Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention in Comparative Perspective

Jeremy Weinstein ()

No 57, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: There is growing recognition that significant threats to collective security emerge not only from competition among great powers, but also from the disorder, violence, and oppression wrought by governments (or occurring in the absence of effective governance) across the developing world. Scholars have responded by proposing new models of intervention—including neo-trusteeship and shared sovereignty—that respond to these failures of governance. But these calls for intervention rest on two underlying assumptions that have escaped serious consideration: the idea the countries cannot recover from conflict on their own and the argument that intervention is the best strategy for state-building. In this article, I define and describe a process of autonomous recovery in which states achieve a lasting peace, a systematic reduction in violence, and post-war political and economic development in the absence of international intervention. I offer a series of theoretical reasons to take it seriously and use case studies of recovery in Uganda, Eritrea, and Somalia to demonstrate how it works in practice. I conclude by identifying three tradeoffs—for the country on the receiving end of intervention—that policymakers confront when weighing whether and how to respond to internal conflict.

Keywords: security; violence; conflict; state-building; peace; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F51 F52 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2005-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/2731

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:57

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().