degree of authority that the administration intends to exercise. In contrast, in their own authority claims, local actors often refer to their former political roles, to their moral integrity and to their capacity to speak on behalf of a constituency. To take the case of Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, acting SRSG during UNMIK’s initial set-up, was provided extensive jurisdiction by the first regulations implemented by UNMIK. Later, in his authority claims, he constantly referred to that regulation (see Lemay-Hébert, 2017). At the same time, local actors like the Kosovo-Albanian Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) instead tried to exploit their roles in opposing Serbian domination, whether with violent means in the case of the latter or as part of non-violent resistance in the case of the former (see Distler, 2017).

The question then is whether or not, and by whom, authority claims are recognized. In this regard, it becomes clear that international and local actors can be interdependent and mutually reinforce each other’s authority. This was, at least, the idea guiding the policies of UNTAC when they installed Norodom Sihanouk, the former king, as the head of the Supreme National Council (SNC), which was composed of representatives of the civil war’s factions. Although UNTAC’s legitimacy benefited from Sihanouk’s authority, the international recognition gave Sihanouk the opportunity to raise and strengthen his authority claims (see Travouillon, 2017). The Cambodian case is also an example of violent resistance to international authority, as the Khmer Rouge – after they had withdrawn from the peace process – rejected UNTAC’s claims and continued the civil war.

On the other hand, international actors can seek to deny the authority claims of local actors, who often reinforce nationalism and particularism. The clearest example of this is in Kosovo and Bosnia–Herzegovina, where the international administrations actively tried to devaluate the authority claims of different local ethnocentric actors (see Zaum, 2017).

Both practices of authority building – claiming authority and recognizing the claims of others – are linked to what Zürn (2015) has recently described as types of public authority, that is the authority to interpret and the authority to decide. The first type can be defined as interpretative authority. In this case, claims to authority and recognition thereof refer to an interpretation of the collective identity and political community, but first and foremost of the country’s political future. While international actors usually engage in a discourse that draws on universal values, local actors often mobilize a variety of different and particular sources to appeal to collectively shared ideas.

The second type of authority is linked to the essence of the political, e.g. collective decision-making. Claiming and recognizing authority here refers to capacities in making collective, binding decisions, and further to the right to govern the country. In contrast to the first type, this second type can be defined as performing authority. International administrations are in charge of making binding decisions, but they also appoint actors and create institutions for decision-making. Within these institutions, but also in opposition to them, local actors themselves can claim authority, as the Timorese did when they criticized how UNTAET selected and limited the members and the authority of the National Consultative Council in 1999. Both types are crucial in statebuilding processes – whether or not internationally supervised – as legitimate government depends largely on both recognition as legitimately representing the people and being able to make and enforce decisions (Table 1).

Table 1. Types of authority in international statebuilding.

	Claiming authority	Recognizing authority
Interpretative authority	Claim authority to interpret, e.g. using symbolic references (mandates, historical narratives, charismatic figures)	Recognizing actors as authority of interpretation
Performing authority	Claiming authority to partake in decision-making	Recognizing actors as responsible for decision-making

The two practices of authority building conducted by statebuilding actors in order to establish their authority on the ground and vis-à-vis other respective actors – claiming/justifying and recognizing – constitute social relations of power with regard to two different types of authority: the authority to interpret and the authority to decide.

This typology of authority-building practices aims to guide a more empirical analysis of authority relations in the context of international statebuilding. Whereas a formal-legalistic understanding of authority takes for granted the authority of international administration based on their mandates, the empirical study of authority building seeks to look at if and how external authority claims – given with the mandates – are recognized as legitimate social relations of power on the ground (e.g. Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2010).

Building the authority of international administrations

The articles in this special section deal, in particular, with the politics of authority building of international administrations as a distinct type of actor in international statebuilding. Against the background of the current sociological understanding of authority as a social relation of power, it is crucial to analyse how international administrations claim authority for themselves, via whom, for what reasons, and based on what expertise. Claims of authority may be imposed on local as well as external actors or organizations, each of which require their own correspondingly different reasons to justify the superiority of the international administration. Given this, an international administration such as in Kosovo often faces the problem that the recognition of their authority claim rests on a group whose recognition by other groups can barely be achieved. Nevertheless, it has been beneficial for the authority of the international administration in Kosovo that the SRSG could, to some degree, act independently of the UN. On the other hand, the lack of independence, in particular, was a big problem for the international administration put in place in the Saarland in the first half of the twentieth century; the governing commission was under a strong French influence that caused its authority claims to be largely disputed by Saarlanders. However, this is not the only relevant relationship between external actors. Generally, for local actors it makes a difference if authority is established through the general population or through various elites of the former warring parties.

