Statebuilding and Nationbuilding ISA compendium Goetze Guzina

8/10/2019 Statebuilding and Nationbuilding ISA compendium Goetze Guzina

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Statebuilding and NationbuildingCatherine Goetze and Dejan Guzina

Final draft chapter for Goetze, Catherine and Dejan Guzina. "Statebuilding and Nationbuilding." The International Studies Encyclopedia . Denemark, Robert A. Blackwell Publishing, 2010. Blackwell

Reference Online. 17 June 2010

IntroductionMax Weber famously stated in his Economy and Society that the [modern], rational state has only

existed in the Occident ( Weber 1925 ; translation by the author). Yet, as indisputable as this claim mighthave been at the beginning of the twentieth century, states have since been built around the world duringdiverse decolonization processes, and continued to be externally constructed by powerful internationalvoluntarism in the past decade. As a result of the enigmatic practices of statebuilding, the term is as fuzzyas any major social science concept and it continues to be subject to numerous partial interpretations

contingent on the political contexts in which it is used. Numerous authors have thus tried to clarify the veryconcept of statebuilding, and a plethora of special issues and edited volumes have scrutinized its implicitand explicit meanings ( Chesterman 2004 ; Goetze and Guzina 2004; Paris 2004 ; Caplan 2005a ).

However, authors attempting to clearly define statebuilding generally face two major conceptualdifficulties. First, the concept has been employed in historical sociological literature analyzing longuedure processes of state formation in modern Europe while concurrently being used, quite independentlyfrom the former branch of research, for policies of external assistance to political and administrativeinstitution building in war-torn societies since the early 1990s. Second, statebuilding is always defined inrelation to the concept of the state, which itself is an object of endless debates in different branches ofsocial science.

Here, it suffices to say that the most generally accepted definition of the state is Max Weber's, whodefined it as a composite of territory, population, and a (legitimate) government in control of the means ofviolence. Weber himself approached the state as a heuristic device (according to his understanding of

concepts as ideal types) to help him understand and compare modern European experiences ( Migdal andSchlichte 2005 :24). However, the trends of the twentieth century (national liberation and decolonizationmovements) have turned the question of what is a state into a different question altogether when and howis a state a state? Furthermore, while for Weber the state was understood as an approximation of reality,in the twentieth century, its composite parts have become understood as the facts or ingredients necessaryfor the process of statebuilding. This change of analytical perspective to a more pragmatic one that is,paradoxically, based on the deification and metamorphosis of abstract concepts into facts on the groundswas already recognized in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States. TheConvention, which still represents an undisputed formulation of criteria of statehood in international law,offers a shopping list of necessary statebuilding components: (1) a permanent population, (2) a definedterritory, (3) a government, and (4) a capacity to enter into relations with other states ( Caplan 2005b :52).

Finally, exacerbating further the conceptual confusion, the term statebuilding is more often than notused interchangeably and synonymously with the term nationbuilding , notably in the policy-making

literature. Yet, here again, at least two broad currents of social science research have developed ratherdifferent understandings of nation-building. Whereas in the sociological-historical literature the focus is onthe rise of nationalism as collective imagination and state-supporting ideology ( Anderson 2006 ; Gellner2006), the more recent literature on institutional change, notably on democratic transitions within existingstates with minority problems, has rather focused on questions of power sharing and institutional design todiminish ethnic and nationalist conflict ( Horowitz 1985 ; Linz and Stepan 1996 ). Both of these perspectiveson nation-building are the focus of separate entries on nationalism and power sharing in this volume, andthus will not be dealt with in this entry.


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In what follows, we start first with a short overview of the historical sociological and comparativeliterature on statebuilding. Central to this section are the relationships between political development andstatebuilding, democratization and statebuilding, nationbuilding and state destroying, and war and states.The current trend in the literature on externally supported statebuilding will then be addressed and willcover several themes. First, a relationship between security and peacebuilding is addressed, followed by anoverview of peacebuilding as saving lives. The third section represents an overview of the relationship

between the generalized approaches to statebuilding, while at the same time the local contexts within whichthey are being applied are evaluated. Special attention is given to the role of the UN PeacebuildingCommission given its increasing importance in externally supported statebuilding. The last part of thisentry is a survey of the more critical literature on statebuilding as a new empire in the making.

Statebuilding: Comparative PerspectivesPolitical Development and State FormationThe collapse of colonialism, followed by the rise of many new states in Asia and Africa, is the global

context within which the twin paradigm on political development and statebuilding emerged in the 1960s.Throughout the decade, Gabriel Almond, the chair of the American Social Science Research Council'sCommittee on Comparative Politics, and members of the committee (Leonard Binder, Samuel Huntington,Joseph LaPalombara, Lucian Pye, Sidney Verba, Myron Weiner, and others) were engaged in research onpolitical development in new states. Their general conclusion was that each political system has to go

through a series of crises before it fully develops into a system that strongly resembles a Western-typeliberal democracy. Theoretical elaboration of these findings was presented in Almond and Powell'sComparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966). Not surprisingly, a developmental approachturned out to be an exercise in structural functionalism for which Almond was internationally renowned.By the end of the 1960s, this process of development (or, in the functionalist terminology of the day,penetration, integration, participation, identity formation, legitimization, and distribution) becameidentified with state- and nationbuilding. In short, both statebuilding and political development weredefined in a teleological manner, that is, they could not have been explained without reference to the finalgoal: a stable and fully developed Western type of a political system (see Tilly 2006 ).

However, not all members of the SSRC's committee shared the optimistic thrust of the developmentalliterature. Already in 1965, Samuel Huntington had published a classic article in World Politics in which heput forward his famous thesis that rapid modernization, in brief, produces not political development, butpolitical decay (p. 386). Three years later, Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies , in

which he argued that the process of economic and social modernization, if not followed by strong politicaland institutional development, would ultimately lead to the collapse of order and upsurges of violence, andhence the endpoint of development did not necessarily need to resemble Western-style democracies.

At around the same time, and at the invitation of the SSRC, a different group of scholars (mostlyhistorians and sociologists) started researching the processes of Western European state formation. In hisrecent article (2006), Charles Tilly maintains that theorists of political development were hoping that such awork would only confirm their sequenced development approach. However, when in 1975, the editedcollection of essays on The Formation of National States in Western Europe was published, it turned outthat the contributors (Charles Tilly, Stein Rokkan, Samuel Finer, Peter Lundgreen, and others) did not sharethe optimism of the previous generation, for their conclusion was that history did not confirm the overtlyclean and tidy crisis-and-sequence scheme that could somehow be easily emulated by later developingstates. Or, in the words of Tilly, [T]he processes of state formation were far more contingent, transitory,and reversible than analysts of political development then supposed (2006:419).

Major contributors to the debate over state formation in the 1970s and 1980s (Charles Tilly, SteinRokkan, Barrington Moore, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michael Mann) were all united intheir dismissal of the abstract language of structural functionalism and in favor of the evaluation ofconcrete historical processes of state formation in Western Europe. They differed greatly, however, in theirexplanations as to what led to the establishment and consolidation of durable military, administrative,

judicial, and financial apparatuses in Western Europe. This is not surprising, as they were influenced intheir analysis of state formation by various insights and aspects of the works of such diverse authors asMax Weber, Otto Hintze, and Karl Marx ( Ertman 2005 :367).


