Legacy State Formation Peacebuilding

This article was downloaded by: [Universidad de los Andes]
On: 10 January 2014, At: 10:56

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK
International Peacekeeping
Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/finp20
The Legacy of State Formation

Theory for Peacebuilding and
Statebuilding
Oliver P. Richmond
Published online: 07 Nov 2013.
To cite this article: Oliver P. Richmond (2013) The Legacy of State Formation Theory
for Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, International Peacekeeping, 20:3, 299-315, DOI:
10.1080/13533312.2013.838398
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2013.838398
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed
in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should
not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-
licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [Universidad de los Andes] at 10:56 10 January 2014
The Legacy of State Formation Theory for
Peacebuilding and Statebuilding
OLIVER P. RICHMOND
The mainstream literature on state formation has provided the basis for peacebuilding and
statebuilding praxes to focus on power and realist concepts of security and the state. The
dominant focus on violence and how it shapes the state has been an important motif of
peacebuilding and statebuilding literatures. However, state formation literatures also
offer sociological, anthropological, and structural accounts as a basis for a post-colonial
framework for peace, security, and order, which expose the limits of peacebuilding and
statebuilding.
Introduction
The historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the State, and their
history is essentially the history of States and of groups of States.1
The concept of the state has always been flexible. Yet, the view that endogenous
state formation processes indicate a teleological process of development towards
Westphalian sovereignty, following a Weberian perspective, has been translated
into a dominant, realist concern with security and territory. This perspective
has a vice-like grip over international relations. It also underpins exogenous
liberal peacebuilding and neoliberal statebuilding policy, even in the current
new deal era.2 Both are connected by a mainstream argument about how the
localized contestation of power drives state formation. This perspective requires
strong state structures that integrate the material and identity forces the state rep-
resents into a bureaucratic set of institutions. This may produce viable state gov-
ernance even if it favours powerful elites, themselves beholden to external
power.3 Order and territory may eventually be assured, providing continuity
for structural and governmental power. Much of this discussion revolves
around the way conflict and power shapes the state, and whether this may even-
tually lead to a social contract shaped by the hegemonic power of elites and/or
other actors capable of promoting societal consensus.
Such arguments have formed the basis for many contemporary analyses of
conflict, peacebuilding, statebuilding, state fragility and weak or failed states in
mainstream academic and policy literatures.4 Peacebuilding offers a cosmopoli-
tan and normative vision of rights, development, and representation across
societies, whereas statebuilding is the vehicle through which the neoliberal insti-
tutional and political framework in a particular version of this vision can be
assured within a specific territory. But both are informed by state formation lit-
erature, which offers a historical and predominantly realist view of the endogen-
ous emergence of the modern state (in both European political history and from
International Peacekeeping, Vol.20, No.3, June 2013, pp.299315
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2013.838398 # 2013 Taylor & Francis
300 INTERNA TIONAL P EACEKEEPING
the American civil war) as well as its subsequent processes of institutionalization.

It often now refers to the processes that also led to the emergence of the modern
states of Japan and Germany before and through WWII. From this basis, a range
of databases and indexes has recently appeared which connect the state with war
and peace. All use the state and its role in violence as an organizing principle,
either as a container for the contestation of power or an active player among
others in war and violence.5 Its reductionist logic has also been used as the
basis for mainstream accounts of recent conflicts around the world based on
the understanding that violence is inherent to human society and is then trans-
ferred to the state and international relations. And it has influenced the way in
which the UN, the World Bank, major states, INGOs, and donors engage with
conflict and development issues. In particular, it has supported a link between

security and development,6 and has led to a narrative linking localized and natur-
alized dynamics of violence, power, and status, with the formation of a state as a
prototypical member of the international architecture.
The next step in this rationale is to legitimate an externalized statebuilding or
peacebuilding process as a response. However, this same logic may be partly to
blame for relatively ignorant engagements with local and contextual dynamics
of power, such as the high handed approaches witnessed in Iraq after 2004.7
Indeed, the priority given to Western rational-legal assumptions about insti-
tutions, security, property, and power, reflect a form of Orientalism about the
states intended subjects.8
This theoretical article begins by illustrating how the evolution of state for-
mation arguments through mainstream power, and less well-known sociological,
anthropological, and structural modes, have provided a basis for contemporary
liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis. It articulates what are now rela-
tively obscure foundations of related contemporary debates. It illustrates these
processes briefly with reference to a number of long-standing post-cold war
examples of peacebuilding and statebuilding.
General Dynamics of the Debate on State Formation

The state has been written about ad nauseum in a number of different disciplines
and from different methodological perspectives, in international relations and
political science, where it is of particular interest for realist theoretical approaches
(e.g. Morgenthau, Waltz, etc.), to sociology (Weber, Tilly), anthropology (Evans-
Pritchard, Radcliffe Brown), history, and economics (Keynes, Marx, Friedman)
and many others.
A state, following the Western historical model, provides core functions aimed
at providing security, autonomy, the control of territory and borders. Interven-
tion, development, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and statebuilding assume this
model is their focus and guide. The state provides an infrastructure in which con-
flict is mitigated by providing institutional checks and balances on power and/or
through the redistribution of resources. The state can function in various ways; to
entrench power or to ameliorate it; to remedy or maintain inequalities; and to
produce either a negative or positive form of peace. The state may be the
LEGACY OF STATE FORMATION THEORY 301
instrument of structural violence or its mitigation. According to Marx, the state is
a vehicle for predatory elite interests that exploit society, whereas according to
liberal theorists it offers the potential of checks and balances in which a civil
society and a social contract produce a stable order.9 In the nineteenth century,
nationalism, a driver of state formation theory, was seen to be a positive
process, whereas today most elites and societies hold much more ambivalent
views about nationalism, even if they assume the state is naturalized.10
Thus, conventional state-formation arguments are generally associated with
the processes by which local actors gain power and eventually create a Weberian
state, which falls under their control. This involves the use of violence, which
means that the state is both the product and instrument of force.11 It requires
autonomy, which is central to traditional conceptions of sovereignty. Power is

