ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, the plight of peoples and states emerging from conflict has become a central focus of humanitarian and development policy. The opportunity to settle a series of civil wars, following the end of the Cold War, through United Nations peacekeeping operations, gave rise to a new industry in peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction, incorporating multilateral and bilateral aid agencies, international non-governmental organizations, private contractors, and academic researchers and consultants. Southeast Asia hosted two such operations, each ground-breaking at their respective times: in Cambodia from 1992 to 1993 and in East Timor from 1999 to 2002. As relatively small countries which were inaccessible for decades during their respective wars,
most of the contemporary scholarly writing on Cambodia and East Timor has come from the perspective of comparative evaluations of international policies for peace as practised in these two cases. Each of these operations has generated a considerable literature, much of which is written from the perspective of international relations or by staff members or consultants working for international peace operations. The two cases are regularly included in comparative volumes about peace-building, state-building and post-conflict reconstruction. Such comparative evaluations considerably outweigh the country-specialist literature, so that contemporary understandings of Cambodian and Timorese politics are heavily influenced by models from the literature on comparative intervention. Within international relations, the literature on politics and policy in post-conflict states has
tended to fall into two camps. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the vast majority of writing on this subject was problem-and policy-oriented, interrogating case studies in order to elicit ‘lessons learned’ for international organizations and aid agencies. Since 2004, a more critical literature has emerged on peace-keeping and state-building in post-conflict states, which draws on political theory, international relations and development studies for its theoretical innovations. This literature covers a spectrum of approaches, but agrees on the central proposition that previous mainstream policy debates over international intervention in states suffering and emerging from conflict uncritically both reflected and promoted particular aspects of liberal dogma, with deleterious results for the aims of peace, justice and development. In this chapter, I discuss these contending approaches, in the light of the theoretical schema provided in the introduction to this handbook, and in the light of the experience of the two Southeast Asian case studies, Cambodia and East Timor.