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In his overview of theories of state formation, Gianfranco Poggi (2004) has tried to introduce a certainorder into this vastly rich literature on statebuilding by identifying three principal perspectives on stateformation (statualization): managerial, military, and economic. The managerial approach to statebuildingemphasizes an increasingly effective administration over population and territory; the military perspective,primarily influenced by Weber and Hintze, focuses on the role of war in the state's increasing monopoly oflegitimate violence; and, finally, the economic perspective, inspired by Marx, emphasizes the role of class

struggle in the process of state formation and consolidation. However, Poggi cogently explains that eventhough these perspectives appear radically different, they in fact complement each other as each oneaddresses one particular aspect of an extremely complex process of statualization that rejects easygeneralizations or a unifying theory.

As Poggi argues, the managerial perspective is mostly concerned with explaining the development ofever more effective ways of collecting resources and providing services to the public ( Strayer 1970 ), on theone side, and with explaining the significance of law in providing stability and order in the process ofstatebuilding ( Berman 1983 ), on the other. These concerns, however, are also important to military andeconomic approaches to state formation. Even though the former recognizes war as central to stateformation ( Tilly 1975 , 1992, 2002), this perspective also recognizes that the development of standingarmies promotes and necessitates the rise of state bureaucracy, particularly in the realms of public financeand taxation systems. In similar fashion, the neo-Marxist approaches could not focus only on the analysisof different class alignments in different parts of Europe without incorporating into their explanation

insights from the so-called managerial and military perspectives. Thus, while Perry Anderson's centralconcern is to explain the uneven development of Europe (1974) in the medieval period, to do so, he alsohas to explain why and how class constellations differ between parts of Eastern and Western Europe. Hisanswer to this question led him to incorporate Weber and Hintze's insights into his work, namely, torecognize the centrality of war and war preparations in differentiating one region from the other. In similarfashion, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) does not offer only an economic analysis of the rise of the Europeanworld economy. He also shows that the processes of increasing bureaucratization, monopolization of force,legitimization of absolutist states, and cultural homogenization were instrumental in the development ofmodern capitalism and the state (1974:1346) Finally, Barrington Moore, in his classic Social Origins of

Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), not only accounts for different class constellations in different parts ofEurope (Britain, France, Germany, Russia) leading to the development of radically different politicalregimes, but also recognizes an autonomous role for the state in the process of political development(Skocpol 1999 ).

In the end, despite all differences in various approaches to state formation, Ertman is certainly right toargue in his overview of statebuilding in Europe that one particular aspect of state formation connects mostof the literature on the subject. He asserts that even more so than the importance of the war, almost allauthors recognize that the expansion of administrative and financial institutions is always followed bypatrimonial practices of proprietary officeholding, tax farming, and financial cronyism with their attendantinefficiency, arbitrariness, and large scale diversion of public funds into private hands, a pervasiveness ofwhich the endemic corruption and rent seeking in the public administration of many developing state[s]today is reminiscent (2005:382). Ertman claims that the literature on the formation of European nation-states offers two answers as to how social groups resisted the rent-seeking pressures of state institutions.One strand of research identifies Brandenburg-Prussia as a model of an authoritarian executive that closelymonitored its own administrators; another points to eighteenth-century Britain, where the state wascontrolled through the expansion of autonomous political representative bodies (Parliament), theautonomous financial market, and a relatively free press (see also Ertman 1997 ). These institutions haveworked together ever since in concert to impose efficient and honest behavior on the part of stateadministrators ( Ertman 2005 :383). Both these scenarios identify themes and institutions that are alsocentral to the contemporary literature on democratization and external statebuilding, as will be seen in theremaining entry's sections.

Statebuilding and Democratization ParadigmThe process of democratization in Southern Europe and Latin America in the 1970s and the

implosion of communism in 1989 have inspired social scientists to coin new concepts (or refurbish oldones) to explain the content and scope of the unprecedented and unanticipated social and political changesthat have resulted from these events ( Whitehead 2002 ). In the process, the very concepts of state- and


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nationbuilding have undergone radical transformation. Originally, statebuilding was used by historians andsociologists to explain state formation in modern Europe. It has since been expanded to encompassprocesses of state formation, both external and internal, in regions around the globe. Furthermore, with theemergence of newly liberated postcolonial states, statebuilding became conflated within the modernizationparadigm. Finally, political scientists replaced the concept of modernization with the new paradigm ofdemocratic transition and consolidation of already existing states. Samuel Huntington's extremely

influential formulation of the third wave of democratization (1991) was instrumental in replacing theconcept of statebuilding with the term democratization . Even though he applied the concept to SouthEuropean and Latin American democratic expansion in the 1970s, it soon became broadly used as a key tounderstanding the Eastern European processes of democratic transition in the 1990s, and later the sameprocesses in Africa and Asia.

The underlying assumption was that in all these cases, one deals with essentially the same phenomena:the breakdown of rigid, nondemocratic regimes and the birth of pluralist societies based on principles ofliberal democracy. In other words, it seemed justifiable to assume that Southern European and LatinAmerican experiences with democratization might (and should) provide analysts of the third and fourthwaves of democratization with valuable insights into transformation policies and processes. Thus, theoriginal ideas, themes, and concepts of the democratization literature have seemed to become part andparcel of comparative politics studies that go well beyond the context of Latin America and SouthernEurope. As such, a sketch of the key findings of this literature, as it relates to the question of the

relationship between society and the state (sociopolitical development), is both necessary and instructiveand thus will complete the remaining part of this section.Among the main themes in the transition paradigm are the role of the military, the relationship between

the state and civil society, the continuing influence of predemocratic politicians inherited from theauthoritarian past, and the legacies of maldeveloped economies. Guillermo O'Donnell classifies thesepractical issues in the case of Brazil into three main continuities: (1) the continuous influence andinstitutional presence of the armed forces, (2) the persistence of notable political actors from the previousregime, and (3) the endurance of elements of old patrimonial politics, such as clientelism and personalism.Accordingly, under conditions of political uncertainty the executive branch can easily slide into old habitsof personalism and clientelism that provide them with the sense of omnipotence. At the same time, suchgovernments are perceived by the populace as impotent, because of their failure to regulate national lifein an effective way. This, on the other side, opens the door for populist politicians to regain ground in thepolitical arena. Thus, O'Donnell's analysis implies that as long as these continuities from the past remain an

important factor in shaping political life during democratic transition and consolidation, there is a distinctpossibility of wild swings between blatantly technocratic and populist styles of government (pp. 37, 50).O'Donnell's distinction between transition to democracy and its consolidation has been widely

influential. Even though this distinction looks rather formalistic, it has practical application in that it allowsthe old questions about the meaning of democracy to be raised from a completely different perspective.Hence, focusing on issues of consolidation allows analysts and policy makers to shift their understanding ofdemocracy from substantive terms (i.e., defining democracy by certain political outcomes) to proceduralterms (defining democracy according to the rules that govern politics) ( Mainwaring et al. 1992 :296). Or,in Mainwaring et al.'s words, [D]emocracy's fundamental claim to legitimacy is not a substantive one(greater efficiency, equity, or growth), but rather a procedural one: guarantees of human rights, protectionof minorities, government accountability, and the opportunity to get rid of rulers who lose their popularsupport (1992:306).