centralized, territory is clearly defined, and so a state comes into being in West-
phalian form, driven mainly by a struggle over who is confirmed as the power
holder. Its objective qualities and capacities focus on security and its recognition
arises from its capacity to make war, domestically or internationally. Taxation is
the basis for the internal expansion of state authority (often for reasons of war-
making), success in which then leads to an expansion of the security, administra-
tive, and political capacities and the emergence of a strong state.12 This may spill
over into regional ambitions, meaning that state formation is not solely of dom-
estic significance.
These processes of state formation were often given momentum by a conflict
between tradition and modernization.13 Yet, the state rather than society is the
unit of analysis, even if society is deemed to be the source and target of violence.
The state is conventionally understood as principally a product of force, patron-
age, and power, including external power (as in post-colonial Africa), rather than
recognition or to achieve a range of core functions.14 Post-colonial processes of
state formation, are in particular, assumed to imply an illiberal social contract
where state resources are used in various ways to support elites and to buy off citi-
zens, preserving local patterns of power responsible for state formation itself.15
States that emerge from these processes are assumed to find themselves in unstable
regional security complexes with other similarly formed states fed by localized
dynamics of power, violence and criminality. However, such assumptions rest
upon an orientalist dichotomy between traditional, non-Western society, and
the modernity the Westphalian or liberal state represents. This supports a hierar-
chy that places the rational-legal state structure at the pinnacle of contemporary
political development,16 because of its bureaucratic power and core functions,
which balance internal power structures in order to provide a legitimate authority
structure.
Key State Formation Debates

The early historically oriented literature on state formation explored the tra-
ditional power systems and socio-historical patterns of politics in Europe in
order to show how they formed the state as a natural and inevitable outcome
of contests for power and wealth. These were then used to outline the dynamics
of a progression from a traditional or colonial territory, or a post-conflict

environment, to the modern state. The contest of power in European states was
seen as a historical process of institution formation, often skewed towards
elites, before being corrected by the formation of a contract between citizens
and rulers.17 Similar processes in colonial or conflict environments were thus
identified and seen as a justification for various forms of intervention aimed at
moving states further along the process of institution formation.
The state in this literature is deemed to be fundamental both to the inter-
national system and to the organization of domestic political life, also maintain-
ing a division between the domestic and international spheres. Processes of state
formation are also framed as a classic story about the emergence of a Westphalian
form of sovereignty at the domestic level. In this story the struggle to form a state
as the basis for domestic power and order as well as a place in the international
system is assumed to be an instinctive drive according to an inherency argument
about the biological and hence the state roots of violence.18
Accordingly, the nature of the state depends on the interests of dominant pol-
itical classes and their economic and ideational strength determines the level of
conflict, the nature of the state, and its durability and responsiveness.19 Such
state formation debates have revolved around four key state dynamics: the juxta-
position of capitalist accumulation and class conflict and the contradictions they
reproduce; crises in governance resulting from threats to political elites; chal-
lenges from the global political economy; and geopolitics.20 This literature also
gives emphasis to the idea of the state as a vehicle for elite control over society
in order to mobilize collective agency so that the state can fulfil basic functions
associated with sovereignty, security, and some public services deemed necessary
to provide a historical continuity of power. The balance of these functions leads
to the particular character of the state, whether predatory, security oriented, or
fulfilling a social contract in liberal style. The more a state in a region is secur-
ity-oriented, the more others will tend to follow suit.21
State formation, may be re-interpreted in this vision to require mobilization
for development, security, and the creation of institutions supported by power
or consensus, enabling taxation to be raised. Historically, this enabled the expan-
sion of state power in both domestic and regional settings. It made the state the
centre of domestic and international discourse and an epistemic hierarchy,
along with its political, economic, and developmental praxes. However, this
turned at some point in the post-colonial era into a simulation of state power,
where quasi-states were externally formed based on an anti-colonial international
legitimacy and limited juridical and material capacity.22 Thus war-making was
not the only mode by which a state emerged and maintained itself. However,
any state formation process also needs to produce economic and social capacities
as well, implying the development of public services and welfare, something
which conventional/realist state formation models tend to ignore. War-making
alone might lead to the demise of the state if it cannot fulfil such functions. On
the one hand then, local scale legitimacy can arise from a socio-economic consen-
sus, which at its optimum may then be reflected in political institutions. On the
other hand, quasi-sovereignty arises through juridical sovereignty, which
provides external legitimacy and the framework for the post-colonial state but
little real internal capacity. This implies contemporary processes of state for-
mation in post-conflict environments may therefore engender contradictory
local and international forms of legitimacy by being representative of local iden-
tity and historical narratives, anti-colonialism, needs and rights (even if unsup-
ported by effective formal state institutions), as well as through juridical
sovereignty even if the state was formed by war or external fiat.
Thus, states are the product of social as well as material forces, requiring an
assessment of their stateness, in which these forces shape their institutions
through social movements and non-state actors, as well as through the projection
of exclusive identities, as in the ethnic democracies of the contemporary Balkans
for example.23 States may form from the top-down via elite forces, from the
bottom up via social forces, or through different combinations of both forces
However, in the conventional literature, whilst state-society relations matter, jur-
idical sovereignty outweighs both.
Of course, the social processes inherent in state formation, in which power
became accountable, pointed to the formation of a social contract. Indeed, in
liberal political theory the state represents a Great Arch24 that binds rulers
and citizens into a mutually dependent relationship. This emerges through vio-
lence between classes and the outcome is dependent on their power relations,
norms, interests, material capacities, culture and identities. Through this Great
Arch, the state lives through its subjects and a relationship based on rights,
law, a social contract and consent rather than outright power.25 The liberal pol-
itical theorists of the Enlightenment, notably Locke, described how this would be
a solution to the internal and external violence that had blighted Europe and had
undermined what were to become known as human rights.26 If state formation is
to lead to a Great Arch a social contract between elites and citizens or subjects
must be forged through a form of cultural revolution. In this sense central and
predatory authority is slowly dissolved and pushed out to the furthest reaches
of society through the state, interweaving tense relations between governors
and the governed (as in the liberal revolution in Mexico in the nineteenth
century).27
What is normally emphasized in the engagement of international relations and
political science with modern state formation processes is how power is contested
and rulers mobilize armies to ensure the flow of revenue required to make a state
viable, without necessarily creating an arch with the general population.28 Such
thinking is underpinned by a sense that state formation is an archaic process
that needs to be tamed and guided from war to peace, whether on the model of
the European state, which was a solution to internal contests, or the post-colonial
state, which emerged as part of the pursuit of independence and autonomy.
The types of states that emerge from state formation, whether realist or
liberal, are controversial. Do the forces of violent contestation mean the state is
forever weak and about to collapse, or does it lead to the formation of a
strong, but not necessarily equitable, state? If a strong state emerges it would
need a firm control, not just of its territory and the means of violence, but also
of its place in the global order and economy, in order to maintain a political
and economic position that would enable domestic prosperity, stability and inter-
national competitiveness. The race to achieve this may be, however, one of con-
stant and violent setbacks. It may be that a strong state would resemble a
neoliberal state, in which resources and security are controlled by a small, elite
group who refuse to redistribute them equitably. Alternatively, it may represent
a state where relative equality is used to assuage interest groups. It may represent
a social democratic state with the necessary political freedoms and law to
promote national cohesion and political and economic dynamism. All of these
debates assume that some version of the rational-legal, bureaucratic, and sover-
eign state, projecting power, or conforming to cosmopolitan norms, or embedded
in the global economy, is the only type of architectural structure available.
Indeed, Tilly argued that international organizations extended the European

