Essay examples --

Since the mid-1990s, the United Nations (UN) and other multilateral bodies have asserted authority for the administration of war-torn territories and shouldered the responsibility of placing them on the trajectory of political change (Knoll 2008: 2). In 1995, right after Dayton Peace Agreement, the UN assumed responsibility in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Chesterman 2004: 2). In 1999, following NATO’s armed intervention in Kosovo, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1244 establishing the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (Brabandere 2009: 37). Just a few months later, a transitional administration was created with effective sovereignty over East Timor until independence (UNTAET). These expanding mandates continued a trend that began with the operations in Namibia in 1989 and Cambodia in 1993, where the United Nations exercised varying degrees of civilian authority in addition to supervising elections (Chesterman 2004: 2). However, although the UN had assumed responsibility in 68 countries since 1948, the missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor are commonly seen as unique in the history of the United Nations (Chesterman 2004; Doyle 2001; Chopra 1998; Wolfrum 2005; Stahn 2008). First, international administrations of these countries represent the most comprehensive missions ever deployed by the United Nations. Second, these cases also represent clear examples of democratic regime-building efforts on the part of international administrators. In the three cases, democratic regime-building has been an explicit goal, and international administrators have sought to oversee and involve themselves in a full process of regime change (Tansey 2009). Lastly, the three cases also display variation on both independent a... ...lack of interviews or surveys represents a limitation in this respect. These gathering-data techniques could enormously supplement the present paper in addition to primary documents, academic literature and non-academic materials published by think-tanks and NGOs. Second, following Przeworski et. al. (2000) and Mainwaring et. al. (2001), the present paper it leaves out substantive results such as social equality and economic development. Nevertheless, although these caveats are significant and may serve as the impetus for further research they do not overshadow the modest endeavor of the present paper. As Mainwaring et. al. (2000) suggests, by applying a trichotomous scale with a modest information demand, the number of coding errors significantly would be reduced and thus achieve greater reliability than would be possible under a more demanding measurement scale.