Since at least the beginning of the 1990s, state- and nation-building has been an industry unto itself. A wide spectrum of activities and actors fall under this heading: military peacekeepers, diplomats, experts in reconstruction, governments willing to help, myriad international organizations, and humanitarian helpers from non-governmental organizations—their work is as multifaceted as the range of problems they try to solve.

They descend on failed states and post-conflict societies like harvesters in the picking season, mandated to somehow lift the troubled state out of its malaise and to put it on the road to recovery. One would expect that this work, so complex, ambitious, and full of responsibility, is approached not only with a great deal of money but also with a master plan and trained interventionists. It is therefore all the more surprising that still, time after time, the same mistakes are made, to the detriment of the people living in post-conflict societies. Furthermore, the ever expanding number of actors in the nation-building industry are always astounded, when they arrive in these troubled countries, to learn that they are not alone and must coordinate their efforts with countless other well-intentioned international helpers. Even today, rivalries, national “pet projects,” “beauty contests,” and redundant efforts actually wind up hindering progress. When this happens, not only are valuable reconstruction and development funds and limited amounts of international personnel wasted but the programs do not reach the very people for whom they are intended.

How can we do better, especially in the ongoing crises in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq? What about the crises to come in Asia or Africa? Are there not a small number of high-quality sources from which the international nation-builder and peacekeeper can learn? The literature on state- and nation-building has grown enormously. Political think tanks, international institutes, and universities, particularly in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, offer theoretical and practical analyses. Policy-oriented organizations such as Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), The Brookings Institute, the RAND corporation, Harvard’s conflict study centers, and the German Institute for International and Security Studies (SWP) have equipped policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic with some good groundwork. Most studies concentrate, however, on the main policy fields for external nation-building assistance. Detailed empirical analysis of the organizational structures and the concrete tools and mechanisms of the nation-building industry is still largely missing.

Anne Holohan’s Networks of Democracy tries to fill in this gap. The sociologist, formerly from UCLA and currently at the University of Trento in Italy, tackles previously under-researched actors’ performances in post-conflict reconstruction efforts. Efficient external nation-building assistance requires a conceptual and operational working relationship of both international and local players that is as close and full of trust as possible; this is the main message of Holohan’s comparative field study conducted in 2001 in Kosovo. In Networks of Democracy, she reminds the designers of international stabilization and reconstruction interventions that the necessary diversity of participating “repair” agencies needs an organizational structure to optimize its success. To make the key nation-builders pull together, Holohan suggests a “magic formula” for the creation of an inclusive network of multinational civil servants, donor countries’ diplomats, military peacekeepers, NGO experts, and representatives of the society to be reconstructed. Such a network would avoid the cacophonous situations that have plagued the international nation-building “communities” in Sarajevo, Pristina, Kabul, and Baghdad, in which civilians competed with soldiers, multinational actors with national diplomats, civil servants with non-governmental helpers, and internationals with locals. Having been part of various such international nation-building engagements myself, I can only echo Holohan’s findings.

Banshik and Thezren, two small adjacent Kosovar towns (their names have been changed for reasons of confidentiality), are representative of the Black Bird Field’s post-war communities, and also of post-conflict reconstruction places somewhere at the Hindukush or in the Middle East. They serve as the “model” for Holohan’s two typical examples of international nation-building organization or, rather, disorganization. Although they shared a similar starting point in June 1999 at the end of the Kosovo conflict, with the same amount of international aid provided and the same number of international nation-builders deployed, the two municipalities’ social, institutional, and economic developments diverged. Banshik’s better performance, Networks of Democracy contends, was a direct result of the less hierarchical, more integrated, and denser communication structure through which stability and reconstruction were distributed.

Based on an interdisciplinary scientific approach—described in a chapter that the author kindly advises the practitioner to skip—drawing from both sociological and economic theory, Holohan maintains that those reconstructional disparities were a direct result of the different organizational approaches of the international community on the ground. While in Banshik the local representatives of the main international actors, with the UN in the lead, managed to establish a flexible interagency network based on encompassing information sharing and expertise, the population in Thezren ended up with the “old” UN structure based on hierarchy, rank, withholding of information, and exclusive participation. Moreover, while in Banshik the UN Mission in Kosovo, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organization Kosovo Force, CivPol, NGOs, and local actors unpretentiously succeeded in creating constructive unity among disparate nation-builders, the stabilization and reconstruction effort in Thezren was hampered by an overly centralized administration, poor in communication and coordination. As Holohan demonstrates, both the way these organizations see themselves, as well as the procedures they use, and how and whom they recruit and employ, contribute substantially to their implementation strategies on the ground.

For many international nation-builders, these conclusions will sound all too familiar. In very rare cases, however, they do have the power to determine these strategies and structures. All the more reason that Networks of Democracy should be a mandatory manual for the designers of peace- and nation-building operations in multilateral organizations and national donor governments. The dramatic shortage of nation-building resources at a time where post-conflict management and reconstruction have become a major task and burden of our foreign- and security policies, requires the application of the optimal organizational structures and implementing instruments. Nation-building’s “foot soldiers” can profit as well from Holohan’s study, receiving hints on how to overcome institutional “guerrilla wars,” make better use of available information technology and contribute to the enhancement of the joint conflict resolution network.