Post-Conflict Peace-Building and Constitution-Making

Peace-building accomplished through international intervention has had little success in achieving sustainable peace. In February of 2004, Haiti slipped back into chaos and despair, turning ten years of international and Haitian state- building efforts to dust. Liberia is in its second round of international intervention since returning to conflict in 2004 following UN supervised elections in 1997. There is daily violence in Iraq and ongoing instability in Afghanistan. Kosovo remains under UN administration, with an uncertain future and ongoing undercurrents of conflict. Theories abound for the lack of success in peace-building. Some focus on operational limitations and the unintended negative consequences of international aid, while others focus on institutional lacunae. Increasingly though, it is accepted that the most critical problems involve a lack of knowledge of how to rebuild states and an associated failure of state-building strategy. This Article focuses on one of the key elements of post-conflict peace-building: the role of constitution-making in the political and governance transition. [CONT