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The book proceeds with six chapters and a methodological appendix. In chapter 2 I provide the background and hypotheses of my domestic opposition theory, the international resource theory, and the path dependence theory.

Seven case studies in chapters 3–6 evaluate these hypotheses. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each considers two reform efforts from highly resourced post-conflict interventions, with chapter 3 examining reforms of central government institutions; chapter 4, reforms of defense institutions; and chapter 5, reforms of police institutions (see table 1.2). The reform efforts studied in these chapters occurred in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq, which, among interventions with a strong state-building mandate, had the highest level of international resources (see the appendix for details). Following the international resource theory, if reform success is likely to occur anywhere, it would occur in these societies.⁵⁵ Within these countries, I chose reforms that cover the full range of variation in threat to domestic interests and international resources and that provide useful comparisons for causal inference. The appendix also shows there is substantial variation in the preintervention level of development of these countries, which the path dependence theory expects would lead to different outcomes. Chapter 6 explores the wider applicability of my domestic opposition theory by considering defense reform in Ukraine, which had a very different context from the reform efforts examined in chapters 3–5. Ukraine was not a post-conflict society, the local government was the driver of reform rather than the international community, and Western organizations had far fewer resources to encourage the changes that they desired. The fact that similar dynamics of domestic opposition occurred in Ukraine suggests that my theory applies to a wide range of US and international institution-building efforts, as I discuss in the conclusion.

The case studies use three logics of causal inference to test the hypotheses. A first type of causal inference, congruence testing, simply compares the observed outcome to the outcomes predicted by the various theories. The case studies also use causal process tracing, which means to scrutinize the events of the reform to identify information indicating whether the logic of the process hypotheses is operating as expected.⁵⁶ Finally, I use the comparative method to isolate the impact of different variables and rule out competing explanations. The case studies compare reforms of the same institution in different countries, different state institutions within the same country, and variation over time within stages of the same reform.⁵⁷ The appendix offers additional detail on these methods.

The case studies draw on a wide range of official documents, news reports, think tank analysis, and academic work. The case studies on reform efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor make use of more than 160 interviews from over ten months of fieldwork in these countries. I also conducted additional in-person and phone interviews in the United States. The interviews offer a firsthand perspective and fill gaps in the written record.⁵⁸ Because nearly all interviews were conducted on a not-for-attribution basis, and because the discussion is not available to the reader, I provide a written source to support evidence from interviews wherever possible. For the Ukraine case study, I also draw on the results of RAND’s publicly released report on security sector reform, which relied extensively on interviews. In the case of Iraq, I make use of the academic record of the US presence as well as unclassified materials from the CPA provided to the RAND Corporation.⁵⁹

TABLE 1.2. Case Studies

Note: CPA = Coalition Provisional Authority; NG = nationalist goal; PCN = patron-client network.

These sources offer a range of ways to gauge the motivation of domestic elites and foreign officials, which is an essential tool for evaluating the theories. Public statements or interview responses are a useful starting point and are most telling when actors have little reason to dissemble. Private discussions and correspondence can be the most compelling evidence but is rarely available. Comparing actors’ responses to different or similar events can also be informative. Where possible, especially for key judgments, the case studies triangulate across multiple sources.

Following the theory chapter, chapter 3 considers the creation of central government institutions in Kosovo and Iraq. The UN Mission in Kosovo quickly established a constitution and parliament to govern Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 but faced riots in 2004 after it changed its policy to indefinitely delay negotiations about Kosovo’s independence, the main Kosovo Albanian nationalist goals. After 2004 the UN began negotiations that would lead to independence, achieving a greater improvement in Kosovo’s institutions. In Iraq in 2003 the CPA sought an extended occupation to build democratic institutions. However, the CPA had to compromise when it faced an elite boycott, spearheaded by Shia religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who argued that the CPA’s plan was insufficiently democratic. Both cases show how even high-resource missions with effective sovereign control cannot overcome public opposition and how the missions achieved greater success during the stages of reform when they did not propose changes that threatened nationalist goals.

Chapter 4 compares defense reforms in Bosnia and Timor-Leste. In Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) was able to eliminate the ethnically based “entity” militaries and create a single, civilian-controlled BiH military. This success depended on extensive international resources and, more importantly, on specifying demands that would merge the entity militaries while not threatening Serb nationalist goals or the ruling elites’ patron-client networks. In Timor-Leste the nationalist importance of a pre-independence guerrilla movement opposing Indonesia’s occupation compelled a UN transitional administration to establish a military, contrary to the UN mission’s original intentions. Successor UN missions paid little attention to the military and therefore failed to improve its accountability and compliance with law. The problems within the military later contributed to violent conflict between elements of the Timorese police and military.

Chapter 5 describes police reform in Bosnia and Iraq. In Bosnia the success of defense reform led OHR to pursue the reorganization of the police and create new police district boundaries that crossed the border between the two entities. This demand threatened Serb nationalist goals by undermining the autonomy of the Serb-dominated regional entity of BiH, the Republika Srpska. The threat of OHR’s demands led to public opposition by Bosnian Serb elites, which blocked the reform effort and contributed to the subsequent delegitimization of OHR’s authority in Bosnia. In Iraq, from 2003 to 2011, Coalition forces attempted to create a police force to take over security when they departed. Shia elites engaged in private opposition, co-opting and undermining Iraq’s internal security forces. Shia private opposition stemmed more from a desire for control and the legacy of oppression under Saddam Hussein than the threat of the Coalition effort to Shia political parties’ networks, although Shia opposition was more intense where there was a greater threat to these patron-client networks.

Chapter 6 examines the case of defense reform in Ukraine after 2014. It shows how the Ukrainian domestic imperative to meet NATO standards led the international community to make recommendations that threatened the ruling elites’ patron-client networks to varying degrees. The recommendations that posed the least threat to these networks were ultimately the most implemented, showing how the domestic opposition theory offers insight outside of highly resourced post-conflict interventions.

Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing the results of the case studies, discussing policy implications, considering the wider applicability of the domestic opposition theory, and proposing directions for future research. By looking across the diverse reform efforts studied in the book, shown in table 1.2, it is possible to observe some general patterns, including that resources appeared to have little consistent impact on success and that the most successful reforms tended to be those that posed the least threat to nationalist goals and patron-client networks. Chapter 7 concludes that institution builders should formulate their demands and recommendations to avoid provoking opposition while still improving state institutions. The chapter also explores how foreign organizations can implement this advice, including developing foreign officials’ local knowledge, ensuring greater autonomy for deployed missions, and increasing the priority of improving partner institutions over other objectives.