Nicolas Lemay-Hébert

University of Birmingham · School of Government and Society

Red-zoning emerged as a key security practice in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with colour-coded security zones defining the spatial dimensions of diverse restrictions. However, red-zoning, understood as the cartographic practice of ascribing the colour red to a geographically defined area, has a long history. Prior to the pandemic,...

This article offers a new perspective on the failed states agenda, and the reconfiguration of colonial discourse buttressing it, by theorising its afterlives. The concept of afterlives has mostly been discussed as a metaphor or in passing in the IR literature. Drawing from the post- and decolonial literature, we propose to define the concept simult...

While the ‘emotion turn’ has emerged as an influential analytical lens in International Relations (IR), there is not yet a well-developed understanding of the role that emotions play in facilitating or inhibiting peace. This special issue of Cooperation and Conflict engages with the analytical potential of emotions and the promise this perspective...

Strategic narratives are employed by political actors as tools to pursue their goals, constructing a shared meaning of the past, present, and future in order to shape behaviour. Building on discourse analysis of the magazine Dabiq and from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2018 and 2019 with IS civilian employees and civilians...

This chapter reviews how peace operations can implement child safeguarding as part of preventing sexual exploitation and abuse and sets out lessons to be learned for future operations. The chapter draws on field research from peacekeeping contexts, peacekeeping training centres, and multilateral organisations over the past six years. We foreground...

After belatedly apologizing for the cholera epidemic in Haiti, the ‘New Approach to Cholera in Haiti’ by the UN and the promise of material assistance to victims through a ‘victim-centred approach’ highlight how the victims turn and the socio-economic turn are increasingly pivotal in the field of transitional justice. In light of these growing call...

The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation offers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation. With contributions from over thirty distinguished and leading scholars, the Handbook provides a timely, engaging, and critical overview of conceptual foundations, political...

While the cholera outbreak in Haiti still claims victims every month, it is also the backdrop of one of the biggest legal battles the UN has been engaged in – one for the recognition of harm caused and for reparations for victims of cholera. Having used its immunity to disengage from the issue, the UN finally changed its stance in December 2016 and...

This article reviews how peacekeeping officials safeguard children from sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in Liberia, more than 15 years after the landmark reports published on this issue. Based on original fieldwork conducted in Liberia and in New York, the article introduces an innovative framework to assess whether or not organisations effecti...

Critical Peace and Conflict Studies scholars have increasingly sought to overcome binary approaches to engage more fully the ways in which peacebuilding missions are designed, implemented and contested. In doing so, scholars have tried to understand ‘the local’ and mobilised three different concepts to do so – hybridity, the everyday and narratives...

The ‘state fragility’ lens is going through a major existential crisis at the moment. Traditional state fragility indexes are increasingly seen as the extension of the privileged few’s willingness to regulate societies outside of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) area, and the results are being increasingly questioned...

This special issue is concerned with the development of the study of narratives of political violence and terrorism. While the concept of narrative has become increasingly popular among scholars in the field over the past two decades, this has not been accompanied by an active and critical engagement with its full ontological, epistemological and m...

This article analyses the concept of international administration by a multilateral organization through the lens of the effective authority of example missions, arguing that the United Nations Interim Administration of Kosovo (UNMIK) and the United Nations Transitional Administration of East Timor (UNTAET) are very specific and distinct attempts a...

International actors have used multiple discursive frameworks for justifying interventions, from human security to the responsibility to protect, and, most recently, resilience-building. We argue that the language of normalization, hidden behind these narratives of interventions, has also contributed to structure the intervention landscape, albeit...

This book explores recent developments in the concept of hybridity through a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing ideas about legal plurality together with the fields of peace, development and cultural studies. Analysing the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, their history, their application in law and legal studies, and their implication...

This article analyzes how different interpretations of Max Weber’s work on the state and legitimacy have materialized in contemporary research on—and practice of—international state-building. We argue that the currently prevailing neo-Weberian institutionalism in state-building theory and practice is based on a selective interpretation of the passi...

The special issue 'Fragile States: A Political Concept' investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of 'state fragility'. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the 'fragile states' concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development...

The concept of legitimacy has been highly influential in policy recommendations concerning state building in 'fragile states'. Indeed, depending on how 'legitimacy' is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can differ substantially. This article discusses what is at stake in the conceptualisation of 'legitimacy' by comparing the aca...

The peacebuilding and academic communities are divided over the issue of local ownership between problem-solvers who believe that local ownership can ‘save liberal peacebuilding’ and critical voices claiming that local ownership is purely a rhetorical device to hide the same dynamics of intervention used in more ‘assertive’ interventions. The artic...