process of state formation to the rest of the world through decolonization. Domi-
nant states and former colonial powers guided new states29 in the hope they
would emerge peacefully in acceptable, modernized (later cosmopolitan, and
more recently neoliberal) form. This guidance would prevent them from repre-
senting a burden on, or a flashpoint in, the international system. However,
Tilly also appealed for a weakening of the state, in his own prescription for
peace.30
Critiques of State Formation

Seeing state formation only as a criminal and predatory racket leads to a roman-
ticisation of the local in which local actors are perceived in orientalist mode as
proponents of, or subject to, violence and criminality, and have little progressive
political agency.31 Such Orientalism justifies the interventionary and disciplinary
character of the liberal peace and statebuilding. It also naturalises the pre-emi-
nence of international legitimacy over local legitimacy. This is despite the fact
that state formation debates do not solely imply the state is an instrument of
power, but also that it has social, anthropological, and redistributive functions:
i.e. it is an instrument of identity and social justice. The state is part of the
social world and cannot instrumentally be separated from the broader context
provided by local history, culture, and society.
This insight is a particular feature of sociological and structural perspectives
in which society and individuals also exhibit autonomous political agency. This
was, in critical form, indicative of forms of resistance to oppression or hegemony,
or encroachments on rights, needs, identity, and autonomy. Sociological analysis
also implied an ethnography of the state by which the states positionality, charac-
teristics, structures, and social forces were interrogated (if only by using the
methods of a colonial-style understanding of social context).32
Another perspective lies in more structural forms of critique, which extended
state formation arguments into a discussion of the structural dynamics that drive
state formation.33 Such revolutionary processes involved the breakdown and
reformation of state structures according to class, inequality, grievance, and sub-
sequent resistance, solidarity and mobilization. As Marxist theorists also argued,
the uneven development of states via the dynamics of state formation and its
consequences for the international system (or international community) have far-
reaching consequences for the states legitimacy.34
There has also been a long-standing anthropological engagement with the
state. Yet, anthropological approaches have generally been applied in practice
to instrumentalize social processes (as with COIN in Afghanistan).35 Neverthe-
less, Radcliffe Brown saw the state as a fiction, an ideological construct, which
only really exists as a collection of humans related in a complex manner.36
Such an analysis meant that anthropologists focused on social, cultural, and his-
torical practices.37 The state was regarded as a metaphor for a broad range of
relationships at local and global levels. The neatness of its conceptualization in
political science, they argued, masked its social, chaotic or imperfect nature.
Post-colonial theorists have developed the view that Weberian, Orientalist