An important corollary of this understanding of democracy is that the aforementioned authors are able

to incorporate many practical issues that grand theoretical schemes, by their very nature, do not usuallycover. Being influenced by Robert Dahl's famous political equation of the costs and benefits ofauthoritarian rule the more the costs of suppression exceed the costs of toleration, the greater the chancefor a competitive regime Mainwaring, O'Donnell, and Valenzuela offer various combinations ofprocedural rules and institutions that may consolidate precarious democracies into stable democraticregimes ( 1992:3225).

However, despite their emphasis on the role of procedures and institutions in the consolidation ofdemocracy, their approach leaves out some important questions raised by D. Rueschemeyer, E. HuberStephens, and J.D. Stephens (1992) . The virtue of this latter work is its incorporation of both substantive


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and procedural elements of democracy. Hence, its understanding of democracy includes not onlyprocedural elements but also the effects that social class divisions and transnational power constellationshave on the democratization process. Following such diverse authors as Karl Marx, Max Weber, andAnthony Giddens, these authors provide the reader with many interesting theoretical insights about thelinks between democracy and capitalism. Links they highlight include those between class constellationsand democratization, and between the state and civil society. They also examine the differentiating effects

of state structures, war, and the impact of economics and geopolitical dependence.Despite the differences in their approaches, both groups of authors support the comparative analysis ofthe structural conditions that favor or inhibit democratic consolidation. They would also seem to agree thatthe issues of democratic consolidation are ultimately issues of power relations, more specifically thosebetween different classes and between the (autonomous) state and civil society. Successes and failures infinding the delicate balance between different class interests, and in delineating borders between the stateand civil society and, increasingly, between domestic and international actors, largely determine theoutcome of the drive toward successful statebuilding understood in terms of a right type of political regime(liberal democracy) ( Diamond 2008 ). As will be seen in the section on the forms of statebuilding, most ofthese insights were either forgotten or simply taken over (or reinvented) in the international relationsliterature on statebuilding.

Statebuilding versus NationbuildingOne particular aspect of the post-1989 Eastern European political transformation democratization in

the context of the rise of ethnic nationalism following the collapse of the former communist federations has been usually perceived as an exclusively Eastern European phenomenon without a counterpart in thepreviously mentioned experiences of Southern Europe or Latin America. It is only recently ( pace areaspecialists) that events in Africa and Central Asia have shown that the problem of ethnic nationalism is nota distinctively Eastern European phenomenon.

One of the reasons why the national revolutions in some parts of the former communist bloc during andafter 1989 appeared different from anywhere else is that with the collapse of the Soviet model of commandpolitics and economics, the socialist state collapsed as well. The consequences of this collapse variedsignificantly throughout the region, depending on whether postcommunist states represented a consolidatednation-state or not. In those states where there was a significant ethnic majority (80/ and more), the collapseof communism did not affect the legitimacy of the state. This was the case in most of the Central Europeanstates, where statebuilding became synonymous with the process of democratization and liberalization ofthe state (as was previously the case in Southern Europe and Latin America); however, in the Balkans andthe former Soviet Union, postsocialist transitions took the form of (sometimes very violent) ethnic conflictsfor control of the state. At least in the cases of the former Yugoslavia and parts of the former Soviet Union,this led to prolonged wars resulting in the birth of many new nation-states in the region. Thus, out of nineformerly communist states in 1989, 28 nation-states emerged by the end of the 1990s ( Roeder 1999 ). Inother words, the process of statebuilding became inextricably connected to and confused withnationbuilding. The final result was that, at the end of the 1990s, the political struggle in many ethnicallyheterogeneous postsocialist states revolved exclusively around the issues of self-determination and statesovereignty ( Brubaker 1996 ; Huttenbach and Privitera 1999 ; Smith 1999 ; Kymlicka and Opalski 2002 ).Accordingly, many analysts were forced to ask the question as to why (in the context of multination statesin crisis) the nationalist call has proven to be more potent time and again than any other alternativenarrative.

The most provocative answer to the rise of nationalist conflicts following the process ofdemocratization came from Jack Snyder (2000) . His analysis of nationalist conflicts in the 1990s leads himto hypothesize that the process of democratization (particularly in its early stages) enhances, rather thanreduces, the possibility of both international and internal ethnic conflicts. Snyder maintains that inpolitically weak societies with little understanding of liberal institutions, it is in the self-interest of variousethnic elites to sidetrack democratization and pursue the defense of sacred national interests. Thecountries upon which he draws his analysis vary from the historic examples of Britain, France, Germany,and Serbia to countries of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India, Rwanda,and Burundi. Not unlike Linz and Stepan (1996) , Snyder maintains that ethnic mass mobilization becomesan alluring substitute for true democracy. However, unlike Linz and Stepan in their comparativeevaluation of democratization policies in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, Snyder


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strongly doubts the short-term possibilities of managing ethnic nationalism through various forms of powersharing or cross-ethnic alliances. He believes that power-sharing arrangements between different ethnicleaderships tend to solidify ethnicity as the single most important identity marker in such states, at theexpense of policies that could foster more inclusive, civic versions of national identity.

Snyder's analysis seems to support Dankwart Rustow's insight that the vast majority of citizens in ademocracy must have no doubts or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to

(1970:350). To the extent that this is not the case, statebuilding and nationbuilding tend to work againsteach other ( Connor 1993 ; Conversi 2004 ). Paul Collier in his latest book Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places offers empirical support for Snyder's claims regarding the dangers ofpremature elections in postconflict countries ( 2009). Collier argues that the international communityfocuses too much on elections, and that in the context of poor, fragile, multiethnic states an election is often

just a faade rather than a sign of meaningful democracy. Ultimately, without a broader framework ofaccountability between such states and the international community, elections are often destabilizing andwill lead to the process of state destruction rather than statebuilding ( Roeder and Rothchild 2005 ; Collier2009).

Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin have echoed these sentiments (2001) . They suggest thatcontemporary democratizing states (countries of the third wave of democratization) don't have the luxuryof first becoming modern states (the clearly established and socially accepted rules of law, strongparliaments, and the judiciary) before extending the vote to the masses. Instead, they are forced to complete

the democratization process backward as they are pushed by the international community into earlyelections prior to engaging in statebuilding ( Rose and Chin 2001 ; see also Paris 2004 ). Ultimately, thesestates are no longer in transition, but instead, as Georg Sorensen argues, they have reached a point ofstandstill (2008). This is the situation when, as Thomas Carothers nicely explains ( 2002, 2007), onepolitical group tries to dominate the political apparatus of the state. In the context of ethnically diversestates, such dominant power politics quickly degenerates into political violence and conflict that fullyreplace the process of statebuilding with its exact opposite nationbuilding understood in terms of statedestroying.

