Theorizing Security, State Formation and the 'Third World' in the Post-Cold War World

The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict and the International
System by Mohammed Ayoob
Review by: Keith Krause
Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 125-136
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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 Studies 125 136 ? British International Studies Association
Review of International (1998), 24, Copyright

Theorizing security, state formation and the

Third World5 in the post-Cold War world*
KEITH KRAUSE

Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict
and the International System, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1995

Future historians will argue that the most profound

perhaps transformations of
twentieth-century world politics were catalyzed not by the atom bomb, the two
world wars, or the transformations of the global economy, but by the dismantling of
European empires that created and incorporated new states into the Westphalian
system. The consequences of this process, which was compressed into the historical
eyeblink between 1947 and 1993, are yet to be clearly understood. What is un
doubtedly the case is that this transformation?the spread of territorial states to all
corners of the globe?marks the juridical high-water mark of the 'modern project'
of theWestphalian state system.
Of course, for contemporary analysts the future trajectory of the 'Third World' (a
contestable term to which I will return) is unclear. Coinciding with some of the most
intense phases of the Cold War, and thrust directly into the superpower con
frontation, it is difficult to isolate the impact of the particular conditions of post
1945 world politics on the decolonization process. Perhaps the Cold War will turn
out to have had a transient impact on political, social and economic development
processes in the Third World. More likely, it has altered profoundly the historical
development of post-colonial states.
Most attention to the Third World has, however, come from political economists,
while few scholars have tackled this issue from the 'security' side of International
Relations. Those that have have tended to view Third World states as subjects: bit
players in the larger drama of superpower conflict, and the arena in which
immensely destructive regional wars were fought with billions of dollars' worth of
weapons poured in from East and West, over stakes that were seldom clear to all
participants.
Mohammed Ayoob's excellent volume, The Third World Security Predicament:
State Making, Regional Conflict and the International System, is situated precisely on
the security side, and presents a comprehensive analysis of the security problematic
of Third World states that directly challenges traditional accounts. The book
expands upon Ayoob's previous work, is tightly written, and contains many

*Thanks to Iver Neumann, Jennifer Milliken and Michael Schechter for comments on earlier drafts of
this article.

125

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 126 Keith Krause

interesting and intricate subsidiary arguments.1 Its principal claims stand on two
pillars: the assertion that neither orthodox nor 'new' conceptions of security
adequately capture the 'security predicament' of Third World states; and the claim
that Third World security imperatives are inextricably linked to the ongoing process
of state formation. According to Ayoob, the security predicament of Third World
states is conditioned by the lateness with which they have arrived at the state-making
process (and hence its compressed nature), and by their late entry into the state
system. These can actually be seen as part of the same process, since state-making
does not really occur in its 'modern variant' outside of the context of the
Westphalian state system.
Hence, the book grows out of, and must be evaluated against, the comparative
politics literature on state formation, and the more narrow International Relations
debate concerning how we should conceptualize 'security'. Ayoob's contribution to
both these debates is nuanced, distinctive, and in some respects flawed. His critique
is, however, worthy of careful scrutiny, for it contains many strong elements and
makes a particular contribution to our understanding of the future evolution of the
Third World. It also raises several more general issues in International Relations,
some of which I will touch upon below.

How should we define security?

Broadly speaking, most of the diverse contributions to the debate on 'new thinking
on security' can be classified along one of three axes. The first, associated with
authors such as Jessica Tuchman Mathews, Richard Ullman, Theodore Moran,
Myron Weiner and many others, attempts to broaden the narrow 'orthodox' con
ception of security?safeguarding the state from threats to its core values that
emanate from outside its borders and are primarily military in nature?to include a
wider range of potential 'threats', ranging from economic and environmental to
human rights or migration.2 This move has been accompanied by attempts to deepen
the agenda beyond its state-centric focus by moving either down to the level of
individual or human security, or up to the level of international or global security
(with regional and societal security as possible intermediate points).3 A third
1
For his previous work see 'Security in the Third World: The Worm about to Turn?', International
Affairs, 60:1 (Winter 1983/4), pp. 41-51; 'The Security Problematic of the Third World', World
Politics, 43:2 (Jan. 1991), pp. 257-83; 'The Third World in the System of States: Acute Schizophrenia
or Growing Pains?', International Studies Quarterly, 33 (1989), pp. 67-79; and the edited volume,
Conflict and Intervention in the Third World (London, 1980).
2
Inter alia, see Caroline Thomas, In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations
(Boulder, CO, 1987); Theodore Moran, 'International Economics and National Security', Foreign
Affairs, 69:5 (Winter 1990/1), pp. 74-90; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, 'Redefining Security', Foreign
Affairs, 68:2 (Spring 1989), pp. 162-77; Brad Roberts, 'Human Rights and International Security',
Washington Quarterly, Spring 1990, pp. 65-75; Myron Weiner, 'Security, Stability and International
Migration', International Security, 17:3 (Winter 1992-3), pp. 91-126; Richard Ullman, 'Redefining
Security', International Security, 8:1 (Summer 1983), pp. 129-53.
3 to this include: Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead,
Contributions
1991); Ole Waever, 'Societal Security?A Concept and its Consequences', unpublished paper, 1995; J.
Ann Tickner, Gender and International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
(New York, 1992); United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 1994 (New
York, 1994), pp. 22^6; Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global
Neighbourhood (Oxford, 1995), pp. 80-1.