characterizations of other societies as traditional, pre-modern, customary, and
non-Western perpetuate hierarchy, for which the state itself has been vital. This
places the state as a specific form of polity at the heart of an international
system designed to regulate violence and interests rather than representing the
interests of widely divergent social groups. Colonial powers tend to remain at
the top of this system. This leads to a concern about the construction of legiti-
macy, whether international or local, connected to justice and power.
These perspectives provide an alternative history of the state system. Rather
than a struggle to create a state-based international system reflecting power
(material, normative, or epistemic), a combination of sociological, structural,
and post-colonial approaches view state-formation as a struggle for justice, legiti-
macy and autonomy in an a priori system. The post-colonial (rather than subal-
tern) critique of the Western state is ambivalent in that it both embraces the
Westphalian state, and simultaneously argues it is a product of western
power.38 Scholars in the Western European context have generally emphasized
the role of formal institutions as both guiding and constraining power, whereas
in the Middle East, Africa or Latin America, a more complicated picture has
been uncovered, blurring boundaries between formal and informal, tradition
and modernity, north and south, liberal and local.39 Alternative or parallel politi-
cal structures offer fragmented agency that maintains a challenge against existing
political categories.40
Thus, the state may be seen as a range of institutional and relational practices
aiming at coherence, justice, and legitimacy, even though they develop in the
context of power relations.41 Influenced by Foucaults work on governmentality,
state formation processes may be seen as . . .integrated into global and historical
contexts. . . and as cultural processes.42 They can also be seen as processes
whereby local actors re-appropriate political control from external or elite sites
of power and return control to local, indigenous, social groups and relations or
networks.43 They are representative of a significant set of agencies, and in particu-
lar connected to contextual legitimacy.
Social and anthropological conceptions of the formation of the state sets into
sharp relief the reductionism of approaches that focus on political economy or
security and their bureaucratic and institutional imperatives.44 They also point
to the importance of rituals and symbols of statehood,45 its meanings, norms,
46
assumptions and non-rational elements. They highlight the everyday cultural
dynamics and forms of state practices that arise from the interaction of power
and agency at multiple social, political, economic, and customary levels to
produce a state.47 This reproduces, in diffuse and obscure ways resistant to
rational and bureaucratic knowledge, the modern state. But this modern state
(and particularly the post-colonial state) is a hybrid international, (neo)liberal
and local, customary, identity-oriented, national-liberation-focused, modernizing
construct, where power is exercised from the local to the international. In other
words, such an analysis of state formation moves away from material interests
and an international or state-level industrial-scale mobilisation of agency. It
includes socio-political and historical dimensions, and everyday dynamics.
Power-oriented state formation debates and processes tend to focus on mascu-

line and patronage-based networks of power and control. Instead, the state is
formed via the intersection of many different group relationships.48 The agency
of awkward subjects positioned anthropologically, as well as socially and struc-
turally, produces the state (or polity) in a post-colonial world. They seek to
mobilize politically, economically, socially, and culturally and in doing so have
the capacity to build the mosaic from which peace might arise.
Such alternative perspectives on state formation problematize the notion that
the international, state, and society are separate. The concept of civil society is not
naturalized in the way it is in international relations and statebuilding or peace-
building debates as proto-liberal, but instead is positioned in specific historical
contexts. The idea that the state is not simply a set of interlocking institutions,
but instead is a constant performance of encounters, power relations, everyday
and social practices, offers a more nuanced understanding that transcends that
of the orthodox state formation literature.49
The contours of mainstream perspectives on state formation merely span its
emergence as a consequence of the violent clash of interests or, alternatively, to
mitigate violence and abuse of power through systems designed to let off
steam or provide checks and balances. From the former perspective the state is
an ever-changing arrangement of power relations and resistances,50 whereas for
the latter it is a fixed, liberal architecture that lends itself to being mapped
through formulae and blueprints. Such mainstream perspectives set the scene
for a range of international actors to develop strategies of intervention according
to their particular interests, norms and related construction of responsibilities.
Yet it has been forgotten that Tilly foresaw that state formation led to the
emergence of state-makers who suppressed participation and rights.51 Adopting
a neoliberal state as the pattern for external intervention has supported this ten-
dency and it has exposed new states to the global economy. Moreover, the neo-
liberal state is unable to engage with the needs, rights, representation, and
transformation needed on the ground to escape embedded structures of power
and conflict. Embedding the state in the global economy enhances social and
class divisions on the ground and disguises the importance of elite control of
material resources, which they then use to co-opt state institutions.52 Sovereignty
was essential to this process because it provided a level of autonomy from inter-
national intervention. Nevertheless, it has not been able to prevent the double
rupture that state formation dictates for post-colonial societies: one through wars
that form the state, and another through external intervention to reconstruct a
state that is not a product of local agency or legitimacy.
This posits a predatory, fragile, yet autonomous state where internal differ-
ence is eradicated, a national identity is constructed, and elites benefit the most
because their power needs assuaging. It draws from the Western European and
conventional understanding of statebuilding despite growing post-colonial
experiences. The focus on states, power, and interests lends itself to a positivist
and realist methodological and theoretical orientation. Devoid of its sociological,
structural, or anthropological dimensions, this logic inadvertently emphasises the
need for an examination of the formation of peace and its relationship with the
state:
. . . relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them,
necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state. . . because the state can
only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The
state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks
that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology,
and so forth. . . .[T]his metapower with its prohibitions can only take hold
and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and
indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great nega-
tive forms of power.53
Implications for Contemporary Peacebuilding and Statebuilding