War and StatesContrary to the aforementioned historical-sociological research on state formation in Europe,

contemporary statebuilding literature, notably in the discipline of international relations, does not accountfor the statebuilding potential of social conflict. Current research on civil wars has been paradigmaticallyframed by two images in the past decade. On the one hand, a major influence has been the greed versusgrievance debate that was initiated at the end of the 1990s by Paul Collier's work for the World Bank oncivil war ( Collier et al. 2005 ); on the other hand, several analyses stating that contemporary civil wars arenew in their mixture of the privatization of violence, state destruction, and forms of violence have led tothe inference that these wars do not construct states as sixteenth- or seventeenth-century wars did inEurope; rather, they are state-decay wars ( Kaldor 1999 ; Mnkler 2002). Both strands of research havebeen particularly influential in establishing a political consensus about statebuilding as security policy. Inboth arguments, weak or failing statehood is considered to be the primary cause of contemporary protractedarmed conflicts. Indeed, the very existence of civil war proves that governments are unable to containopponents: Civil war is an armed conflict that pits the government and national army of an internationallyorganized state against one or more armed opposition groups able to mount effective resistance against thestate (Doyle and Sambanis 2006 :31). The state is seen as existing prior to the conflict, and war resultsfrom the incapacity, unwillingness, or both of the state to solve social conflicts and to respond adequatelyto grievances and distribution problems ( Doyle and Sambanis [2006] talk of coordination and cooperationproblems; see p. 51). In other words, intentionally or not, these authors invoke pluralist state theories, suchas those developed in Robert Dahl's work Poliarchy (1972) , as they assume that war arises out ofconflicting interests within given state institutions.

This research shows little interest in or connection to previous analyses on civil war and statebuildingdone from historical and sociopolitical perspectives. Classic analyses like Barrington Moore's Dictatorshipand Democracy (1966); Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital and European States (1992); Norbert Elias TheCivilizing Process (1994); or Michael Mann's The Sources of Social Power (1986) (just to mention a few)have emphasized, each in its own way, the importance of internal warfare not only for the acquisition ofphysical means of force and power by specific social classes, but also for the forging of rights, laws, and


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political institutions necessary for the building of the state that then acquires autonomous powers (or not).More importantly, as all these authors argue, institutions do not necessarily solve the social conflicts oftheir time, but the other way around: The social conflicts and the respective distributions of power shapethe institutions, that is, differentiated institutions arose because they proved to be useful instruments in thehands of social classes in the struggle over power and domination in political, economic, and cultural terms.

With their emphasis on state destruction and state failure, current analyses of civil wars tend to

underestimate the dynamics of sociopolitical power configurations. Consequently, motives and capabilitiesof actors to support or obstruct peace processes are not accurately understood. One effect this has had hasbeen the depoliticization of many conflicts as they are seen to be motivated by greed or violent strategiesof ethnic group building but not as conflicts over opposing political designs. This partial blindness towardthe sociopolitical dynamics of civil wars is deepened through the voluntarist approach to statebuilding,where much discussion centers around the ability of the institutions to impose and very little focus is on thelocal particularities. Statebuilding as a global project has, in the past, been pursued rather as a tool-kitapproach where the solution to the puzzle involves the right combination of ingredients. The negligence ofscholars to couch their analyses of institutional dynamics in an understanding of local politics meansinstitutional failure is often interpreted as resulting from voluntary spoiling strategies or posttraumaticstress disorder. Richard Caplan exemplifies such characterizations with the remark that too rapid a transferof authority carries its own risks: among other things, it can overwhelm a people emerging from the traumaof violent conflict as well as reinforce divisions that lie at the heart of the conflict as former warring parties

compete for political power ( Caplan 2005a :110; emphasis added).Statebuilding as Global ProjectSince the early 1990s, the number of statebuilding projects has multiplied, often ending several years or

even decades of violent conflict. The objectives of these missions have been formulated ad hoc, driven bythe geopolitical contexts in which the mandates of statebuilding missions were established. While inpostconflict situations the first goal is to establish physical security and to reestablish the materialinfrastructures, middle- and long-term goals aim at the establishment of rule of law, the creation of stateinstitutions (bureaucracies as well as political-constitutional institutions), the holding of elections, thecreation of a civil society sector and public opinion, the liberalization of the economy, and so on.

After initial success in establishing a sense of physical security, the empirical evidence documents inmost cases that statebuilding has failed, or only moderately succeeded, in the process of externally buildingstates. In some countries violence has resumed after the initial end of hostilities. In others the best resultsachieved were authoritarian regimes based on fragile stalemates between warring parties. Finally, in manycases, the statebuilding missions have become states within states. That is, in response to their inability torebuild externally supported states on the principles of pluralist societies, democracy, and market economy,they keep postponing the official end to their missions for fear of undermining positive (but modest) resultsof economic and political reforms that have been achieved thus far. As Astri Suhrke (2009) shows forAfghanistan, state revenues keep diminishing despite all the efforts of the international community. Thesame can be shown for other cases of statebuilding whether in the form of international missions in so-called fragile states (see the case studies in Goetze and Guzina 2008 ; and see Hughes 2003) or in the formof continued development assistance (see Schlichte on Uganda in Goetz and Guzina 2008 ). The mixedsuccess of statebuilding coupled with its high costs make one wonder what the motivations for suchambitious projects of social engineering might be. Two main motivations can be discerned anddistinguished: On the one hand, statebuilding has become an integral part of global security strategies; onthe other hand, statebuilding is seen as a moral imperative in an ever more interdependent world in whichhuman rights and life integrity are to be the ethical keystones of a globalized world.

Statebuilding as Global Security PoliticsNumerous policy-advising analysts see state failure and protracted violence as threats to the national

security of Western states and to the international order in general. The international system is based onsovereign statehood, which in the 1990s was redefined as the internal capacity of effective rule rather thansimply the external recognition of independence. The norm of noninterference, which emerged as a markerof sovereignty during the Cold War and was reaffirmed during the independence of former colonies in the1960s, was superseded in the late 1990s by the norm of responsibility, that is, the state's internal capacityto respond to the demands and needs of its population. So-called failing or collapsing states that, by


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definition, are incapable of responsibility were redefined as threats to sovereignty and, consequently, alsoto the international system.

Yet, it is not enough that these failing or collapsing states are considered to be undermining thenormative justification of the international system. They are also seen as anomic spaces that harborpotential terrorists, whose political vacuum leads to refugee flows and social unrest, and that generally riskinfecting the wider world through their anarchic nature. This latter view has notably gained credence

through the American-led war on terror as expressed in the 2002 US security strategy, which identifiesthe poor governance of third world countries as a fundamental cause of terrorism and protracted violence.The main objective of peace- and statebuilding has become to secure international stability through thepolicing and controlling of those areas that are considered anarchic spaces without effective government.This view has been ventilated by authors and policy advisors like Francis Fukuyama, Robert I Rotberg,Fareed Zakaria, Stephen Krasner, or Robert Kaplan.

As the process of statebuilding is seen to ameliorate the position of the local population, these authorsdo not see any particular ethical problem arising from new forms of trusteeship or shared sovereignty, asKrasner calls it (2004) . Consulting the local population is neither a moral nor a legal obligation but merelya device to enhance legitimacy, and for this an ombudsman scheme should suffice. The control of theinternational administration is primarily an administrative task of oversight that can be fulfilled by theinternational community itself.

