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Election Monitoring

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Casualties of the New World Order

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Abstract

Election monitoring is one of the UN’s peace-building activities in which the mission actually comes into contact with the conflict dynamic. Elections often symbolize the end of a civil war: ‘UN monitored elections should be regarded as a watershed event in a nation’s emergence from civil insurrection … following commitments by rebel groups to participate peacefully in a political process.’1 Yet while elections usually only occur after some advancement of the peace process, this does not necessarily mean that all the belligerents have irrevocably abandoned the conflict dynamic For elections to succeed in ending the civil war, former belligerents must both participate co-operatively and abide by the result. Furthermore, the nature of democratic elections makes them viable only in certain conditions. For these reasons, there is great potential for weaknesses to appear in UN election monitoring missions, and for a nascent conflict dynamic to act on these weaknesses to frustrate the whole process. This chapter applies the analytical framework to a failed and a partially successful election monitoring mission to search for the responsibility of common weaknesses and their vulnerability to the conflict dynamic for the missions’ different levels of failure.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Asia-Australia Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Michael Wesley

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  1. Michael Wesley
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© 1997 Michael Wesley

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Wesley, M. (1997). Election Monitoring. In: Casualties of the New World Order. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391055_4

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