State Formation After Civil War ─ Local Government in National Peace Transitions

State formation after civil war tackles a problem that has challenged the UN system and scholars alike since the end of the Cold War: What kind of phenomenon is a transition from civil war to peace, and how do we `see’ and make sense of it as `a whole,’ as `national’ experience which has a unity and normative significance for a society and not simply as the sum of what international peace builders do?

Mining ideas drawn from the literatures on peacebuilding, state building, state formation, decentralization, development, and federalism, as well as evidence from 19 major peace processes, including a detailed study of the South Africa transition in the 1990s, this book proposes a new heuristic. The author argues that there is a distinct pattern to state formation: People bargain terms for peaceful coexistence despite their conflicts and divisions. More specifically, they bargain over the right to rule, the political-legal rules that organize and validate the exercise of state authority, and how those rules are institutionalized in practice follows a consistent pattern that gives state formation as rule-formation for peace its national character and significance.

This book will be of importance to officials and practitioners working in post-conflict situations, as well as academics and students of comparative constitutional law, peace building and state building.

Dr Powell is a South African scholar and a practitioner who has had the rare experience of having worked inside one of the major constitution-making processes in history and later, as a senior official in the South African government, of being involved at the highest level in processes that were directly concerned with building the state. Dr Powell currently heads an applied research project at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town South Africa that focuses on problems of governance straddling the law, state, and economy in developing and conflict-affected countries. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Aix-Marseille in France, where he teaches a mastera€?s course on the law and practice of post-conflict state building. He is a former Deputy Director-General and policy advisor in the South African government, where he served in senior positions in the Ministry of Provincial and Local Government from 1996 to 2009. Over that time he played a leading role in developing the policy and institutional machinery for local government and intergovernmental relations. Prior to joining government he was head of the research department at the Constitutional Assembly during the two-year process to negotiate and draft a democratic Constitution for South Africa (1994-1996). He is the author of numerous academic publications and is a regular contributor to the media.