In order to fulfill its mandate of securing the anarchic regions of the world, the internationaladministration need not be accountable to the local populations. Indeed, Krasner argues that internationaladministration has become necessary exactly because the local population, and particularly its politicians,have proven their incapacity to rule the country. In the view of these authors, democracy necessarilysucceeds institution building under the logic that the main aim of peace- and statebuilding is the militaryand institutional stabilization of the country. For these authors, interventions do not constitute a violation ofsovereignty for the very reason that our understanding of sovereignty has changed with the end of the ColdWar. Sovereignty has been redefined as responsibility in the international realm as well as responsibilitytoward citizens. Sovereignty has never been fully realized by the kind of states in which statebuilding takesplace, and, worse, this failure makes them apparent hosts to organized criminality, breading grounds forterrorism, and the starting point of undesirable forms of migration and refugee flows.

Consequently, trusteeships have become a necessity in order to enforce the new norm of sovereignty.This view has not vanished over the years of protracted conflict in Iraq and fading progress in Afghanistan,as a recent article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences shows. Thearticle spells out 40 recommendations for the future US president, many of which are military in nature,and forced democratization holds a strong place among the suggestions to eradicate terrorism ( Bergen andFooter 2008 ).

Statebuilding to Save LivesIn sharp contradistinction to the advocates of statebuilding as security policy, many defenders of

statebuilding put forward ethical goals based on the notions of sustainable peace, durable peace , or humansecurity . The paradigm of human security has been established in numerous policy documents fromnongovernmental organizations, the UNDP, and most notably the Human Security Report publishedannually since 2002 by the Human Security Centre.

The concept of human security advances the idea that human rights and individual safety are at the coreof the international politics of development and security. Such a widened concept goes far beyond theworld-order approach to peacebuilding sketched above. Advocated at the end of the 1990s through the

Millennium goal pledges of the United Nations, the concept of human security was defined as the creationof an environment in which people live, according to the then Secretary General of the United Nations KofiAnnan, in a world free of fear and free of want. The concept built on a decade of redefining theconcepts of security, sovereignty, and development. Notably, the concept of human security waspromulgated by the Human Development Report in 1994 and the increasing consensus within the UnitedNations system over so-called humanitarian interventions and peacebuilding, voiced first in BoutrosBoutros-Ghali's 1992 Agenda for Peace, then reiterated in the 1995 addendum and again in the 2000Brahimi Report ( Brahimi 2000 ).


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Sponsored by the Japanese government, the Human Security Commission developed this conceptfurther in its Human Security Report in 2001. The report seeks mainly to distinguish the concept of humansecurity clearly from the state-centric concept of national security by focusing on the well-being ofindividuals and not states, and by integrating the modified notion of sovereignty as responsibility ofgovernments toward their citizens and global humanity. Human security exists if the government pursuespolicies aimed not only at the protection from physical violence, but also at public health, economic

development, public education, and the general welfare of the people. The work of the Commission hasbeen carried on by the Human Security Centre (n.d.; www.hsrgroup.org ), which continues to monitorprogress of the development goals defined in the first Human Security Report.

The need for peace- and statebuilding is therefore not legitimated through egoistic considerations ofnational security but through a concern for the global well-being of populations. Simon Chesterman,Michael Ignatieff, and Ramesh Thakur (2005) , for instance, condemn the US-American Security Strategyas being too shortsighted and simplistic. The aim of peace- and statebuilding ought not to be merely tomake the state work but also to build a democratic state in which human rights are respected and wealthredistributed in order to prevent individuals or small groups from mobilizing discontent and fear that willconsecutively escalate into war. If these authors agree with national security scholars that civil warterritories are breeding grounds for terrorism and organized crimes, they nevertheless consider welfarepolicies to be a better remedy to these risks than simply policing these sanctuaries. Consequently, theseauthors advocate long-term strategies with substantial funding and involvement of various international

actors in order to develop these countries. As Chesterman states, Resolving the contradictions [ofstatebuilding] requires an acceptance that even where the ends of transitional administrations may beidealistic, the means cannot be. The challenge, then, is to manage the interests of the various internationaland local actors through a framework that provides a realistic opportunity for the population in a territory totake control of their political destiny ( Chesterman 2004 :9).

Most importantly, these authors differ in their visions of how statebuilding should be executed. As theaim of these missions ought to be protection and empowerment of the local population, they see afundamental dilemma in the neocolonial appearance of statebuilding and its aims. They often call forgreater attention to the local population and for projects that focus on the empowerment of those groupsthat are seen as particularly vulnerable such as minorities, children, women, and the elderly. They alsoadvocate a greater coordination and consistency in the planning of the missions and in designating clearresponsibilities. Usually, the United Nations is seen as the ideal decision-making body for and executor ofstatebuilding missions. As such, reform of the UN generally appears as the primary item on the list of

recommendations made by these authors.Forms of StatebuildingAccording to whether peace is defined negatively as the absence of war or positively as human security,

different strategies are suggested for successful statebuilding. In order to understand these strategies, onemust first address the major disagreements that exist as to which causes of war and state failure are morerelevant. In fact, statebuilding represents a series of problems; not only do these programs have the goal ofestablishing peace among warring parties, but also they have to transform societies fundamentally. Thisrequires changing the politicoadministrative institutions, and the political culture and forms; transformingand developing the economy into full-fledged market economies; and creating pluralistic, democratic, andtolerant societies. One common approach is to consider peace- and statebuilding as tool-kit exercises wherethe right mix of different components will lead to success.

Tool-Kit Approaches

One way of making sense of statebuilding is to consider it as being composed of multiple componentsand to develop an understanding of how these might fit together. Some of these models try deliberately toreduce complexity by simplifying the conflict and the statebuilding dynamics, whereas others developrather complex models that try to capture the global dynamics of statebuilding.

Michael Doyle and Nicolas Sambanis (2006) , for instance, have developed the peacebuilding triangle ,which condenses the statebuilding situation to a threefold relationship between local capacities,international capacities, and the level of local hostility. Nevertheless, this relationship is not symmetrical asDoyle and Sambanis emphasize the heightened importance of the role of local dynamics in their triangle.On the one hand, the success of statebuilding depends on the economic and institutional resources available


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in the country; on the other hand, the level of hostility persisting after a cease-fire will determine the actorswillingness to cooperate and collectively rebuild the country. International interventions must aim at fillingthe gaps that exist on these two local dimensions. For example, if the hostility is too great to make acomprehensive peace agreement possible, the international community needs to focus its efforts onestablishing fair conditions of peace, including disarmament and provision of security. If the localcapacities are weak, the international community must emphasize development assistance that furthers the

economic, administrative, and infrastructural capacities of the postconflict states. From these lessons Doyleand Sambanis establish a seven-step plan for peace- and statebuilding: (1) establish national security, (2)establish regional security, (3) allow quick wins in the form of humanitarian assistance andreconstruction of infrastructures (energy, roads, and buildings), (4) establish the rule of law, (5) ascertainthe right to property, (6) launch participatory democratic processes, and, finally, (7) initiate genuine moraland psychological reconciliation ( Doyle and Sambanis 2006 :341).

