Three Analytical Dimensions

The theory distinguishes between three analytical dimensions in order to capture the attempts of actors and institutions to establish themselves as interpretative authorities:

The symbolic conditions, the opportunities, and the interpretative practice.⁹ Symbolic Conditions

The first analytical dimension is concerned with the existence and the status of the collective ideas that create a political community. According to the theoretical framework societies integrate as political communities around the interpretation of such symbols. The collective identity of a community can then be described in regard to both its symbols and the status of these symbols in relation to each other. In an established democracy like Germany or the United States for instance, the collective identity of the political community tends to evolve around the constitution. As an

9This chapter draws on Bonacker, Thorsten; Brodocz, André; Distler, Werner; Travouillon, Katrin.

2014. Deutungsmacht in Nachkriegsgesellschaften. Zur politischen Autorität internationaler Administrationen in Kambodscha und im Kosovo.

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expression of the mutual promise people give each other to act together¹⁰, political communities integrate by giving this symbol the central position in public political discourse. The superior status of the constitution as a symbol of collective identity in the United States is evident in the fact that the two questions ‘is this constitutional’ and

‘is this who we are as a people’ are deeply intertwined. Other societies may integrate around symbols like national myths, a traditional leadership figure like the king, or other founding texts.

Because of their ambiguity these symbols can incite and regulate a discourse over categories of shared understanding. An institution that is accorded with the status to legitimately decide what constitutes an appropriate interpretation in cases of unresolved issues constitutes an interpretative authority. It is in the act of issuing such an interpretation that political authority as interpretative authority is exercised. Strong symbolic conditions do thus describe a situation where one symbol for a society’s common ground is safely established and conflicts arise only in regard to its interpretation.

Approaching the analysis of a post-conflict society through this theoretical framework, means to first establish what kind of symbols public discourse evolves around. The difference between an established, peaceful society and a society divided by war can then be described with regard to the status these symbols have: Most often they stand for conflicting interpretations over society’s common ground. In absence of a symbol that is considered representative for the entire political community, no institution can claim interpretative authority. The symbolic conditions are hence uncertain.

10 Paraphrasing Arendt, as quoted in (Brodocz 2014, 43).

44 Opportunities

The second analytical dimension is concerned with the opportunities for institutions to present themselves as authoritative interpreters. As an institution is dependent on the repeated public acknowledgement of its superior status in order to exercise interpretative authority, it needs to have opportunities to this end. In established democracies these are for instance the political functions an institution is entitled to perform. The determination of the Higher Court as the institution entitled to legitimately interpret the constitution, and the status of the constitution as a symbol for society’s common ground are in this regard mutually reinforcing.

In societies torn apart by conflict all actors that strive to establish political authority would therefore first of all need to make use of temporary structures to deliberate the substance of a new common ground. Peace agreements can in this regard be perceived as temporary symbols that provide the formerly warring factions with such opportunities for public deliberation. International interventions that are based on Security Council mandates (which are often part of peace agreements) create a situation in which both local and international actors are provided with opportunities to deliberate the new political order. Unlike international actors who can only participate legitimately in this deliberation through opportunities directly tied to the mandate, local actors may also make use of already established institutions such as parties or the local media.

Interpretative Practice

The third analytical dimension is concerned with the interpretative practice of an institution. In the context of the theory of interpretative authority this practice is defined as the use an institution makes of an opportunity to generate authority by articulating an interpretation of society’s common ground. The practice is therefore strategic, but also limited in this intend as the interpretations are grounded in a knowledge over collective identity and social order that is not simply accessible to rational choice. As these interpretations are ‘public’ by definition, the practice is not only concerned with verbal statements, but also with actions that can be interpreted as statements by others.

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Symbolic conditions, opportunities and interpretative practice are in a mutually constitutive relationship. The particular challenges actors in a post-conflict situation are faced with can again best be described by juxtaposing it with the dynamic as it presents itself in an established democracy: The symbol and its authoritative interpreter are already established in political discourse. In these strong symbolic conditions the interpretative practice serves to confirm and uphold this situation: In order to intervene in interpretative conflicts and issue an authoritative interpretation the institution can make use of established opportunities.