Against this background, it is a particular challenge for the international administration that its mandate, and the norms contained in it, must justify in various ways the authority that it claims for itself. What is particularly evident is the need for analytical sensitivity to the associated differences in the form of international administrations, such as those in Kosovo and Timor-Leste. Both were based on almost identical UN resolutions that were adopted at approximately the same time. Nevertheless, the centralization of power in the hands of the designated SRSG went considerably further in Timor-Leste than in Kosovo; in the latter case, the international administration made great efforts to integrate minorities, although this was not explicitly part of the resolution. However, to generate interpretative authority it is equally important that the powers assigned to an international administration, and the associated opportunities to act as authority, are actually used and not – as in the case of the Governing Commission in the Saarland – left unused.

From this, it becomes clear that even under conditions of the most comprehensive form of international statebuilding, authority cannot be built top-down. Rather, authority is generated by complex social relations between the actors involved, as the activities of authority building have to be carried out in particular social and political contexts. This becomes obvious if the establishment of authority is not seen primarily as a technical issue of deploying a mission on the ground, but as a political process in which all political actors in the international administered ‘spaces’ are involved (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008). While an international mandate puts the international administration in a legal position of claiming authority, the sustained commitment of all political actors to participate in and accept the outcome of the political process cannot be coerced. In other words, the international administration has to become an authority in the sense that it has to convince the local political actors that compliance with its rules, and those made under its auspices, are more beneficial than non-compliance (Zaum 2007). As a result, the authority of the international administration is far from given; rather, it is constituted dynamically vis-à-vis the country’s political elite and, perhaps most importantly, of the former fighting factions. In order to maintain its authoritative status, the international administration has to claim and justify authority on a daily basis as well as recognizing local authorities, which in turn function as a validating confirmation of the administration’s authority.

If authority has to be developed on-site in concrete social interactions, it is embedded in local contexts constraining the building of international actors’ authority. A first constraint to an administration’s authority is its competition with local actors, in particular with the representatives of former warring factions. This restriction has several facets; in order to achieve their goals, the international administration must rely on cooperation with the local groups whom they compete with for authority. This can lead to a certain ambivalence from these local groups; therefore, all involved are dependent on the success of cooperation, the failure or obstruction of which – such as in Timor-Leste – may come at the expense of the authority of all actors. For the international administration, this mutual dependence on cooperation can certainly generate authority – such as that which occurred in Kosovo – when it is associated with access for local groups to international goods and resources, such that the authority of the international administration is formally and publicly recognized by the local actors.

A further facet of this competition over authority presents itself in the self-justification of claims. Whereas the representatives of various factions primarily justify their claims to authority only to their respective groups, the authority claims of the international administration are dependent on the recognition of all parties to the conflict and external actors that are part of the international state system as well. This is because external actors such as governments can in turn have an impact on local groups – an aspect from which the international administration in Kosovo benefited, for example.

Closely related to this is the restriction that claims to authority made by the international administration must not only be consistent with the international mandate, but they also depend on the ability of the international administration to connect these claims to the different local traditions, structures and procedures of the various groups. Broad sections of the population in Timor-Leste regarded the actions of the international administration as a continuation of the Indonesian occupation, which was not conducive to its recognition as an authority, a view similar to that held by the Saarlanders who regarded the international administration in their territory as a form of French rule.

A third constraint on the claim to authority by an international administration is the extent to which actions may be limited to a certain period and to which the achievement of concrete objectives are seen to come to their foreseeable end. In Kosovo these goals were not always concrete or achievable by the international administration alone, so that over time recognition of authority on the part of the general population decreased.

Finally, the fact that authority has to be established in a process of recognition can constrain international authority to a certain extent, because this implies that an actor who formerly validated international authority can refuse recognition and therefore go on to challenge it. Studying the international administrations in Cambodia, Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Bosnia–Herzegovina, one could conclude that this takes place after some duration of international statebuilding missions. Local political elites or leaders try to gain authority, by cooperating with international actors and by recognizing international authority and, in the process, receiving a certain kind of authority from them. When the establishment of full sovereignty nears and international governance ends, local politicians begin to publicly criticize the international administrations for governing as though they discovered them ‘like the inhabitants of the New World when the Spanish suddenly arrived’ (Albin Kurti, founder of the nationalist Kosovar movement Vetevendosje!, quoted in Lemay-Hébert 2011, 1825).

Under such constraining conditions, it is fair to say that an international administration’s interpretative authority faces an array of challenges – as do all forms of external statebuilding. They must have the capacity to perform like an authority, e.g. to provide security and enforce justice, create an effective administration that provides critical public goods and services, build a sustainable economic structure, organize humanitarian aid, coordinate the disarming of groups, and facilitate non-violent contact between past adversaries. Finally, they assume responsibility for facilitating the state’s (re)constituted democratic legitimacy. As such, the central task of international administrations is to create and preserve authority by claiming and justifying it and simultaneously by being recognized as an authority under specific local conditions. In analysing authority building in international administered territories, it is learned that the authority to temporarily govern is not simply given by the mandate or a peace agreement; rather, it is generated by the authority-building activities and practices conducted by international and local actors on-site, e.g. by shaping the political discourse through interpretations of the political community’s collective identity and by being part of collective decision-making processes in joint institutions.