Even though Doyle and Sambanis admit that these steps do not have to occur in consecutive order, theygive little advice on how each of these steps can be achieved and how they are related to each other. Yet,despite its vagueness, Doyle and Sambanis seven-step plan reflects common wisdom of the policyadvising literature in statebuilding. The United States Institute of Peace similarly promotes a frameworkfor success for fragile states and societies emerging from conflict in which the following five elements arepresented as cornerstones of durable peace: a safe and secure environment, the rule of law, a stabledemocracy, a sustainable economy, and social well-being (n.d.; see www.usip.org ). The RAND

Corporation, in its The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building (2007), suggests, similar to Doyle andSambanis, to first establish physical security through military and police reform, then strengthen the rule oflaw, respond to immediate needs of the population through humanitarian assistance, and make sure that aneffective government is in place; from there on, statebuilders need to pursue the goals of economicstabilization, democratization, and development. The OECD, too, in its Principles for Good InternationalEngagement in Fragile States and Situations, argues that priority should be given to ensuring security and

justice; mobilizing revenue; establishing an enabling environment for basic service delivery, strongeconomic performance and employment generation ( OECD, 2007 ). Neither of these organizationsexplores the question of how exactly this can be done in complex conflict situations that usually imply,among other difficulties, a strong hostility against the intervening forces themselves.

Delving into Local ContextsOne major problem with the analysis and, more specifically, with the practice of contemporary

statebuilding is the lack of social sensibility. Local actors are often characterized and compartmentalizedbased on their immediate interests in the postconflict situation that do not reflect their social positions andtheir collective struggles over power in political, social, and cultural terms. Notably the model or tool-kitapproaches distinguish only vaguely between the social strata and groups within and among warringparties. Furthermore, the dynamics of statebuilding and social class formation remain unseen andneglected, which is in direct contradiction to some of the major insights of the democratization andliberalization literature of the previous decade.

Barnett and Zuercher's peacebuilder's contract focuses specifically on the difficulties of managing thelocal context as the starting point for their model ( 2007). Contrary to the approaches above, they do notassume that statebuilders are parachuted into postconflict situations and then simply have to dosomething, but rather that they are constitutive of the conflict situation itself. Barnett and Zuercherobserved in the case of Afghanistan that statebuilding fundamentally influences the power strategies oflocal actors who will, according to their goals and resources, try to capture and detour statebuilding effortsfor their own interests. Once the statebuilders are seen as a constitutive element of the local situation, themeager successes of statebuilding can be explained as results of negotiations and strategic games betweennational elites, subnational power rivals, and internationals. Notably, the problem of establishing security,which is largely dependent on the local elite's willingness to cooperate with international security forces,becomes a bargaining token with which local elites will haggle over other resources like the access tohumanitarian aid, infrastructures, parts in government, and so on.

They distinguish four types of outcomes from this interaction. First, in the case of cooperativestatebuilding (or, in their terminology, peacebuilding ), all three actor groups agree on the projects and thedistribution of its benefits; however, in a second case scenario where statebuilding becomes a stake instrategic power games between the different actor groups, the best outcome to hope for is compromised


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statebuilding in which the international peacebuilders will swap cooperation in some issues againststalemate in others. Yet, in a third possible outcome, if too many of the statebuilder's projects and resourcesare captured by local elites, Barnett and Zuercher speak of captured statebuilding , which can develop intoconflictual statebuilding (the fourth possible outcome). This is a scenario when both sides, internationalsand domestic actors, may opt for coercive tools (violence) to (re)capture these resources and achievetheir objectives. Overall, as local elites will almost always try to get a hold on state-building projects,

Barnett and Zuercher argue that compromised peacebuilding has become the norm. This explains not onlythe mixed success of statebuilding missions but also their long duration. As statebuilders become deeplyinvolved in local power struggles and as projects become compromised, exit strategies cannot beimplemented and the international missions continue over years and years.

Apart from the obvious evidence of the never-ending missions all over the world, quite a number ofempirical studies support Barnett and Zuercher's thesis of the statebuilders becoming a constitutive part ofthe postconflict local power struggles. Roland Kostic (2007 , 2008) has shown for Bosnia how much theOffice of the High Representative (OHR) and the statebuilding project it represents have become pivotalplayers in the Bosnian political field, determining not only how local elites place themselves with respect toeach other in daily politics but also how the OHR's position is structuring the more general political ideasabout nation, state, and society. Beatrix Pouligny (2004) has carefully analyzed how the sheer presence ofstatebuilders, even more than their actions and projects, has transformed local societies and politics.

Beyond showing that statebuilding is never a neutral, objective job to be done by outsiders, and that

already the notion of intervention has been misplaced as it implies a determined plan of goal achievementand exit, these empirical studies point to the huge variety of ways in which statebuilding becomescompromised. Already, Barnett and Zuercher's three-tier model of international statebuilders, nationalelites, and subnational local elites appears too short-handed for most societies, which are much morecomplex as elites not only span transnational networks but also are socially, economically, culturally, andethnically much more diversified and stratified. Again, it is useful to recall the insights of the historical-sociological studies on state formation in Europe, namely, the finding that the particular form of a state iscontingent upon struggles between social groups, and not upon institutional design. External statebuildersintervene exactly in those social struggles and become part of them.

Coordination and the United Nations Peacebuilding CommissionWhereas on the one side, local constraints and strategies mold statebuilding missions, the international

community itself is seen as a major problem in the statebuilding process. Despite its commonly used name,the international community is far from being a consistent community. On the contrary, in the case ofstatebuilding it is necessary to distinguish carefully between all the international agencies, state actors, andnongovernmental organizations that participate in these missions. Not only are they very different infinancial endowment and in their organizational capacities, but also their aims and goals may vary sharplyand create insolvable contradictions between various mandates. The cry for better coordination amongagencies, for clearer leadership in the statebuilding community, and for greater financial as well asorganizational independence from donors is usually a key conclusion of reports, papers, and books onstatebuilding.

The 2004 report of the General Secretary's High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (UN, 2004 ) was the last report in a row of assessments ofthe United Nations peacebuilding capacities. It prominently called for better coordination amongst allactors involved in peace- and statebuilding. The report prompted the creation of the United NationsPeacebuilding Commission through the General Assembly Resolution 60/180 and the UN Security CouncilResolution 1645 (2005) of December 20, 2005. Yet extended negotiations about its composition andprocedures made the commission take up its work only in late 2006.

The Peacebuilding Commission is a consultative body that works on the basis of consensus among itsmembers and at the request of the state in which the peacebuilding mission ought to take place. Its mandateis to provide information about peacebuilding needs, and to offer a forum of exchange and coordination ininstitutional-procedural and financial matters, for all involved parties. It has no decision-making power ofits own, yet it is hoped that it can clear the field in advance of missions, set priorities, assignresponsibilities, and anticipate coordination problems, thus heightening the efficiency of peacebuildingmeasures. It has a standing fund to allow initiative projects and ease transition gaps between immediatehumanitarian assistance during and just after conflict, and longer term recovery. The fund has a target of


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$250 million, of which, as of April 2009, roughly $102 million has been allocated to projects in Burundi,Central African Republic, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Cte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Haiti, Kenya, and Nepal.The peacebuilding commission has also taken up its own tasks like the Working Group on LessonsLearned, which aims at formulating strategies on the basis of lessons learned from previous peacebuildingmissions.