In a post-conflict situation actors would first need to promote the status of a symbol as representative for society’s common ground. In order to change the symbolic conditions for the potential establishment of interpretative authority from uncertain to strong actors need to a) establish appropriate opportunities and b) engage in an interpretative practice that can demonstrate the superior integrative power of the symbol they seek to represent. They succeed in creating stronger symbolic conditions when their interpretative practice is being repeatedly and increasingly acknowledged in public. Analytically the dynamic between the three dimensions is thus that of a circular reinforcement.

3.6. Summary: Consequences for the Analytical Model

Based on the previous discussion of the theoretical assumptions and models guiding the analysis it is possible to argue that international and local political actors engage in continuous struggles over the meaning of the new institutions. These struggles evolve around their respective attempts to promote symbols that can serve as symbols for society’s common ground. In order to be acknowledged as an interpretative authority institutions are dependent on repeated public acknowledgement of their symbols’

superior status. An analysis that seeks to advance our understanding of the concrete practice with which interveners seek to enforce, uphold, and confirm their vision of the new political order in the course of a mission thus needs to depart from the symbol they attempt to establish at the center of the intervention society’s political discourse.

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The Peace Agreement as a Symbol of the New Political Order

Just like the rise of United Nations interventions in peacebuilding, the increasing proliferation of peace-agreements as part of the settlement of violent conflict is a phenomenon of the post-Cold War period (Bell 2006, 373). Bell described how these developments are intertwined and can be attributed to the growing internationalization of local conflict resolution and the resulting emphasis on building a ‘positive peace’:

“Peace agreements have become relevant to attempts to reconstruct societies in the wake of interstate conflict” (Bell 2006, 373). The international interest in the settlement of these conflicts has also contributed to the trend of involving actors other than the affected parties in fixing their terms. The United Nations for instance is in many instances directly involved “as some type of third party to the agreement”, that is “the UN, a UN agency, or a UN representative was party or signatory, mediator or facilitator, observer, witness or negotiator to the agreement” (Bell and O’Rourke 2010, 953).

In the case of Cambodia the UN had been a signatory to the Paris Peace agreements. These agreements included a mandate that would endow the UN with all powers necessary to oversee their implementation. It has often been remarked that mandates serve as constitutions of such international state building or peacebuilding missions. Ndulo specifies in this regard that a mandate, defined as the “broad objectives and specific instructions that define, limit, and guide” such a mission determines what interveners “are authorized, obligated, inclined, and equipped” to do (Ndulo 2011, 784–785).

The conceptualization of implementation mandates as ‘guides for action’

depoliticizes the intervention and reduces the character of peace agreements to a list of unambiguous goals. Constitutions are certainly a way to organize authority, but, as quoted earlier, they are also a formalized way of promising each other to act together.

Peace agreements and its related mandates do therefore establish international and local actors as participants in the joint project of rebuilding a political order. Rather than

‘solving’ a conflict they alter the character of ongoing negotiations over the political future. As such they are guides of encompassing social changes.

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In order to capture the dynamic of these changes in Cambodia and further our understanding of the impact that local and international actors had on this process the analysis will therefore highlight the symbolic dimension of the Paris Peace Agreements. As the temporary symbol of Cambodia’s new political order it took center stage in the country’s public political discourse for the duration of the United Nations’

intervention from 1992-1993.

The International Administration as an Interpretative Authority

International missions that are officially sanctioned by the United Nations derive their authority from a Security Council mandate. The procedures preceding its approval are designed to assure that the goals of such missions are considered to be drafted in the interest of the affected people and not in the interest of the foreign governments entitled to take these decisions. A mandate is considered to give international actors the authority to legitimately intervene in the internal political affairs of another country.

The theory of interpretative authority conceives the relationship between a mandate and the authority of interveners in a less linear manner. Instead of understanding authority as something that is ‘given’ and ‘used’ in order to implement a mandate, it stipulates that the mandate provides interveners with the opportunity to generate political authority. As the theory will be applied to the UNTAC mission in Cambodia it is useful to briefly recall the definition of ‘symbolic conditions’. For the duration of the mission the Paris Peace Agreements (this includes the implementation mandate) symbolized Cambodia’s new political order.

