English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

Post-conflict state buildingOthers have sought to acknowledge this imperial overstretch and permeatethe conceptual framework for peace building and state building with lessdemanding aims. Krause and Jutersonke (2005, p 448) rightly assert that"Post-conflict operations are not minor 'insertions' of another actor into acomplicated field of forces, but represent major breaks in state formation,often attempting to redistribute political, economic or social power andreshape the institutional terrain on which political competition occurs."While Krause and Jutersonke (2005) address some of the defects ofpresent approaches to post-conflict peace building, they continue toadopt a 'single sovereign perspective' which assumes the individuality ofthe state and fails to capture how international strategies are subverted,appropriated and resisted 'on the ground'. Any attempt to reconstitute asingle sovereign and inscribe a single path to development is at best futileand at worst takes the form of collusion with re-emerging structures ofdomination. This is but because of its model of a single sovereign governinga bounded territorial unit (Heathershaw 2008). A better approach allowsus to explore empirically and interpretatively the multiplicity of authorities(and spaces) that exist across and between given territories. In short, wemust acknowledge the multiplicity of sovereigns and spaces.Questioning bounded territoriality under a single sovereignty is not thesame as denying the importance of territory which we understand as a“physical and geographical area which actors seek to control throughacts of defending, excluding, or including” (Cox 2002, pp 1-2). Thissingle sovereign perspective has captured the imagination of scholars,practitioners and critics of state building.'Post-conflict' is, of course, a misleading term. Gerd Junne and WillemijnVerkoren understand it as 'shorthand for conflict situations, in which openwarfare has come to an end' (Junne and Verkoren 2005, p 1). From this, itshould be eminently clear that a 'post-conflict' society will have no shortageof conflicts or violence. It just means that these conflicts and violence arebeing addressed in new modalities of internationalised governance. Theambiguousness of these situations has variously been described as 'nopeace, no war' (Richards 2005) or 'no war, no peace' (MacGinty 2006).Such descriptors aptly highlight the difficulties of categorising this state ofaffairs. They also challenge the notion that post-conflict countries are in astage of transition between war and peace.Of course, the idea of a clean, unidirectional transition has already beendemolished by research showing that the risk of war is substantially6