International administrations like UNTAC and UNMIK tried to influence the postwar political discourse by establishing rules for using media and setting up campaigns and then supervising compliance with those regulations. This ensured that, at the end of the day, they were in charge of interpreting their mission. Yet, a closer look at the political process of authority building also reveals that an international administration’s ability to govern political discourse and determine its outcome is actually very limited, because in the political discourse local actors usually link their authority claims to local conceptions of power and local narratives and identities. If this resonates with the fundamental beliefs of the local population, local elites can successfully reinterpret the purposes of statebuilding originally prescribed by the international mandate.

The authority of an international statebuilding mission, therefore, has to be created on the ground vis-à-vis local actors. This implies that authority should not be treated as a quasi-automatic outcome of functioning state institutions. As Lake and Fariss (2014) argue, international statebuilding tries to ground political legitimacy on formal-legal norms and not on the personal charisma of a leader or tradition as institutionalized charisma, as Weber (1921) did: ‘Drawing on the formal-legal approach, the implicit assumption in much of the statebuilding literature is that convening some type of constitutional convention and passing a new basic law will automatically, or at least without great difficulty, legitimate a new government’ (Lake and Fariss 2014, 5).

Instead, what is perceived as legitimate depends on the political discourse in which institution building is embedded and in which belief in the legitimacy of the state is created. If an actor is able to bring him or herself into the desirable position of being an authority in this political discourse for the purpose of statebuilding, he or she can more or less determine the interpretation of ‘common ground’ in a postwar political community. Therefore, this special section suggests a focus on interpretative authority building as a political process of international statebuilding that shapes the conditions for both the politics of international administration in postwar societies and the facilitation of legitimate state institutions (see also Bonacker et al. 2014).

Overview of the articles

The following articles analyse international administrations’ politics and practices of authority building and their authority relations in statebuilding from a sociological point of view. They explore how international administrations claimed and justified authority, as well as how they recognized or refused local authorities, and were recognized or refused in turn. With this, the articles delve into the black box of external statebuilding and analyse dynamics of authority building of international administrations, investigate how these dynamics have an impact on statebuilding processes, and in which respects international administrations fundamentally differ from how formal mandates have been used for generating authority.

Dominik Zaum’s article elaborates on the theoretical concepts related to a sociological perspective on authority building in the context of international transitional administrations. It highlights the advantages of an agency-focused analysis which aims to understand the complexities of political authority in statebuilding processes. In particular, he introduces a practice-theoretical view on international statebuilding, arguing that the authority-building practices of international actors consist of three distinct aspects, namely claiming and justifying their authority, recognizing and validating the authority claims of local actors, and strengthening the capacity of local actors to justify their authority claims. Referring mainly to the cases of Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Bosnia–Herzegovina, he shows that authority building is indeed a complex and very political process on the ground given that international actors have to choose between different local actors and organizations, recognizing the authority claims of some and withholding recognition from others. Furthermore, they have to justify their claims to both international and local audiences. Not least because of this, international authority can be challenged by powerful external – and also internal – actors, who may follow a more nationalistic political agenda.

Taking up the case of Kosovo, Werner Distler analyses the claims of both local political actors and UNMIK to interpretative authority, as well as the structural conditions that empower and restrain all actors in their attempts. In particular, the absence of commonly shared symbols of unity on the one hand and an authoritative interpreter of symbols of national unity on the other led international and local actors to debate the status and the future of Kosovo in public discourse. While UNMIK used UN Security Council Resolution 1244 as an authoritative symbolic reference for their claims, the Kosovar actors competed intensely for the identity and symbolizations of Kosovo’s future (United Nations 1999). Hence, local symbolic references of Kosovar actors were promoted by UNMIK’s attempt to de-nationalize public discourse. While UNMIK, according to Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, can be seen as an exceptional case of maximalist international statebuilding, even in this case their authority remained uncontested for only a very limited period. As an outcome of political dynamics, the authority relations between local actors and UNMIK significantly changed after 2001, when UNMIK was increasingly portrayed as an occupying force and its authority to define the political future of Kosovo was heavily contested.

