State failure and state-building

Question 1

Global politics framework

Answer 1

When we’re dealing with state-building we need to take on a global perspective on conflict –> conflicts needs to be viewed as transnationalized space.
-Transnationalized civil war = end of closed polity approach (Gleditsch, 2007)

Question 2

Keohane and Nye’s (2000) definition of globalisation.

Answer 2

Globalism is a state of the world involving networks of interdependence of multicontinetal disctances. The linkages occur through flows and influences of capital and goods, information and ideas, and people and forces, as well as environmentally and biologically relevant substances. Globalisation and deglobalisation refer to the increase and decline of globalism.

Question 3

Factors of the post-Westphalian state.

Answer 3

• Territory: Untenable distinction between domestic and international -> overlapping spheres of authority.
• Identity: State no longer primary site of loyalty and community = a new transnational community.
• Governance: New modes of governance beyond and above the state = from government to governance.

Question 4

Factors of the Westphalian state.

Answer 4

• Territory: Fixed boundaries, distinction between inside and outside.
• Identity: State as the sole anchor or identity and loyalty of its subjects.
• Governance: Government and efficiency.

Question 5

Weak state vs. failed state dilemma: Are weak and failed states distinct categories?

Answer 5

No: A weak state is a form of failed state (Robinson, 2007)

Yes: Collapsed states are rare and is a extreme version of failed states. (Miliken and Krause, 2002; Rotberg, 2002).

= We need to define weak and failed states on a continuum from weakness to complete state collapse. However, this invludes a negative understanding defining the state to its opposite.
–> It is very difficult to come up with a single explanation of and definition of state weakness.

Question 6

3 approaches to state weakness.

Answer 6

1) Capabilities: Capacity to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, and appropriate the use of resources in determines ways (Migdal, 1988).
2) Out-put oriented: Levels of effective delivery of goods (Rotberg, 2002).
3) Impact/Consequences: Horizontal and vertical legitimacy (Holsti, 1996).

Question 7

Rotberg’s (2002) argument for why state’s fail.

Answer 7

Nation-states fail because they can no longer deliver positive political goods to their people. Their government lose legitimacy, and in the eyes of the population the nation-state itselfs becomes illegitimate.

A nation-state fails when:

• It loses basic legitimacy;
• Its nominal borders become irrelevant.
• One or more groups seek autonomous control within one or mre parts of the national territory.

Question 8

Rotberg’s (2002) characteristics of failed states.

Answer 8

• They have lost control over their borders or chunks of territory.
• Failed states pray on their own citizens whether it is driven by ethic or other intercommunal hostility, or regime insecurity.
• There is growth of criminal violence.
• They increasingly forfeit their function as providers of political goods to warlords and other non-state actors.
• Contain weak or flawed institutions.
• Corruption flourishes to an unusually destructive scale.

Question 9

What causes state failure in Rotberg’s (2002) view?

Answer 9

State failure is man-made, not merely accidental not caused geographically, environmentally or externally. Leadership decisions and leadership failures have destroyed states and continue to weaken the fragile politics that operate on the cusp of failure.

Question 10

How should outside actors handle failing states according to Rotberg (2002)?

Answer 10

Strengthening weak states against failure is far easier than reviving them after they have definitely failed or collapsed.

Outside support should be conditional on monetary and fiscal streamlining, renewed attention to good governance, reforms of land tenure systems, and strict adherence to the rule of law.

Question 11

States on the brink of failure?

Answer 11

• Sri Lanka: Still delivers positive political goods.
• Indonesia: Most of the country is stille secure and nationalist.
• Columbia: Government still controls 70% of the country.
• Zombabwe: Lacks widespread insurgent movements directed against the government.

Question 12

How do Holsti (1996) measure state strength?

Answer 12

State strength is measured in the capacity of the state to command loyalty, to extract the resources necessary to rule and to provide services, to maintain that essential elements of sovereignty, a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within defined territorial limits, and to operate within the context of a consensus-based political community.

Question 13

Holsti’s (1996) definition of vertical legitimacy.

Answer 13

Authority, consent and loyalty to the idea(s) of the state and its institutions.

Question 14

Holsti’s (1996) definition of horizontal legitimacy.

Answer 14

The definition and political role of community.

Question 15

3 theoretical perspectives on the state.