Even though it is correct that all peacebuilding and statebuilding missions have remained underfunded

(at least with respect to the initial pledges, even though some like Kosovo have been funded much moregenerously than others) and that there are time and again cases of shared goals but failed coordinationefforts, Roland Paris has pointed out that most of what has been labeled as a coordination problem is in facta reflection of fundamental differences in the aims, values, and worldviews of the agencies involved ( Parisand Sisk 2009 ). These differences can be seen in the three main categories of statebuilding actors.

First, states, which remain the ultimate legitimating bodies of statebuilding through the United Nations,have differing views on how much intrusion international law may and should allow. These differencescould recently be best observed in the debates between the European Union and the US with China overintervention in Sudan and Darfur. Yet, even where peacebuilding missions have been decided, thebalancing of different state interests has led in almost all cases to skewed mission mandates (such as, untilrecently, the hybrid status of Kosovo as province of sovereign Serbia and as a territory under internationaladministration).

The second dividing line goes between international agencies and their programmatic missions. The riftbetween the IMF and World Bank over structural adjustment programs and the effects of globalization,voiced mainly by the writings of the then World Bank Senior Vice President Joseph Stiglitz, shows clearlythat international agencies do not act as blocks but that important differences exist within the liberal-democratic market paradigm of peace that make for strongly diverging views on the priorities ofstatebuilding. They do so not only because each agency needs to have its own agenda in order to gain adistinctive profile in global governance, but also because they have very different constituencies.

The same is true, by the way, for most nongovernmental organizations, which, from the outset, havebeen closely integrated into statebuilding missions. The generic umbrella term NGO conceals the hugediversity of organizations that may fall under this categorization. Some of them stem from global networksof specialized, professionalized organizations, while others are genuine, sometimes amateur, grassrootsorganizations with a strong local foothold, while still others are ephemeral mushroom organizations bornout of sporadic indignation or out of simple opportunism. The NGO community is, as are internationalagencies, deeply divided over the aims and means of statebuilding. So-called coordination problems oftenreflect these divisions rather than problems of compatible working procedures or communication styles.Furthermore, the focus on information exchange and procedural coordination problems masks the politicalnature of statebuilding, presenting it merely as an administrative exercise. Yet, opposition and resistance tostatebuilding and its resulting inefficiencies are more often the consequence of fundamental political andideological disagreements between and within local and international actors than the simple lack ofcoordination.

Statebuilding: A New Empire in the Making?Since statebuilding projects difficulties have become clear with the never-ending mission in Bosnia-

Herzegovina and the painfully slow progress in other internationally administered areas, criticism of theseglobal governance projects has not ceased. The accusation of a new imperialism goes far beyond theskepticism of some authors cited above about the efficiency of this or that project. Rather, the moral,political, and legitimate foundations of statebuilding missions are questioned. Scholars who develop such a

fundamentally critical view are more interested in the patterns of power and domination that are at work instatebuilding than in its everyday routines ( Bickerton et al. 2007 ). Their goal is precisely not to developanother policy recommendation catalogue but to unveil the elementary reasons why such global socialengineering projects are bound to create more conflict than they will solve.

Although these authors take very different stands on statebuilding, they agree that the policy-advisingliterature fails to acknowledge the fundamental problems of the entire enterprise.

The authors main argument is that with the existing world economic and political structures, statescannot be rebuilt through UN-administered statebuilding and that, consequently, these projects serve apurpose other than the well-being of the population, namely, the building of new empires. They also agree


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that these empires are substantially different from their predecessors as they rely neither on direct territorialcontrol and reign, nor on the disciplinary violence of a sovereign power. Rather, they are established on thegrounds of devolution and decentralization of authority to international agencies, NGOs, and ad hocinterstate bodies and through indirect control. Many of these analyses, though not all, refer to theFoucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics to capture these new, global forms ofexercising power over the periphery in the name of their own advancement and well-being.

Marc Duffield (2007) , for instance, denounces development as a security policy that holds as itsprimary goal not the creation of well-being, but the establishment of stability that is necessary for the worldcapitalist system to keep up its functioning and search for markets and profits. Duffield draws on theglobalization analyses of Manuel Castells (2004) and David Harvey (2001) , who both see globalization as acapitalist enterprise that divides the world into productive, consumerist (and hence useful) territories andpopulations, and waste, unproductive (and hence useless) territories and populations. The latter needcontainment and some sort of governance to maintain order and avoid negative effects on the productiveworld. Empire is understood as the establishment of a governance structure that upholds this division of theworld by holding the dangerous populace in place yet, at the same time, works for the creation of newzones for consumption in order to dump the surplus value created in the productive zones of the planet.

David Chandler (2006) defends a very different view of the causes of empire building. Whereas theempire of post-Marxist analysts has a sense and a meaning, namely, the absorption of surplus value eitherby liberating capital factors that allow new investments ( Harvey 2001 ) or by discarding useless

populations ( Duffield 2007 ), Chandler maintains that the core characteristic of the global project ofgovernance through statebuilding is its denial of responsibility and authorship. With the loss of grandnarratives and grand projects after the end of the Cold War, politics is not about changing the worldanymore but only about remedying negative effects the world might have on individuals. Hence, Chandlerclaims, politics in the West, where statebuilding comes from, has moved from collective projects ofrevolutionary change to therapy and band-aids. Statebuilding is a patronizing attempt to silence those areasof the world whose failed modernization risks pose uncomfortable questions for the Western world. Theobjective of empire is not to physically control populations, production, or trade as in former times but topreserve the ideas, values, and norms of the liberal, modern world through the suppression and defamationof alternative political organizations: The dynamic of Empire in Denial is continually to underminecenters where social power exists in order to create artificial subjects to be empowered or capacity-built(Chandler 2006 :192). The pathology of world politics is therefore not to be sought in the zones ofstatebuilding, but in the West where the evasion of responsibility, claiming that power cannot change the

world, has become the central aim of politics altogether.Instead of ConclusionThe literature on statebuilding encapsulates a vast number of theories and approaches that more often

than not collide with each other, claim the exact opposite, and mount (contradictory) evidence in support oftheir mutually exclusive claims. Still, even though the distinct branches of the literature (historicalsociology, comparative politics, and IR) use very different approaches and methods of analysis, what unitesthem is their inquiry into the general structural and policy-making conditions that nurture or impedestatebuilding processes. It could have hardly been otherwise, given that most of the surveyed authors weredeeply influenced by political events that sparked their interests in statebuilding in the first place. Thus,Rokkan (see Flora 1999 ) and Tilly not only were interested in getting the picture of European state- andnation-building right, but also were curious as to whether the insights of historical sociology can tell usmore about a contemporary context of statebuilding beyond the Western European borders. This is also astrue for comparative writers in the field of democratization studies in the 1970s and 1980s (Linz andStepan) as it is for the IR analysts (Paris, Chandler) on challenges of external statebuilding in the 1990s andbeyond. Yet, our survey also elucidates a more problematic characteristic of the statebuilding literature alack of dialogue across the various disciplines. Many of the claims in the IR literature on externalstatebuilding are a mirror image of the previous ones made on democratization (Paris work nicelyencapsulates the similarities between the two). An additional problem is the propensity to repeat the samemistakes of the previous generations (for example, the early years of optimism of the democratizationliterature mirror the early optimism of some IR scholars in regard to statebulding experiments in Bosnia,Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan).