It was legitimized through the signatures of all Cambodian conflict factions and the support of the international community. For the duration of the mission it determined the international administration as its authoritative interpreter: This means that only UNTAC representatives were in a position to intervene legitimately in conflicts over the interpretation of the mandate.

It is still not possible to speak of strong symbolic conditions for the Paris Peace Agreements as their validity was limited in time. Rather they entered the discourse over Cambodia’s new political order with a strong competitive advantage. Instead of seeing the power bias between international and local political actors originate in their

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respective status as representing ‘international’ or ‘local’ knowledge, it can thus be described as a function of the agreements symbolic status: As long as the international actors succeeded in keeping the Paris Peace Agreements at the center of society’s deliberation over the future political order they would contribute to strengthen the PPA’s superior status. With regard to this strong symbol local political actors were not in a position to legitimately intervene in conflicts over its meaning. To establish themselves as potential interpretative authorities over the future political order they could either challenge the interveners’ interpretations of the PPA or attempt to build up an entirely different symbol as representative for society’s new common ground.

The Public of an Intervention Society

Reviews of UN interventions include almost inevitably a discussion of the missions’

mandate. As guides for legitimate action the individual goals mandates circumscribe take on the function of benchmarks: Successes and failures of a mission are evaluated by comparing the results to the intended outcomes, and future mission will be provided with an improved version that allows a wider scope of action or foresees more and better personnel and equipment.

In contrast to the traditional definition of the mandate the here proposed function as the ‘symbol of the new political order’ encourages a more holistic view on mandates. The legitimacy of a mission does then not only depend on the correct and successful implementation of individual goals. Rather, interveners also need to succeed in keeping the mandate at the center of the political discourse over the future to develop and maintain political authority as interpretative authority.

This conceptualization opens up two main possibilities to approach the analysis.

In order to observe the symbolic dimension of the negotiations over the new political order one could attempt to observe how the different actors intervene in public discourse in order to strengthen their interpretative authority: This would entail the need to find a way to compare the respective strengths of given symbols based on the support they can garner. For the operationalization such an approach holds a number of difficulties, the main one being the availability of empirical data: ‘Support’ of a given symbol can only be measured in the repeated public acknowledgement of its

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superior status. The analysis would therefore have to trace the transformation of societal norms and link these changes to the public deliberation of state-society relations during the intervention. In order to allow for a more focused approach the analysis builds on the second possibility: It will observe how interveners attempt to maintain their competitive advantage by keeping their mandate at the center of society’s discourse over the new political order.

In terms of the theoretical framework this means that we will focus only on the public of the intervention society as constituted through the opportunities the interveners take or create to invite acknowledgement of the mandates superior status as the country’s symbol of the new political order. Because of the institutionalized power bias local political actors cannot simply reject or ignore such invitations: As the mandate has been established as the temporary symbol of society’s new common ground they will have to make use of given opportunities to make their own voices heard and present their interpretations of the future and their role in it.

The discussion of the theories and theoretical assumptions allows us to argue the following with regard to the case at hand: With the creation of UNTAC the Paris Peace Agreements were institutionalized as Cambodia’s temporary symbol of the new political order. The Transitional Authority was given the status of its interpretative authority: Only they were in a position to issue legitimate statements regarding the nature of the new common ground as enshrined in this symbol. In order to keep the PPA at the center of the intervention society’s public political discourse the transitional authority needed to create opportunities for the local political actors to confirm its interpretative practice.

Because of the radical changes in the institutional structure and the related insecurity over the validity and meaning of existing norms and values intervention societies are highly politicized: The public discourse in such a tense political atmosphere is relentlessly concerned with the production of knowledge over the substance and borders of common identity. This implies a heightened awareness for the symbolic dimension of political acts and engagement. Local actors that intend to obtain a position of power after the end of the intervention can thus not simply ignore interveners’

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interpretations. Rather, they have to engage with them publicly to consolidate their claim for interpretative authority over the new political order once the mission terminates. It is in these public struggles that we can discern how the Paris Peace Agreements shaped ideas over the new political order in Cambodia.

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