This article examines the role of bilateral donors and conditional aid in Mozambique's successful post-war peace process. The literature on peacebuilding has tended to privilege the role of UN missions in explaining the outcomes of post-civil war peace processes. The important role that bilateral donors may play in determining these outcomes has not been thoroughly studied. In Mozambique, donors with country experience, knowledge of domestic political actors and constraints, and a shared commitment to a successful outcome, were indispensable to the success of the peace process. The article details this engagement, arguing that it was not UNOMOZ alone, but UNOMOZ as supported by the flexible responses of these donors, that provided an effective third-party guarantee of the peace agreement in Mozambique. It briefly discusses the broader implications of this finding for understanding international peacebuilding efforts.

Associations have been labelled the main ‘building blocks’ for creating social capital. It has been argued that community associations need to transform ‘bonding’ into ‘bridging’ ties to ‘reach out’ while also creating ‘linking’ ties to ‘scale up’. External development actions follow a reverse logic in promoting these associations: they assume that linking ties with the external intervener will reinforce prior social capital endowments. This article highlights the inherent difficulties of such a ‘social engineering’ approach in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, describing three development interventions in the north of Burundi. It defines the process of ‘institutional syncretism’ – merging local with global institutional settings – as a key element to social capital building. The findings illustrate how the three interventions failed to reach this objective, and question ‘bridging’ associations as ‘universal blueprints’ for restoring social cohesion within the liberal peace model for post-conflict reconstruction.

This paper examines contentious state–society and centre–periphery relations in the DR Congo and their implications for state-building. Since the 2006 post-conflict elections, the state's authority has come under fire in the western province of Bas Congo, where a politico-religious group (Bundu Dia Kongo) has emerged as a serious challenger. Enjoying huge local legitimacy, the group has articulated political grievances that the newly elected central government has violently repressed. As locally perceived, elections are a legitimising tool in the hands of the government to impose its unfettered authority in the name of the state-building project. Furthermore, and backed by donors, the Kinshasa authorities also refuse to implement a wide-ranging decentralisation reform. This has fed disenchantment about post-conflict politics in Bas Congo, boding ill for democratic politics and the prospects of state-building in the DR Congo.

The powers of impeachment provided under the Nigerian constitution provide a means of checking the excesses of certain executive officers who enjoy the privilege of constitutional immunity against civil or criminal proceedings while they remain in office. Instead of being invoked in appropriate circumstances, however, this article shows that these powers have been abused. It examines cases of impeachment at the state level during the Obasanjo administration and shows how constitutional provisions were flagrantly breached. It provides evidence that the federal government was complicit in such cases, even though under the federal structure by which Nigeria operates, impeachment at the state level is exclusively a state business. It argues that the abuses are a symptom of imbalance of power between the executive and the legislature as well as evidence of the limits of constitutionalism in the face of politics.