Transitional Governments

One of the most curious elements of the transitional governance story is that the pivotal political transition of the 20th century - the transition from colonialism – recedes ever further from the field’s memory of its history. Yet,, like the return of the repressed, charges of colonial assumptions, practices and consequences haunt every aspect of the field, from constitution making to transitional justice, democracy promotion to rule of law projects. While the field of transitional governance is at pains to walk out of the shadow of colonialism, if we probe its discourses of legitimation and its technologies of administration, we find that the field is replete with tropes of colonial governance, and its larger impacts, local and global, carry echoes, in some cases even continuities, with colonial governance. I argue in this chapter that this paradox is at the heart of transitional governance, and it is this relationship between the denial of colonialism, and its replication, that is most pivotal in understanding the field. In that sense I see the theories and practices of the transitional governance field not as a guide to ‘societies in transition’ that will enable us to ‘transition’ better and more effectively, but as a guide to the ambitions and traumas of the field itself – in particular the constitutive ambition/trauma captured by the dual drive to expel colonialism and replicate it.
Transitional governance often functions as a cipher coding contentious political questions into a policy package of best practices and comparative lessons crafted by technocrats and nested in the dynamics of global governance. This ‘translation’ has helped crowd out questions of distribution and alternative visions of law and policy at the national and international level, while also entrenching its legitimation of the dominant order.  This chapter makes the case for revisiting the transitional governance field by re-translating the colonial transition in two key dimensions. Firstly, as a critique of the historicist notion of transition, and second, in rethinking the notion of democracy that is advanced by the field of transitional governance.

This chapter examines the significance of the international law of self-determination for the legitimacy of a transitional authority. Transitional authorities often have a weak claim to represent the will of the people. A commitment to the international law of self-determination may help a transitional authority to persuade its domestic and international audiences that its purpose is advancement, rather than denial, of governance by and for the people. Yet the content of this law is subject to contestation. The analysis in this chapter covers several features of the self-determination practice of transitional authorities: establishing a transitional authority; developing space for political communication; and creating a popular mandate. The chapter argues that international law offers a transitional authority a means to articulate its normative vision of self-determination, but also to operate lawfully without fully delivering this vision. This reduces the value of a commitment to the law as part of an explanation for why domestic and international audiences should recognise that a transitional authority has the right to rule. It increases the importance of ad hoc instruments for the regulation of transitional periods: peace agreements, aid agreements, and UN Security Council resolutions.