Starting an analysis of order, peace, and the state from the premises of main-
stream state formation literatures replays the argument that all local agency
and the norms and institutions they form, can be ignored because they rest on
inherently violent tendencies. Any attempt to understand state formation as a
contextual process that challenges liberal norms, neoliberalism, or the rationality
of the modern states-system is accused immediately of relativism. Such arguments
are rehearsals of the power-relations that led to the emergence of the modern state
and have provided the basis for liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding.
After the Treaty of Westphalia, the process of global and state institutional
development brought the forces of state formation under control via inter-
national mobilization and social demands for a just order. Most post-cold
war practices of humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding
represented a similar endeavour trying to control the violence of state for-
mation. Much of the recent generation of peacebuilding and statebuilding litera-
ture has been normative or positivist, focused on problem solving (how to build/
fix a peace or state), and understood through the lenses of realism and liberal-
ism. The state is constructed by international actors to respond to state for-
mation tensions, but it is also dependent upon them. Statebuilding provides
the state with its security, technical, and bureaucratic infrastructure, whereas
peacebuilding shapes its institutions and laws, according to a normative
vision of a good state.
These key motifs have been framed by their own Northern-centric, problem-
solving, disciplinary limitations. For example, Huntingdons work argued that
civilizational forces define the state and international order, in turn defining con-
flict.54 Later, Rotberg argued that weak and failed states55 had implications for
conflict prevention, regional security, and US foreign policy in particular. Thus,
such states were nativised in an orientalist fashion so that indigenous agency
was perceived to follow the logic of political realism, which framed understand-
ings of civilizational modes of conflict as well as the securitized nature of states.
Posens ethnic security dilemma is an excellent example.56
Such logic was used to produce a universalized problem-solving analysis of a
states core functions (mainly security, law, rights, markets, and limited services),
and its comparative viability (mainly in security terms). It also determined how
local political dynamics could be negated by statebuilding according to a set of
minimum and common international standards on what an acceptable peace
may look like in a post-conflict and development context. This was deemed
acceptable if the states legal framework followed a liberal/ neoliberal design,
but did not address root causes, structural inequality (local or global) or reconci-
liation at the social level. Consequently, mainstream state formation theory both
invites and legitimizes intervention, to prevent violence and to influence the
nature of the state that emerges.57 Rather than the state being the result of
local political contestation, it is now seen as a unit of political order emanating
from hegemony in the evolving liberal/ neoliberal international architecture.
Much of the academic and policy literature on peacebuilding and statebuilding
begins from this premise.
Nevertheless, state formation literature offers more progressive perspectives
through its alternative structural, sociological and anthropological strands.
Together they offer a paradoxical view of the state in which it is a danger to
others, and to human rights, as well as an indication of the representative poten-
tial of the state in both liberal and informal terms. More historical and structural
approaches raise the issue of equality. Sociological approaches raise the issue of
class, identity and a social contract, and anthropological views highlight informal
processes that illustrate the potential of critical agency to shape the state. A post-
colonial perspective raises questions relating to the construction of a just inter-
national order.
Processes of peacebuilding and statebuilding are designed to develop a liberal
social contract in contrast to the predatory state that mainstream state formation
expects. However, as anthropological, sociological and structural approaches
suggest, both infrastructural power and critical agency are at play in state for-
mation. Hence, externally driven statebuilding and liberal peacebuilding ulti-
mately aim at building a framework that runs against the current of many
aspects of state formation. Some of these aspects are contestations of power,
while others engage with civil society, question inequality, require rights, rep-
resentation, identity, a link with historical norms and institutions of legitimacy
in situ, and raise issues of global justice.
Yet, statebuilding and peacebuilding are designed to replace these dynamics
with liberal institutions, but not to draw directly on contextual historical patterns
of custom, politics, redistribution or justice. This process is supposed to prevent
the emergence of states that are aggressive towards their citizens, or heavily cen-
tralized in terms of elite control of power, and to reduce the power of identity.
More recently it has been legitimized as a form of support for weak states that
have emerged from colonialism, the end of the cold war and the recent wave of
ethnic and resource conflicts but is better described as a set of palliative measures
designed to maintain the liberal international order and the neoliberal state
model.
Empirical Rationales
Violence-based versions of state formation have been deployed to maintain depo-

