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MISDELIVERED MESSAGE You the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building. Simon Chesterman. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 296, $95.00 (hardcover).
A reader investing in You the People might have the reasonable belief from its title that this book is meant to talk to her, one of the everyday people, about the impact of the United Nations' democratization and state-building efforts in recent years. She will be sorely disappointed: as the flyleaf correctly notes, this book is "[ajimed at policy-makers, diplomats, and, . . . academic [s]"-everyone except everyday people.1
As Professor Chesterman explains it, the book attempts to highlight the tensions between "the ends of liberal democracy and the means of benevolent autocracy," that is to say, the inherent ironies and challenges of imposing a democratic government on a state's citizenry. Chesterman's central purpose is to draw attention to the failure of the United Nations and its most powerful member states to adequately involve the citizens of states under its protection in democratization efforts, as well as the structural bars to U.N. effectiveness as a transitional caretaker. But in writing You the People, Chesterman himself missed an opportunity to engage the very people whose problems of access he means to address. This book, like many of the flawed missions described within, talks about, around, and above everyday people. It is the ultimate insider's critique, and therefore is unlikely to become a useful tool for agents of change operating from outside the U.N. structure.
In his introduction, Chesterman describes a newly-heightened awareness of the need for nation-building, or "'peacebuilding,'" as the process of " 'reforming or strengthening governmental institutions' or 'the creation of structures for the institutionalization of peace' " is referred to within the United Nations.- When the mission is framed as "nation-building," as then-Governor George W. Bush referred to it during his 2000 presidential campaign,3 the exercise seems inherently flawed: arrogant, interfering, and, because it is externally generated, innately suspect and doomed to failure. When the mission is framed as the stabilization of governments and regions to enhance international and regional peace and security, as President Bush described it during the 2004 U.S. presidential election debates,4 the exercise assumes the air of a well-meaning sacrifice, aimed at empowering the...