Description
Several papers have explored how Peacebuilding operations can unintentionally contribute to consolidate post-conflict authoritarian regimes (Day, von Billerbeck, Tansey, Al Maleh, 2021, Harkness, 2022), detecting Day and colleagues that through CGF (Core Government Functions - one of the four categories of the OECD Creditor Reporting System) a causal relationship between Peacebuilding and authoritarianism can be established. Based on these works, our argument is that, in addition to considering CGC as a causal relationship, we can also propose legitimacy as a key element that complements this relationship. If Peacebuilders support their target states with material resources, they would also be strengthening the legitimacy of a small elite. In terms of gains and losses, legitimacy could be analyzed as a market, what I would call the Market of Legitimacy: if the elite in power that receives Peacebuilding support is increasingly strong and powerful, it would gain greater legitimacy by eliminating the market or the struggle that may exist between different actors (between those who want a democratic order and those who do not) and Peacebuilding missions could be unintentionally supporting or strengthening the legitimacy of non-democratic leaders. More specifically, if a country is authoritarian, receives a considerable percentage of GFCs (as these studies show) and also has a monopoly on the exercise of power (as measured by various indices we will propose), it will be difficult for a moderate opposition to gain access to government. To verify this, we will work with several case studies already used in the aforementioned work of 2021: Madagascar, Comoros, Cote D'Ivore, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, Kirgyzstan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia, Haiti).