liticized, sometimes ahistorical and apocalyptic, views of what might happen
when predatory, violent, and weak states emerge. A narrative is produced
whereby past practices of politics, identity and custom failed to prevent war
and constant collapse threatens political, social, and economic order, as well as
regional or global security (as in Kaplans analysis of sub-Saharan Africa
states).58 Such assumptions arise about historical and tribal dynamics in the
Middle East,59 determining the heavily securitised architecture of the putative
Palestinian state. In the context of Afghanistans long civil war the Taliban and
their links with terrorist actors,60 framed the statebuilding narrative used after
the invasion in 2001.61
Such logic has become common infusing most examples of peacebuilding and
statebuilding since the end of the cold war. The sociological and anthropological
possibilities of state formation are only used instrumentally to expose violent
resistance and its networks, as in the COIN approach in Afghanistan. Similarly,
instrumental support of civil society or peace movements rarely reaches beyond a
superficial approach to NGO-supported peacebuilding common to donor-driven
approaches.
To take one of the most often discussed cases of state formation, in Cambodia,
on-going state formation analysis has meant its problems were connected mainly
to a specific feudal, ideological, and predatory elite at the apex of a complex social
and kinship network.62 A contest over the nature of the Cambodian state, running
through power relations, historical identity and political organization, ideology,
and the regional impact of conflict, eventually led to the emergence of the Khmer
Rouge whose goal was an agrarian and socialist transformation of the state.63
Social, economic, and patronage issues led to a situation where the contestation
of power meant state formation was followed by state collapse, as well as societal
and economic collapse. Such conventional state formation perspectives allowed
many of Cambodias problems to be identified as local rather than regional or
international, relating to local power and historical patterns of society and poli-
tics, rather than global dynamics of politics and economy. Negative anthropolo-
gical arguments were used to discount past heritage, identity, and social
structures. This established the basis for the later focus of liberal peacebuilding
through a UN mission after the Paris Peace Agreement in 1991.64 State formation
was viewed as a historical contest for power veering towards a territorial and
interest orientation, and ignoring much of the historical complexity of its social
aspects.65 Such analyses emphasized the way a network of patronage and domi-
nation rather than a social contract supported a neo-feudal state presided over by
elites. This is typical of the way in which in its encounter with international
peacebuilding and statebuilding the dominant realist state formation debate
conveniently portrays violence as local, risk as regional, the state as the aim of
all mobilization, and its nature as universal. This produced an international dis-
course that was both absolved of responsibility for the current condition of the
Cambodian state, but also endowed with the (temporary) responsibility and
legitimacy to replace it with neoliberal forms of statebuilding and the liberal
peace. International agency rebuilds the state and the liberal whilst local
agency is invested with the potential to pervert or disrupt it. With such a perspec-
tive peacebuilding and statebuilding cannot even begin to approach the contradic-
tions of externalized frameworks for peacebuilding and statebuilding, based on a
distrust of all or most local agency.
In ex-Yugoslavia in 1990 1999, several states, including Serbia, Bosnia
Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo, and Croatia are also often analysed through state
formations power perspectives. The ethnic framing of their analysis and resultant
institutional frameworks, particularly in the case of Kosovo and Bosnia, rests on a
primordial view of power and identity, for which the state becomes a vehicle for
deep social contests.66 These have, it is often argued, led to the emergence of
ethnic democracies in the Balkans. Ethnicized elite power was contested militarily
in a series of state formation projects in brutal fashion throughout history, which
more recently rested on a re-imagined ethno-nationalism.
In the case of BiH, identity, religion, security, military force, territory, and
civil society were swept along in a state formation project driven by the Serb
aim for a Greater Serbia. Such contestation has continued in negative peace
time since the Dayton Agreement in 1995, indicating the ways in which indigen-
ous processes of state formation are not only conducted through violence, but
also through structural forms of violence. Indeed, Dayton is now seen less as a
peace settlement, but as a cease-fire, commensurate with state formation pro-
cesses power dynamics.67 BiH appears to be becoming more not less ethnically
polarized.68 The assumptions of state formation drove internationals into adopt-
ing the very particularistic and ethnicized binaries they claim they seek to trans-
form, and to rebuild the state through Dayton on an ethnicized base. At the same
time they missed the signs of local agency, legitimacy and peace formation pro-
cesses in a historical context. BiH is frozen at the moment of intervention
rather than being caught up in building a local social contract, democratization,
and reconciliation, or indeed reconstructing the regional pluralism that existed
before the war.69 In practice, state formation debates have been used to legitimate
the construction of a neoliberal state with no regard for pre-war structures and
the historical agreements, not to mention political struggle, they rested upon.
Indications of state formation in Kosovo rest on ethnic mobilization and
violent resistance to Serb control, as well as powerful critiques of international
actors roles in recent times. Such approaches draw sustenance from historical
identity factors embedded in socio-political formations that paralleled formal
70
government by Belgrade or governance by internationals. International per-
spectives highlight the agency emerging from violence which gave rise to the
Kosovo Liberation Army, but much local agency was also expended in the pro-
vision of basic public services like health and education, albeit in private.
NATO and UN involvement tried to shift the process from violent state formation
to liberal peacebuilding whereby sovereignty was replaced by standards of norms
and law.71 However, local actors conducted a creeping administrative occupation
of the core functions controlled by internationals after 1999, via neopatrimonial
structures. International peacebuilding was as a result guided towards the self-
determination cause of the Kosovo Albanians. The state in Kosovo has hence
become implicated in the ethnic, sovereign and territorial dynamics of inclusion
and exclusion, cooperation and rejection. It represents a complex mix of violence

