Transitional Administrations
Phase 1 – “Transitional Administrations”: April 2001-February 2003
Phase 2 – “State-Building”: March 2003-June 2005
Project Description
Transitional administrations represent the most complex operations attempted by the United Nations. The operations in East Timor and Kosovo are commonly seen as unique in the history of the UN – perhaps never to be repeated. But they may also be seen as the latest in a series of operations that have involved the United Nations in “state-building” activities, where it has attempted to develop the institutions of government by assuming some or all of those sovereign powers on a temporary basis.
Like many innovations in UN practice, these operations were born of necessity. The United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) provided some much-needed legitimacy to the military intervention undertaken by NATO without Security Council authorization in 1999. The UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was hurriedly established after the violence that greeted the Timorese people’s overwhelming vote for independence from Indonesia. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which operates with a substantially reduced mandate compared to the previous two operations, was a response to the crisis following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC.
The starting point of IPA’s project on Transitional Administrations was the concern – raised, though only in passing, by the Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations (the “Brahimi Report”) – that the United Nations is becoming involved in state-building operations without any clear institutional guidelines or political consensus. This has given rise to uncertainty of mandate in ongoing UN operations, as well as the potential for establishing precedents that may confuse the normative framework within which future operations take place.
On this basis, the two goals of the project were:
(a) to develop clear guidelines on how United Nations transitional administrations can and should be used to further the self-determination aspirations of a given group; and
(b) to examine how UN actions have contributed to the normative and practical transformation of self-determination and state sovereignty through the 1990s (in turn, perhaps, giving rise to more calls for self-determination by groups).
By approaching the issue from the UN institutional perspective – that is, by examining the challenges of self-determination through the process of establishing mandates for, implementing and running transitional administrations – IPA’s project moved beyond the well-rehearsed arguments about what the norms of self-determination are or should be, and focused on the concrete role of the United Nations in defining and realizing those norms.
The work for this project was conducted primarily through field research in eight areas where the UN has been involved in state-building projects that involved issues of self-determination – Namibia, Cambodia, Eastern Slavonia (Croatia), Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, East Timor, Western Sahara, and Afghanistan. In each case, interviews and workshops were conducted with local officials (state and non-state) and international staff. These were complemented by interviews with key UN personnel in New York.
IPA published a series of four Policy Reports, directed at the senior level of the United Nations and the Missions of Member States. A Final Report evaluated the success of the project. This was complemented by the publication of a single volume on transitional administrations aimed at a more general audience.
The expected outcomes of the project were two-fold. First, the project encouraged senior UN personnel to examine closely the larger institutional and normative consequences of ad hoc transitional administrations. Coming from outside (but very close to) the United Nations, such an approach by an organization like IPA was often more effective than an internal “lessons learned” analysis. Second, the project pushed the academic and institutional debate about the nature of self-determination in the twenty-first century.