Building Peace and Democracy or Organizing Exit

Since the early 1990s the United Nations has accepted the liberal democratic peace thesis and adopted the democratic reconstruction model as a modus operandi for its peacebuilding endeavours. Internationally administered elect­ions have played a central, but not unproblematic, role in these missions. Are post-conflict elections really designed to establish democracy or do they simp­ly provide an exit strategy for international actors? This book seeks to an­swer this question by exploring and evaluating how the UN's use of elec­tions has changed since the end of the Cold War. It offers in-depth analysis of UN missions to Cambodia and East Timor, two of the most important ex­am­ples of international attempts at implementing democracy in post-conflict si­tuations. The book is addressed to political science students and re­sear­chers with an interest in peacekeeping and peacebuilding, democratization and the United Nations.