Answer 15

1) Institutional (Weberion or neo-Weberian): focus on the adminsitrative capabilities of the state and the ability of the state apparatus to affirm its authority.
2) Embedded autonomy: blend of autonomy and embeddedness in society.
3) Relational: asministrative capacity is a product of social and political relationships both inside and outside the state (Buzan, 1991; Holsti, 1996)

Question 16

What did the shift in UN approach towards peace-keeping entail?

Answer 16

Shift from peace-keeping to peace-building = extensive intervention. This was based on the belief that it is legitimate for a external actor to intervene into a sovereign state on all levels.

Question 17

What is the ‘liberal peace idea’?

Answer 17

Liberalisation + marketization = peace = state.

Follows the logic that the absence and/or weakness of liberal institutions is the main cause of underdevelopment and insecurity driving armed conflicts in the global era.

Question 18

Definition of state-building.

Answer 18

State-building is the creation of new governmental institutions and the strengthening of existing ones.

Focus on facilitating a democracy and a private market-based economy.

Question 19

Definition of nation-building.

Answer 19

Nation-building is a process of contructing a shared sense of identity and common desstiny, usually in order to overcome ethnic, sectarian or communal differences and to counter alternative sources of identity and loyalty.

Question 20

Tensions and contradictions in modern state-building (Bojicic-Dzelilovic et al. 2014)

Answer 20

1) External actors’ direct control over a range of policies in local states, but an indirect link to constituencies.
2) Norms and concepts derived from nation-state context.
3) Direct relationship between the rulers and the ruled vs. multiple stateholders at a global and local level.

= tension on sovereignty, legitimacy, accountability and ownership.

Question 21

What is the tension in state-building regarding sovereignty? (Bojicic-Dzelilovic et al, 2014)

Answer 21

Regardless of the degree to which external actors control effective authority, comprehensive interventions in the governance of local states embody a seemingly contradictory principle of ‘compromising sovereignty to create sovereignty’ (Woodward, 2001).

Question 22

Chandler (2010) on the problem with sovereignty in state-building.

Answer 22

Sovereignty is understood not as a ban on intervention, but rather as necessitating intervention. The fact that states, which are held to lack capacity are making sovereign decisions are held to be a major threat both to their own citizens and to the security of the international society itself.

Question 23

What is the tension in state-building regarding legitimacy? (Bojicic-Dzelilovic et al, 2014)

Answer 23

Internationalized state-building presents the ‘dual legitimacy’ problem that maps on to the dichotomy of external and internal, or internation and domestic legitimacy.
- International legitimacy: external actors’ legal and normative bases.
- Domestic legitimacy: perception of beneficiaries.
= Legitimacy of the local state cenceived entirely as a by-product of the legitimacy of external actors and their actions.

Question 24

What is the tension in state-building regarding accountability? (Bojicic-Dzelilovic et al, 2014)

Answer 24

• External state-building and reconstruction interventions are characterized by the absence of formal accountability provisions available to local populations.
• Accountability becomes a problem because of an indirect impact of policies pursued by international actors.
• Borowiak (2011): to whom should representatives of the international institutions be politically and criminally accountable and how? To whom are external-statebuilders accountable?

= Upward not downward accountability matters.

Question 25

What is the problem with the fragmentation of responsibility?

Answer 25

A maze of relationships between external and domestic actors has incentivized each side to take credit for popular outcomes, while allocating blame for unpopular ones to others.

Question 26

What is the risk of a lack of accountability in fragile states?

Answer 26

In fragile states of divided post-conflict societies a lack of accountability can fuel nationalist reactions hat can further obstruct reconstruction efforts.

Question 27

What is the tension in state-building regarding ownership? (Bojicic-Dzelilovic et al, 2014)

Answer 27

• Local ownership is the ultimate aim of the reconstruction effort, given that it represents a rationale for the exit and disengagement of external actors.
• Elusive difinition: who owns what? Who owns whom?
• Suhrke (2007): local ownership means ‘their’ ownership of ‘our’ ideas.

Question 28

What is the risk of promoting local ownership?

Answer 28

To the extent that the purpose of external reconstruction is to build up a capable and sustainable state, the dilemma of re-balancing authority in favor of the locals in external interventions also carries with it the risk of empowering spoilers (Stedman)

Question 29

What does Chesterman (2004) says about the dilemma of local ownership?

Answer 29

Attempts to frame the concept of ownership as a means rather than an end of external state-building are misleading, given that the lack of capacity for self-government was the original reason for the introduction of an intrusive intervention.

Question 30

What is the critique of the paradigm of liberal peace and external state-building?

