This book analyses the changing dynamics of sovereignty resulting from contemporary international state-building interventions. It aims to highlight how the exercise of 'exceptional' forms of power by intervening agencies impacts on the sovereign capacity of intervened states. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of three case studies - Kosovo, East Timor and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the book shifts the focus of the debate to the nature of contemporary intervention as an act of statemaking, and argues that foreign intervention changes the dynamics of political power upon which sovereignty is structured. At the same time, it reveals how intervention reproduces the imposed conditions of international state-making, thus permanently internalising external regulatory mechanisms. International intervention, in other words, becomes the constitutive element of governance in the newly created state. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, war and conflict studies, global governance, security studies and IR.

This book analyses the changing dynamics of sovereignty resulting from contemporary international state-building interventions. It aims to highlight how the exercise of 'exceptional' forms of power by intervening agencies impacts on the sovereign capacity of intervened states. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of three case studies - Kosovo, East Timor and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the book shifts the focus of the debate to the nature of contemporary intervention as an act of statemaking, and argues that foreign intervention changes the dynamics of political power upon which sovereignty is structured. At the same time, it reveals how intervention reproduces the imposed conditions of international state-making, thus permanently internalising external regulatory mechanisms. International intervention, in other words, becomes the constitutive element of governance in the newly created state. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, war and conflict studies, global governance, security studies and IR.

This study argues there are two separate but interacting processes involved in post-conflict settings: (re)building the state and (re)building the nation. Much of the literature, however, has treated post-conflict reconstruction as a single and objective process of organisational and functional structuring that overlooked the potential and actual interactions and contradictions within and between these two very different but inter-related processes taking place during the course of post-conflict recovery. These processes are not neutral or straight-forward but involve highly sensitive, power-driven institutional and societal undertakings that are related to the definition of the state as a political and cultural community. They entail a political and social (re)structuring that is closely linked with the pursuit and distribution of power. The simultaneous undertaking of democratisation that requires the redistribution of power and interests through public participation and contestation tends to further complicate these already sensitive processes.