or power oriented, as well as sociological and anthropological, order oriented,
local agency. Both are formative of political community.
In Timor Leste self-determination, self-government, and statehood were
externally understood as the contested dynamics of a primitive of process state
formation.72 This pitted local elites and much of Timorese society against the
Indonesian state and military, and their supporters within their own community.
State formation processes led to guerrilla and civil support and opposition to both
internal collaborators and the Indonesian occupiers. These were finally brought
to an end after the Indonesian government agreed to a referendum on indepen-
dence; meaning state formation would be replaced with international peacebuild-
ing and statebuilding. Of course, state formation did not end at the point of
international intervention: internationals became one of several parties trying
to play a role in state formation. However, sociological, structural, and anthro-
pological analysis also reveals how politics in Timor Leste is contested on the
grounds of identity, custom, and inequality. These dimensions did not reveal
themselves to international actors until after several new rounds of violence.
Internationals thought these problems were a function of an incomplete state,
incapable of controlling violence and offering rights and investment. This
obscured customary cohesion, historical issues and inequalities relating to coloni-
zation, and identity, as political forces, as well as very significant divisions in
Timorese society.73 This is partly because of the priorities mainstream versions
of state formation theory dictates. Rather than the new state representing an
end to state formation it actually represents its continuation.74 It has only been
because local actors began to address the issue of what the shape and identity
of the state would look like from a local perspective, and one perhaps more com-
prehensive than a Portuguese speakers perspective, to address inequality, to bring
in customary processes and actors to ground the state in local culture, and to cri-
ticize international actors for their lack of understanding of context, that matters
appear to have improved.75 This points to the value of the sociological and
anthropological analyses.
In each of the above cases, peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis denies the
obvious point that the state itself is embedded in a socio-historical, and political
system. It may have broken down, or be in the process of being locally
re-imagined, but it also represents the basis for legitimate and autonomous
political development according to its subjects. As power relations are the most
obvious feature of any local terrain to external actors, when the state is rebuilt
from the outside it is likely to be elite focused and unstable. This has allowed
internationals to proceed on the basis of a complete rupture with the past, as if
all violence emanated from local dynamics and all legitimacy from international
norms and programmes.
Conclusion
State formation debates offer several perspectives: a mainstream debate focused
on power and clashing interests so states are understood to emerge as frameworks
for security and material power; a turn towards bringing in social, anthropologi-
cal, and structural forces to provide an understanding of how states form as a
socio-political enterprise; and a post-colonial turn indicating that the state and
peace develops in a context of the circulation of global power and norms.
The mainstream approach supports a Northern blueprint for the modern, neo-
liberal state, to be adopted regardless of context as a quick fix for conflict, inse-
curity, and under-development. Peacebuilding and statebuilding approaches have
been derived from this. Statebuilding focuses on security and markets whereas
peacebuilding has been somewhat influenced by sociological and anthropological
approaches in that it offers rights, representation, a social contract and legiti-
macy. However, it has also been characterized by an unwillingness to engage
with inequality, class, and the impact of the global political economy raised by
structural views of state formation. Consequently, this means that mainstream,
power-oriented understandings of state formation predominately influence
modern statebuilding and peacebuilding. The legacy of state formation debates
in this mode is paradoxical: resultant state designs are not well suited to develop-
ment settings, identity and cultural differences, or alternative epistemologies and
peacebuilding tends to reflect hegemonic global norms rather than widely agreed
local values relating to peace. Such designs are suited mainly to maintaining con-
tinuities of injustice and power. Thus, mainstream statebuilding and peacebuild-
ing praxis are a response to a very limited understanding of state formation
processes. They produce a continuity through which the neoliberal state and
the liberal peace has become naturalized over the interests needs and political
agency of subaltern subjects. Thus, it is little surprise that the states that have
come into being recently have been dominated by discourses and practices of
power, as from Cambodia to BiH.
The social, structural and post-colonial versions of state formation offer more
socio-historical depth, relating to how societies develop their own peace for-
mation mechanisms in the context of an a priori hierarchy. This may indicate
the need for a contractual state with a negotiated identity and form, and cogni-
zant of positionality in terms of global power, hierarchies and inequalities.76 A
post-colonial version may be more focused on peace formation from the
inside of the polity as well as questions of global equity. Hybrid understandings
of peace and the state may be partly drawn from such views.77
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oliver Richmond is a Research Professor in the Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute and the
Department of Politics, University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor, School of
International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea. His publications include A Post Liberal Peace
(Routledge, 2011), Liberal Peace Transitions, (with Jason Franks, Edinburgh University Press,
2009), Peace in IR (Routledge, 2008), and The Transformation of Peace (Palgrave, 2005/7). He is
the editor of the Palgrave book series, Rethinking Conflict Studies, and co-editor of the journal
Peacebuilding.
NOTES
1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 1929-1935, New York: International
Publishers, 1971, p.52.
2. See A New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, 2011 (at: www.g7plus.org/storage/New%
20Deal%20English.pdf). See also John Paul Lederach, Building Peace, Washington DC:
United States Institute of Peace, 1997; Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars:
The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Books, 2001; Roland Paris, At Wars
End, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation
of Peace, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005; Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner, Whose
Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding, London: Palgrave, 2008.
3. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, Lecture at the University in Munich, 1918.
4. See for example Rolf Schwarz, State Formation Processes in Rentier States: The Middle Eastern
Case, Paper presented at the Fifth Pan-European Conference on International Relations, ECPR
Standing Group on International Relation, The Hague, 911 September 2004.
5. See, Correlates of War dataset, The Failed States Index, and the Uppsala Dataset. An alternative
view is provided by the Global Burden of Armed Violence Reports.
6. US Department of Defence, National Defense Strategy, Washington DC: DoD, 2008; European
Security Strategy, Brussels: Dec. 2003; OECD-DAC, Principles for Good International Engage-
ment in Fragile States and Situations, Vienna: OECD, Apr. 2007.
7. Kofi Annan, A Life in War and Peace, London: Allen Lane, 2012, p.316.
8. See Oliver P. Richmond, The Romanticisation of the Local: Welfare, Culture and Peacebuilding,
International Spectator, Vol.44, No.1, 2009, pp.14969.
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998 [1848] p.3; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, The German Ideology, London: Lawrence
and Wishart Limited, 1999 [1846].
10. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. 2nd ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
11. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p.5; Charles Tilly, Coercion,
Capital and European States, Ad 990-1992, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p.15.
12. See Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Prin-
ceton University Press, 1975; Charles Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organised Crime,
in P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985, pp.16991.
13. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, London: Penguin, 1966.
14. J. Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London: Longman, 1993; C. Clapham,
Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993.
15. Yahia H. Zoubir (ed.), North Africa in Transition: State, Society, and Economic Transformation
in the 1990s, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999, p.33.
16. Tony Day, Fluid Iron; State Formation in Southeast Asia, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii
Press, 2002, esp. Chapter 1.
17. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation As Cultural Revolu-
tion, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, pp.23.
18. For opposing views see Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War, New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1959; R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
19. Charles Tilly, Western State-Making and Theories of Political Transformation, in Tilly (ed.),
The Formation (see n.12 above), p.629.
20. Rolf Schwarz, State Formation Processes in Rentier States: The Middle Eastern Case, Paper pre-
sented at the Fifth Pan-European Conference on International Relations, ECPR Standing Group
on International Relations, The Hague, 9 11 September 2004; see also Tilly, Coercion (n.11
above), pp.5 12.
21. Otto Hintze, The Formation of States and Constitutional Development, in Felix Gilbert (ed.),
The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, p.174.
22. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
23. J.J. Linz and A. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe,
South America, and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996, p.16.
24. Corrigan and Sayer (see n.17 above), pp.2 3.
25. James C. Scott, Introduction, in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of
State Formation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, pp.ix, 65.
26. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Lockes Two Treatises of Government. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
27. Scott (see n.25 above), p.ix.
28. Tilly, Coercion (see n.11 above).
29. Tilly, War Making (see n.12 above), pp.16986.
30. Tilly (see n.11 above), p.623.
31. Richmond (see n.8 above).
32. Christian Krohn- Hansen and Knut G. Nustard, State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives,
London: Pluto Press, 2005, p.ix.
33. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979,
p.161.
34. Michael Lowy, The Politics of Uneven and Combined Development, London: Verso, 1981.
35. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 2009 (at: www.isaf.nato.int/COIN).
36. A.R. Radcliffe Brown, Preface, in M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political
Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955 [1940], p.xxiii.
37. Krohn-Hansen and Nustad (see n.32 above), p.5.
38. Jonathan Hill, Beyond the Other? A Postcolonial Critique of the Failed State Thesis, African
Identities, Vol.3, No.2, 2005, pp.139 54.
39. See for example, Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; Robert Cunningham and Yasin Sarayrah, Wasta: The
Hidden Force in Middle Eastern Societies, New York: Praeger, 1993.
40. J.S. Migdal, State in Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
41. P. Abrams, Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol.1,
1988, pp.5889, 74; M.R. Trouillot, The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization:
Close En-counters of the Deceptive Kind, Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, 2001, pp.125 38.
42. Krohn-Hansen and Nustad (see n.32 above), p.7.
43. J.F. Bayart, Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory,
in J. Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics, London and New York: Longman, 1985,
pp.523.
44. Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of
Western Bureaucracy, Oxford: Berg, 1992, p.62.
45. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-century Bali, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980, p.136.
46. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.25.
47. Ana Maria Alonso, The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism
and Ethnicity, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol.23, 1994, p.390.
48. Trouillot (see n.41 above), p.125.
49. Krohn-Hansen and Nustad (see n.32 above), pp.114.
50. S. Ortner, Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, Vol.37, 1995, pp.173 93.
52. Ibid, p.629.
53. Michael Foucault, The Foucault-Chomsky Debate: On Human Nature, New York: New Press,
2006, p.1567.
54. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, London:
Simon Schuster, 1997.
55. Samuel I. Rotberg, The Nature of Failed States, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 25, No.3,
pp. 85 96.
56. Barry R. Posen, The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict, Survival, Vol.35, No.1, pp.2747.
58. Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol.273, No.2, pp.44 76.
59. P.S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (eds.), Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1990.
60. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the Inter-
national System, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
61. Ashraf Ghani and Claire Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured
World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
62. Grant Curtis, Cambodia Reborn? The Transition to Democracy and Development, Washington
DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998, p.111.

