David Chandler (5) (1962–)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/from-kosovo-to-kabul-and-beyond-human-rights-and...

I reviewed one of Chandler’s earlier books for a defunct website back in 1999, and also wrote up an essay collection that he edited more recently, so I knew in advance that I was unlikely to agree with this book (I have the second edition from 2005). He makes the argument that the human rights justification for international interventions is fundamentally wrong-headed, but I would reflect that criticism back show more at the writer.

I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that the Afghanistan war (his main reference point other than Kosovo) was framed to the Western public as a human rights-driven intervention. My memory is that the core argument was about security and removing a government that was supporting Al-Qaeda. Twenty years on, especially after the last few weeks, it’s very difficult anyway to make the case that there is a dominant human-rights culture in international military interventions, so one feels that Chandler was attacking a straw man at a particular moment in history when it maybe looked more substantial than it has turned out to be. But it also seems to me that it is a Bad Thing if the concept of intervention to protect human rights has disintegrated.

I was also startled to read a series of statements about the 1999 Kosova conflict on pages 15-16 which are simply objectively wrong. Cherry-picking is a tactic that we are all sometimes tempted to use, but at least make sure that you are picking real cherries rather than fictional ones. I’m not going to waste time here by dissecting statements in a twenty-year-old book that nobody who reads this is going to go and read, but really, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

So I gave up after the second chapter. show less

http://www.incore.ulster.ac.uk/services/ecrd/new/reviews/266.html

David Chandler subjects the international community's efforts to impose democracy on Bosnia and Herzegovina to a rigorous analysis. Beginning with a critique of the concept of democratisation, he gives a chapter each to the issues of sovereignty, power-sharing, human rights, political pluralism, and building civil society, and concludes that the West's democratisation policy has been driven more by an "external dynamic" of show more post-Cold War security concerns than by the needs of the country, or indeed of the region. The book is well referenced and includes URLs for the many documents cited from the Internet.

The catalogue of failures in the process of Bosnian democratisation is indeed dismal, but at times Chandler over-eggs his pudding. For instance, on p. 77 he says that in the summer of 1997, "NATO troops occupied the public buildings in Banja Luka, handed them over to [Bosnian Serb President]Mrs Plavsic and disarmed local police loyal to the Pale faction, while a British officer sat in Mrs Plavsic's office answering her phone." Police stations were indeed occupied by NATO (and Czech) troops, but other public buildings were not, and the police were disarmed only of items not often included in day-to-day police work elsewhere such as rocket launchers and grenades. Many strange things did happen to the phones in Banja Luka, including my own, during that dramatic time, but I do not recall the incident described relating to Mrs Plavsic's office.

He also underrates the admittedly modest achievement of the "multi-ethnic" parties in the 1997 municipal elections by stating that they won only 6% of the seats, compared with 5% the previous year. There was considerable variation in the number of seats in each municipal assembly/council, and when votes rather than seats are tallied the "multi-ethnic" parties got more like 10% in 1997.

Chandler is undeniably right to point out that the democratisation of Bosnia has not been successful, as demonstrated by the steadily increasing legislative authority of the international community's High Representative (not the "United Nations High Representative" as Chandler calls him). He is right also to suggest that the logical development of current policy is towards protectorate rather than democracy. However it is difficult to concur with his key recommendation of simply "granting people greater autonomy". The international community stood back in 1991-92 when the war began; this should not be repeated. The biggest gap in this book is Chandler's dismissal of the importance of the process of European integration of Eastern Europe. That is the most hopeful future direction for Bosnia and its neighbours. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/463196.html

A collection of eleven essays on the intervention of the international community in Bosnia, by some of the leading writers in the field; papers produced my my own employers in the days when we concentrated much more on Bosnia are cited extensively, and I know several of the authors personally. Very thought-provoking, and also mercifully brief (170 pages, fairly large type).

There is an opening debate in the form of an introduction by Chandler arguing that show more the international community's efforts in Bosnia since 1995 should be seen as largely self-serving and ineffective, an article by Sumantra Bose making the opposite argument, and a full article by Chandler restating his position in greater detail. Even though Chandler thus gets two bites at the cherry, I find his arguments totally unconvincing - he really doesn't understand the EU, which from his description appears to be a power-hungry monster straight from the pages of the Daily Mail - and Chandler is supposedly a leftie! I agree with almost everything Bose says about the international intervention's sucesses and failures; he also has some trenchant criticisms of my own employers' output from the period before I worked for them.

The next section includes a very good article by Dominik Zaum on how the payment bureaux were abolished; a sightly too short assessment by Gemma Collantes Celador about police reform; and a rather too long piece by Daniela Heimerl on refugee return, which didn't advance my knowledge beyond when I last looked at the issue in December 2002.

Then a rather fascinating bunch of four papers. The first, by Vanessa Pupavac, looked at international gender policies in Bosnia - normally a topic that doesn't excite me much, but she had some very interesting analysis of two very specific and rather different sub-topics, the gender provisions in the electoral law and the provision of micro-financial assistance to female entrepreneurs. Unfortunately her conclusion was basically just to say that it's all very complicated, but it was interesting to get there. The next, by Adam Fagan, was even more interesting, challenging received wisdom on NGOs and civil society development in general and in the Bosnian context in particular; again, I could have wished for more meat in the conclusion, but I liked it.

Then Florian Bieber has a compare and contrast exercise on Brčko and Mostar, given the heightened but different levels of international engagement in both towns. I agree with his conclusion that the more intrusive regime in Brčko, rather than the policy followed in Mostar of well-meaning rhetoric followed by humiliating concessions to local warlords, was more successful for precisely that reason, but blinked a bit at one or two inaccuracies. Even more so with Roberto Belloni's article on refugee return in Prijedor, a place I used to know pretty well, where I found myself alternately nodding firmly in agreement and wincing at misprints - the letters č and š written as c and s, but ć remaining ć, and Kozarac, the small town at the centre of the narrative, acquiring an extra diacritical mark to become Kožarac. I'd still like to know more about the precise circumstances in the local political micro-climate of Prijedor that made it such a success - obviously the former local police chief getting shot dead while resisting arrest by British troops in July 1997 improved matters immensely (not a statement I make lightly), but there must have been more to it than that.

Michael Pugh's article on the political economy of Bosnia was so full of jargon that it became utterly incomprehensible, and I skipped it. The final essay, by Richard Caplan, takes a fair look at the international actors present in Bosnia and their relative lack of accountability, and then actually makes policy recommendations. Most of these are fair enough, though I would have a minor concern that creating new mechanisms for accountability might actually entrench the international actors who should be planning for their own withering away. show less