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To sum up, the following topics will arguably define possible trends in the future research onstatebuilding. First, comparative politics is ever more vociferous in raising doubts about the ultimatedestination point for countries in transition. New research points out a direction that would be very familiarto the likes of Samuel Huntington. In many places, new forms of hybrid regimes, partly democratic andpartly authoritarian, have emerged. In particular, the persistence of populist leaders and politics, risingabstention rates, and multifaceted forms of exclusion have raised doubts about the smoothness and linearity

of democratization. A similar trend is slowly emerging in the problem-solving stream of the IR literaturethat is nowadays open to claims that the correlation between statebuilding and democratization is lessstraightforward than originally conceived in the transition paradigm literature. Political attitudes and culturehave come and will continue to be seen as important factors of analysis, although disputes go on as to howmuch importance exactly has to be conferred onto them.

Another discernible trend in the statebuilding literature revolves around the slowly emergingrecognition that the interaction between internal and external factors, and their mutual influence andconditioning, continue to be poorly understood. In other words, a billiard ball model of internationalintervention (to use this old image), which situates international and local actors in opposing positions as ifthey were autonomous and independent from each other and as if their moves were triggered in a linearmanner by specific stimuli, struggles to recognize fully the political dynamics of peace- and statebuilding.From the policy perspective, particular blind spots seem to result in the loss of a micro perspective; that is,what does the local population think, and how does it act in response to external actors moves? Those

critical of statebuilding struggle with their almost exclusive focus on external democratization withouttaking into account different local contexts within which such processes take place. Thus one of the futuretrends will be in bypassing these omissions (see the recent special issue of Civil Wars journal onstatebuilding 2008).

Finally, nationbuilding is one area of research where different disciplines seem to refrain from engagingin discourse. Most schools from the IR perspective (irrespective of whether they are critical of statebuildingor not) approach nationbuilding as a concept of a rather dubious value that can be safely bypassed byalluding to less contested terms such as institution and democracy building. They do this, however, at theirown peril. As the very entries on nationalism, power sharing and federalism contest in this volume, IR'sbenevolent neglect of the sociological and comparative work on various forms of nationbuilding has led toa dead end when it is confronted with the question of how to explain the failures of democracy-buildingstrategies in the multiethnic setting of various Bosnias around the world. The work of Jack Snyder (2000) on early stages of democratization and nationalist conflicts; Stephen Saideman's work (2001) on the links

between ethnic politics, foreign policy, and international conflict; and Philip Roeder's study (2007) oninstitutional changes in the age of nationalism represent examples of authors who are already straddlingdifferent fields and aspects of the comparative and IR literature on statebuilding, nationalism, anddemocratization.

The novice to the field is well advised to pick up any of the mentioned authors and start sifting his orher way through the literature maze. An alternative route is of course to closely follow major journals in thefield that regularly publish articles on state- and nationbuilding.

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Online Resources

Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), University of Maryland. Atwww.cidcm.umd.edu , accessed April 28, 2009. The Center's projects are of direct relevance for state- andnationbuilding. The International Crisis Behavior project gathers data on all international crises since theend of World War I. The Minorities at Risk project monitors the status of politically active communalgroups around the world. The Polity project tracks regime characteristics for independent states from 1800to the present.

Center for Systemic Peace (CSP). At www.systemicpeace.org , accessed April 28, 2009. The CSPregularly monitors and reports on global, regional, and state levels of conflict, governance, and (human andphysical) development. The Center is affiliated with the Center for Global Policy at George MasonUniversity.

International Conflict Research (INCORE). At www.incore.ulst.ac.uk , accessed April 28, 2009.Established in 1993, INCORE is a joint project of the United Nations University and the University ofUlster. Combining research, education, and comparative analysis, INCORE addresses the causes andconsequences of conflict, peace, and statebuilding in divided societies.

International Crisis Group (ICG). At www.crisisgroup.org , accessed April 28, 2009. The InternationalCrisis Group is one of the world's leading independent, nonpartisan sources of analysis and advice togovernments and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union, and World Bank onthe prevention and resolution of deadly conflict.

Post-Conflict Reconstruction (PCR) Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).At www.csis.org/isp/pcr/ , accessed April 28, 2009. The Center is a bipartisan, nonprofit organizationheadquartered in Washington, DC. In 2002, the CSIS established the PCR Project as a leading global


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source for authoritative analysis, evaluation, and recommendations for fragile states and postconflictreconstruction.

Program on States and Security. At www.statesandsecurity.org , accessed April 28, 2009. The Programwas established in 2004, and its main projects focus on the importance of fostering communication betweenacademic researchers and those who make and implement policy related to statebuilding, state capacity,and state failure. The director of the Program is Professor Susan Woodward, City University of New York.

Sustainable Peacebuilding Network (SPN). At www.statebuilding.org , accessed April 28, 2009. TheSPN is an international research initiative involving more than 20 scholars under the direction of ProfessorsRoland Paris and Timothy Sisk. The network examines the requirements for sustainable peace in countriesemerging from civil wars.

UK Stabilisation Unit. At www.stabilisationunit.gov.uk , accessed April 28, 2009. The Stabilisation Unitis a UK government interdepartmental unit that helps improve the UK's ability to support countriesemerging from violent conflict.

United Nations Peacebuilding Commission. At www.un.org/peace/peacebuilding/ , accessed April 28,2009. The Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) is an intergovernmental advisory body of the United Nationsthat supports peace efforts in countries emerging from conflict.

The Peacebuilding Initiative. At www.peacebuildinginitiative.org , accessed May 4, 2009. Developed byHPCR International in partnership with the United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office and in

cooperation with the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University, theInitiative aims to enhance the work of peacebuilding practitioners and policy makers by facilitatinginformation sharing, promoting critical discussion, and building the peacebuilding community.

The Peacebuilding Portal. At www.peacebuildingportal.org , accessed May 4, 2009. The Peace-buildingPortal supports multilateral collaboration and networking on conflict prevention and peacebuilding byoffering local, national, and international stakeholders a web tool to strengthen their work with each otherand the United Nations and better respond to issues surrounding human security, peacebuilding, andconflict.

About the AuthorsCatherine Goetze is head of the International Studies Division at the University of Nottingham in

Ningbo, China. She has worked on civil society building in postconflict societies, humanitarian assistance,and conflict analysis, and is generally interested in the structure and constitution of global society. Recentpublications include Global Governance und die asymmetrische Verwirklichung von global citizenship ina special issue of Politische Vierteljahresschrift on global governance, edited by Michael Zrn and Gunnar-Folke Schuppert; and When Democracies Go to War in Global Society 22 (1), 2008. E-mail:[email protected].

Dejan Guzina is associate professor in political science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo(Ontario, Canada). His major research interests are in federalism, comparative democratization, and ethnicpolitics. Dr. Guzina's current research project is on state- and nationbuilding in southeastern Europe. Dr.Guzina has published in several international journals, including National Identities and the International

Journal of Politics, Culture and Society . Together with Professor Catherine Goetze, he coedited a specialissue of the journal Civil Wars on statebuilding, Vol. 10 (4), 2008. E-mail: [email protected].

Statebuilding and Nationbuilding ISA compendium Goetze Guzina

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