In her article on the debate over a potential presidency and the former king’s role in the Cambodian peacebuilding process, supervised by UNTAC, Katrin Travouillon stresses the mutual dependency of international and local actors in highly dynamic authority-building processes. In particular, the article points to the unintended consequences that practices of authority building can have: To present itself as politically neutral and generating its own authority from this status, UNTAC recognized Norodom Sihanouk as a legitimate representative of the Cambodian people. This in turn provided the former king with the opportunity to claim interpretative authority over Cambodia’s political future, by selectively acknowledging and later rejecting UNTAC’s authority, while simultaneously providing other actors with opportunities to recognize his own claims to legitimacy. Although Sihanouk did not succeed with his plan to hold presidential elections, this practice allowed him – as well as other local political actors – to significantly shape the political discourse in a way that was not intended by international actors.

Analysing the degree to which international authority has been claimed, recognized and exercised, Lemay-Hébert argues that international administrations have differ significantly regarding their extent of governance. Moving beyond the comparison of missions’ mandates and objectives, his empirical analysis of the dynamics and practices of authority building reveals that the two most-cited cases of League of Nations’ administrations in the interwar years – the Saar Territory and the Free City of Danzig, as well as the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority of West New Guinea (UNTEA) – actually show less effective authority than the two more recent cases of UNMIK in Kosovo and UNTAET in Timor-Leste. Therefore, the latter represents distinct endeavours of exceptional international statebuilding compared to other missions. The Kosovo case makes it especially clear that authority has to be understood as being fluid and dynamic. The current UN mission in Kosovo differs significantly from the past concerning its authority, although the mandate itself has not changed in the meantime.

Based on qualitative research using archival documents, interviews and a reassessment of the empirical literature on statebuilding, the articles in this special section move away from a formal-legalistic understanding of authority. They start with two assumptions. Firstly, international authority is not simply given with a mandate but has to be built on-site vis-à-vis local actors, thus it follows that, secondly, authority building is always embedded in a particular social and political context. Developing from this, the contributions explore the dynamics and complexities of authority building in cases of international administration as part of an internationally supervised statebuilding process. In particular, they highlight the need for a closer look at agency and on the relations that result from the attempt of international and local actors to claim, recognize or reject authority. Instead of simply imposing international authority on the local population, international statebuilding has to create authority through a multifaceted social relationship between international and local actors that are mutually dependent in the sense of being recognized as an authority and the conferring of the recognition of such authority. Both claims of authority – whether or not to interpret the core values of a political community and/or take responsibility in collective decision-making – and recognition of these claims have to be used to generate authority. The focus on mandates and objectives predominant in the literature does not capture the complex and even contradicting relationships of international and local actors and their unintended consequences.

At least four conclusions follow from the different empirical analyses adopted in this special section. First, contrary to the formal-legalistic assumption, in all cases of external governance there is not a lack of authority but rather multiple and sometimes competing authority claims. International attempts of authority building, therefore, have to engage with and are entangled within these often conflicting authority claims. This, then, also reveals the political nature of international administrations.

Second, as the cases of Cambodia and Kosovo clearly demonstrate, statebuilding actors speak to different – local and international – audiences. Local actors, especially those who are recognized internationally and therefore provided with an opportunity to speak on behalf of a political community, can raise authority towards a local audience using local sources, such as historical narratives, shared beliefs and war fame in order to shape political discourse in their favour. This essentially limits the effective authority of international actors and helps to explain why intrusive international statebuilding is successful in building institutions while failing to establish the envisioned liberal democracies.

Third, the cases of Cambodia and Kosovo, as well as Timor-Leste, reveal that international authority is often negotiated with local actors and that neither the mandate nor the objectives fully determine how these negotiations proceed. Instead, local actors – though as in the Kosovo case sometimes also powerful external actors – can publicly reject authority claims and thereby shape authority relations on the ground. In fact, international authority stays uncontested often only for a very limited period.

Finally, regarding the different modes of authority, the more recent and exceptional cases of international administrations indicate how the legitimacy of local actors’ power can emerge: if the authority to interpret the substance of a political community is successfully claimed by local actors then their interpretative authority can be used to validate further claims as a performing authority in decision-making processes, and therefore can be transferred into legitimate political power.

Notes on contributors

Thorsten Bonacker is professor for peace and conflict studies at the Center for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg, Germany. He is board member of the collaborative research cluster on ‘Dynamics of Security’ at the University of Marburg and Gießen. He has published on securitization and statebuilding, transitional justice as well as on localizing sexual rights in Cambodia and Central Asia. [email protected]

André Brodocz is professor for political theory at the University of Erfurt. He is editor of the ‘Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie' (German Journal for Political Theory). Among his publications are books on contemporary political theory, concepts of power and the power of supreme courts. [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Thorsten Bonacker http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5325-2816

Additional information

Funding

This article originates from the DFG-funded research project “Interpretative power in international administrated territories. On transitional authority in Kosovo and Cambodia” [grant number: BO 1712/6-1]