Participatory Intervention‪.‬

The front line for international interventions that exercise any degree of political authority in transition has proved to be at the level of local administration. Here, the Western-style paradigm of state building, which is preoccupied with forming a national executive, legislature, and judiciary, confronts resilient traditional structures, socially legitimate powerholders, abusive warlords out to win, or coping mechanisms communities rely on under conflict conditions. Options for the establishment or reconstruction of governing institutions seem stark: either reinforce the status quo and build on it, further empowering the already strong; or replace altogether what exists with a new administrative order. But there may be a middle road. In the past, in Somalia and Cambodia, and later in Kosovo and East Timor, interveners invariably followed the line of least resistance, rendering themselves irrelevant in terms of the impact they had where the overwhelming majority of the population lives. The result was a social and political reality that developed by itself, regardless of the size of the international presence or the scope of the mission's mandate. By contrast, the dimensions of the social engineering project to invent and to introduce an entirely new governance system are vast. Planners have never assessed the number of elements and the breadth of such an assignment, nor have implementers ever adequately prepared for the task, let alone effectively accomplished it. Appreciating the scale of the venture might have led to the conclusion that it was impossible, certainly in the relatively short time frame of most interventions.