ABSTRACT

This book examines the ways in which long-term processes of state-formation limit the possibilities for short-term political projects of statebuilding.

Using process-oriented approaches, the contributing authors explore what happens when conscious efforts at statebuilding ‘meet’ social contexts, and are transformed into daily routines. In order to explain their findings, they also analyse the temporally and spatially broader structures of world society which shape the possibilities of statebuilding.

Statebuilding and State-Formation includes a variety of case studies from post-conflict societies in Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as the headquarters and branch offices of international agencies. Drawing on various theoretical approaches from sociology and anthropology, the contributors discuss external interventions as well as self-led statebuilding projects. This edited volume is divided into three parts:

  • Part I: State-Formation, Violence and Political Economy
  • Part II: Governance, Legitimacy and Practice in Statebuilding and State-Formation
  • Part III: The International Self – Statebuilders’ Institutional Logics, Social Backgrounds and Subjectivities

The book will be of great interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.

chapter |19 pages

Introduction

Statebuilding and State-Formation

part |71 pages

State-Formation, Violence and Political Economy

chapter |17 pages

Risk and Externalisation in Afghanistan

Why Statebuilding Upends State-Formation

chapter |17 pages

International Intervention and the Congolese Army

A Paradox of Intermediary Rule

chapter |17 pages

War Makers and State Makers

On State-Formative Networks and Illiberal Political Economy in Kosovo

chapter |18 pages

Georgia–South Ossetia Networks of profit

Challenges to Statebuilding

part |72 pages

Governance, Legitimacy and Practice in Statebuilding and State-Formation

chapter |17 pages

Statebuilding as Tacit Trusteeship

The Case of Liberia

chapter |16 pages

The Road Less Travelled

Self-led Statebuilding and International ‘Non-Intervention' in the Creation of Somaliland

part |81 pages

The International Self – Statebuilders' Institutional Logics, Social Backgrounds and Subjectivities

chapter |15 pages

Three Arenas

The Conflictive Logic of External Statebuilding

chapter |16 pages

The ‘Statebuilding Habitus'

UN Staff and the Cultural Dimension of Liberal Intervention in Kosovo

chapter |16 pages

The International Self and the Humanitarianisation of Politics

A Case Study of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo

chapter |16 pages

The State We are(n't) In

Liminal Subjectivity in Aid Worker Auto-Biographies