Kosovo has been under various forms of international administration since 1999. Although the political dimension of this international experience has been widely studied by scholars — especially those associated with the critical theory of liberal peacebuilding — the economic dimension of international rule has received less attention. This article...

The Haiti cholera claims are focused upon the UN's violation of the rights of individuals affected by the cholera outbreak to access a remedy. The UN's absolute immunity from jurisdiction of national courts is counterbalanced by its duty to provide alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for private law claims. The UN has not only failed to provi...

This book investigates the emergence, the dissemination and the reception of the notion of 'state fragility'. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the 'fragile states' concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. Contributors investigate...

The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is the latest of seven UN missions in the country, stretching over 20 years of international involvement. If the UN's Security Sector Reform (SSR) mission has had a ‘stabilizing’ influence on the country following Aristide's forced exile since 2004, a string of sexual scandals and the cho...

The special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development...

The concept of legitimacy has been highly influential in policy recommendations concerning state building in ‘fragile states’. Indeed, depending on how ‘legitimacy’ is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can differ substantially. This article discusses what is at stake in the conceptualisation of ‘legitimacy’ by comparing the aca...

According to the Greek myth, the gods condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. “They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour” (Camus 2000, 107). After nearly two decades of involvement in the region, U...

Institution-building under the aegis of international administration has faced various hurdles and obstacles in Kosovo and Timor-Leste. One particular hurdle is related to the mandates of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor, which created a conflict of objectives f...

Plus de vingt ans après la chute historique du mur de Berlin, plusieurs villes demeurent divisées par des murs et des barrières qui imposent une division spatiale et, bien souvent, politique du territoire. Cette contribution entend revenir sur la question de la partition de la ville de Mitrovica au Kosovo depuis l’intervention de l’ otan en 1999, p...

International administrations are a very specific form of statebuilding. This article examines the limits illustrated by the experience in Kosovo. Here, the international administration faced the same requirements of any legitimate, liberal government, but without the checks and balances normally associated with liberal governance. Thus, the intern...

Les grandes résolutions du Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies recense et analyse les résolutions plus importantes adoptées par le Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies depuis la création de l'Organisation en 1945. Dans quel contexte international ces résolutions ont-elles été adoptées ? Quels ont été les positions de chaque État et le processus...

Studies increasingly highlight the limits of state building conducted ‘from the top-down’. Building on the literature and using a Rosenauian concept in a novel way, this article posits that international interventions create a ‘bifurcation of the two worlds’. Departing from a study of Kosovo and Timor- Leste, the article posits that the massive arr...

State-building under the aegis of international administrations has faced various hurdles and obstacles in Kosovo and Timor-Leste—fail- ures that came to full light in March 2004 in Kosovo and in May 2006 in Timor-Leste. However, the international conception buttressing the set up of international administrations—I dub it the ‘‘empty-shell’’ approa...

Drawing upon the vast contemporary literature on state-building that has emerged since Helman and Ratner's pioneer article in 1992-1993, this paper identifies two different schools of thought in the discussion, each of which reflects different sociological understandings of the state. The first one, an "institutional approach" closely related to th...

Following the 2006 gang violence in Timor-Leste amid dissension between the two main security institutions in the country, the Timor-Leste Defence Force (F-FDTL) and the National Police of Timor-Leste (PNTL), the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1704, establishing a UN multidimensional, integrated mission, including UN police with an executiv...

L'état de la nation, LessardJean-François, Éditions Liber, Montréal, 2007, 121 pages - Volume 42 Issue 2 - Nicolas Lemay-Hébert

The paradox of attempting to (re)construct state institutions without considering the socio-political cohesion of societies recurs throughout the world, most notably today in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. This essay tries to shed some light on the debate around the concepts of state and nation-building. Drawing on a sociological understa...

If most of the literature on state-building has extensively covered the question of the increasing interference by United Nations peacekeeping missions, including the broadening scopes and mandates of these missions, not much has been said about the political dilemmas that the exercise of these competencies tend to create locally. This article will...

Generally dubbed “frozen conflicts”, the separatist conflicts in the Caucasus are seen by many authors as political and military stalemates. This approach, however, tends to brush aside sociological dynamics at work inside what would be more accurately described as “zones of conflict”. With a specific focus on South Ossetia, this contribution highl...

Résumé : Au cours des cinquante dernières années, l'aide internationale a été massive et soutenue. Pour certains pays, dont Haïti, on parle de l'équivalent de plusieurs plans Marshall par année pendant plusieurs décennies. Pourtant de nombreux pays récipiendaires de cette aide internationale, dont Haïti, affichaient en 2007 un niveau de vie moyen p...