Answer 30

• Ignatieff: ‘empire lite’ - neither security guarantees nor conditions for take-over of local leadership.
• Chandler: ‘empire in denial’ - more intrusive tan ever, but evasion and rejection of responsibility of power.

Question 31

What is Paris’ (2002) critique of the paradigm of liberal peace in peace-building?

Answer 31

Contemporary practice of peace-building may be viewed as a modern rendering of the ‘mission civilisatrice’; the colonial era belief that the European imperial power had a duty to civilise their overseas possessions.

What is being globalised is the idea of what a state should look like and how it should act => the concept of peace-building may be viewed as the latest chapter in the globalisation of the Westphalian state.

Question 32

Which transmission mechanisms used to promote liberal market democracy in peacebuilding does Paris (2002) identify?

Answer 32

• Peacebuilders have shaped the content of peace agreements while they were being drafted.
• Peacebuilders have provided ‘expert’ advise on political and economic liberation to local parties in war-shattered states during the implementation of these settlements.
• Several international agencies have imposed ‘conditionalities’ requirring states to undertake specific economic and political reforms in exchange for economic aid.
• Peacebuilders use the performance of quasi-governmental functions in war-shattered states, which involves international actors serving as ‘stand-ins’ for local authorities who are unable or unwilling to perform the needed administrative tasks.

Question 33

What is the alternative approach of ‘hybrid peace’ (Max Ginty, 2011; Richmond, 2011)?

Answer 33

Hyprid peace is an alternative emerging peace framework that is more empathetic and emancipatory because it flows from the communities most directly affected by conflict.

• It is partly a ‘bottom-up’ approach that also emphasizes the interface between local and indigenous actors and the international spheres of liberal peace.
• Focus on mobilization of local peacebuilding practices.

The hybridity framework has been used to try and revitalize the centrality of the social contract within international state-building.

Question 34

How can external state-building be effective according to Lemay-Herbert (2009)?

Answer 34

In order to be effective, state-building has to take into account not just the rebuilding of state-insitutions, but also recognize the complex nature of socio-political cohesion.

Question 35

What is the criticism of ‘hybrid peace’?

Answer 35

• Despite its frequent self-description as post liberal, it is more often a problem-solving critique of the liberal peace.
• There is a tendency to protray local communities as ‘traditional’ and pre-modern through the denial that frameworks of power that inhere in the international and Western sphere are at work in the locales of the East and South (=still a colonial and neo-colonial tendency)
• It does not address the constant claim that the state structures created by international state-building are ultimately cosmetic, shell-like forms devoid of even rudimentary sovereignty (Chandler, 2010).
• Critics will point to the lack of alternatives to liberal peace and the fact that a focus on post-liberal, local, everyday and facets of peace may end up privileging illiberal conduct through the reinforcement of authoritarian and autocratic rule and/or repressive customary local practices (Paris, 2010).
• Tendency to neglect the way that conflict is also ‘hybrid’ and present in the world of everyday existence -> hybrid peace most acknowledge hybrid war more extensively that it currently does.

Question 36

What is the tension between war and statemaking in the theory on external state-building?

Answer 36

• Tillyan perspective: wars make state, and states make wars = extraction to make a state.
• Reverse Tillyan perspective = extraction from the state.

Question 37

Why did states begin to embark on external state-building according to Wesley (2008)?

Answer 37

• By the late 1980s states were convinced of the unacceptable costs associated with waiting for new states to develop their own accord.
• The ‘failed’ or ‘fragile’ state shifted security thinkin from focusing on concentrations of state power to worrying about zones of state powerlessness, where transnational threats can incubate and transit while exploiting the interdependence of a globalised world to attack developed societies.

Question 38

Which assumptions does external state-building carry according to Wesley (2008)?

Answer 38

The concept of state-building carries with it assumptions of what a complete state looks like; that in the end all states are constituted and function in the same way.

Question 39

What is the failure of modern state-building according to Wesley (2008)?

Answer 39

The failure of state-building appears to lie in its conception of the state as an independent variable, ideally divorced from politics, economics, and society.
+ the ‘failling state’ label tends to delegitimize local politics as venal and disruptive; as the problem to be addressed.

Question 40

What is Wesley’s solution to the problems with state-building?

Answer 40

A bottom-up approach to state-formation must accept that stable and effective states emerge from within the traditions, compromises, and conflicts particular to the political, economic, and social spheres of each society.

A legitimate, stable state can only emerge form the dominant understandings, compromises, and categories arising from within these spheres of human activity.