63. K.D. Jackson, Cambodia, 19751978: Rendezvous with Death, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1992.
64. Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Hubris: Virtual Peace in Cambodia, Security Dia-
logue, Vol.38, No.1, 2007, pp.27 48; Sorpong Peou, International Democracy Assistance for
Peacebuilding: Cambodia and Beyond, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
65. Caroline Hughes and Tim Conway, Cambodia, London: Overseas Development Institute, 2005.
66. Linz and Stepan (see n.23 above).
67. Kori Schake, The Dayton Peace Accords: Success or Failure?, in K.R. Spillmann and J. Krause,
International Security Challenges in a Changing World, Bern: Peter Lang, 1999, p.295.
68. Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention,
London: Hurst & Co, 2002, p.3.
69. Arnaud Kurze, State, Society, and Globalization in the Balkans: Problems of Democratic Conso-
lidation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and
Serbia, Working Papers in Global Studies No. 4, Apr. 2009, Washington, DC: Center for Global
Studies, George Mason University.
70. Besnik Pula, The Emergence of the Kosovo Parallel State, 19881991, Nationalities Papers:
The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, Vol.32, No.4, 2004, pp.797 826.
71. See Standards for Kosovo, 10 Dec. 2003, UNMIK/ PISG, Jan. 2004.
72. Volker Boege, Anne Brown, Kevin Clements and Anna Nolan, On Hybrid Political Orders and
Emerging States: What is Failing States in the Global South or Research and Politics in the
West?, in Building Peace in the Absence of States: Challenging the Discourse on State Failure,
Berghof Handbook Dialogue No.8, Berlin: Beghof, 2009.
73. Ben Moxham, State-Making and the Post-Conflict City: Intergration in Dili, Disintegration in
Timor-Leste, Crisis States Working Paper No.2, London: Development Studies Institute,
London School of Economics and Political Science, Feb. 2008.
74. J. Milliken and Keith Krause, State Failure, State Collapse and State Reconstruction: Concepts,
Lessons and Strategies, Development and Change, Vol.33, No.5, 2002, pp.75372.
75. Josh Trindade, Reconciling Conflict Paradigms: An East Timorese Vision of the Ideal State, in
D. Mearns, Democratic Governance in Timor-Leste: Reconciling the Local and the National,
Darwin: Charles Darwin University, 2008, p.166.
76. For example, see World Bank Development Report 2011, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011,
in which civil society and social compact make a return to its discussion of development.
77. Oliver P. Richmond, Eirenism and a Post-Liberal Peace, Review of International Studies,
Vol.35, No.3, 2009, pp.557 80.

Legacy State Formation Peacebuilding

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Legacy State Formation Peacebuilding

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Universidad de los Andes]

On: 10 January 2014, At: 10:56

The Legacy of State Formation

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2013.838398

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

the American civil war) as well as its subsequent processes of institutionalization.

conflict and development issues. In particular, it has supported a link between

General Dynamics of the Debate on State Formation

autonomy, which is central to traditional conceptions of sovereignty. Power is

Key State Formation Debates

of a progression from a traditional or colonial territory, or a post-conflict

Indeed, Tilly argued that international organizations extended the European

Critiques of State Formation

Post-colonial theorists have developed the view that Weberian, Orientalist

Power-oriented state formation debates and processes tend to focus on mascu-

Implications for Contemporary Peacebuilding and Statebuilding

Violence-based versions of state formation have been deployed to maintain depo-

and exclusion, cooperation and rejection. It represents a complex mix of violence

DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998, p.111.

You might also like