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 Security, state formation and the 'Third World' 127

attempt has remained within a state-centric approach, but deployed diverse terms
(common, cooperative, collective, comprehensive) as modifiers to 'security' in order
to assess different multilateral forms of interstate security cooperation.4 All three of
these efforts are problematic. Attempts to expand the agenda or the levels on which
security is discussed seldom explain clearly how the various issues or levels are to be
brought together, and whether or not there remains an analytic core to the concept.5
On the other hand, the expanded state-centric approach remains trapped by the
'logic of cooperation and conflict', in which instrumental^ rational actors maximize
their interests and power without reference to broader questions of identity or
interest formation or shared understandings. Further, the unwillingness of all three
efforts to confront the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the
orthodox conception of security leaves them open to the objection that they render
useless a perfectly robust analytic concept by confusing 'threats' with mere 'prob
lems', or worse, fundamentally misconstrue the basic nature of world politics.6
Authors are often forced to fall back to a position such as Thomas Homer-Dixon's,
when he argues that environmental change becomes a security issue when it feeds
into processes that can lead to violent conflicts between states, a position that
effectively concedes that the 'security problematic' should be understood as the
orthodox conception has defined it.7 Of course, analytically the distinction made
within the orthodox literature on security between 'threats' and 'problems' is based
not on their significance for human welfare and survival, but on their relationship to
the prevailing conceptual categories of security studies.
Ayoob's view fits comfortably into none of these categories, and he disagrees with
elements of all of them.Instead, he is allied with scholars such as Edward Azar in
arguing against the applicability of the 'orthodox conception' of security to Third
World states. Ayoob notes that 'the three major characteristics of the concept of
state security as developed in the Western literature?namely, its external orien
tation, its strong link with systemic security, and its binding ties with the security of
the two major alliance blocs during the Cold War . . . that the
[has meant]
explanatory power of the concept has been vastly reduced when applied to Third

4 on Disarmament
See Independent Commission and Security Issues (the Palme Commission),
Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York, 1982); Ashton Carter, William Perry and John
Steinbrunner, A New Concept of Cooperative Security (Washington, DC, 1992); Charles Kupchan and
Clifford Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe', International Security,
16 (Summer 1991), pp. 114?61. For overviews, see David Dewitt, 'Common, Comprehensive and
Cooperative Security', The Pacific Review, 7:1 (1994), pp. 1-15; Raimo V?yrynen, 'Multilateral
Security: Common, Cooperative or Collective', unpublished paper, 1995.
5
Of course, some authors are more sensitive to these difficulties than others, and do a better job of
dealing with them. For the best general analysis see Buzan, People, States and Fear, for a good
critique of one particular 'new issue' see Daniel Deudney 'The Case against Linking Environmental
Degradation and National Security', Millennium, 19:3 (1990), pp. 461-76.
6
An objection levelled, for example, by Robert Dorff against Charles Kegley's expanded list of security
threats, in Robert H. Dorff, 'ACommentary on Security Studies for the 1990s as a Model Core
Curriculum', International Studies Notes, 19:3 (Fall 1994), p. 27. See also John Mearsheimer, 'The
False Promise of International Institutions', International Security, 19:3 (Winter 1994/5), pp. 5-49.
7
Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, 'Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases',
International Security, 19:1 (Summer 1994), pp. 5-40; Thomas F Homer-Dixon, 'On the Threshold:
Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict', International Security, 16:2 (Fall 1991), pp.
76-116. For an interesting critique of the historical foundations of the traditional conception, see
David Baldwin, 'Security Studies and the End of the Cold War', World Politics, 48 (Oct. 1995),
pp. 117-41.

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 128 Keith Krause

World contexts' (p. 6).8 His targets are scholars such as Steven David or Stephen
Walt, who deploy concepts such as 'omnibalancing' or 'balance of threat theory'
(derived from the core notion of balance of power in traditional realist thinking on
security) to explain Third World behaviour.9 For Ayoob, these sorts of accounts
omit precisely what is interesting and distinctive about Third World security
concerns. Against an expanded conception of security, he argues that it is
analytically unfocussed, that it understates the persistence of security dilemmas
(both internal and external), and in some cases (such as Ken Booth's linking of
security to emancipation) that it remains fatally Western-centric.10 He proposes
instead that 'security-insecurity is defined in relation to vulnerabilities?both internal
and external?that threaten or have the potential to bring down or weaken state
structures, both territorial and institutional, and governing regimes' (p. 9, italics in
original).
The strength of this formulation is threefold. First, it places the orthodox con
ception of security in a historical context that underlines its link to the evolution of
the modern state. The consolidation of the modern state, and the concomitant
creation of loyal 'citizens' in the West, meant that the internal dimension of security
was effectively resolved, and hence its external orientation became politically and
conceptually unquestioned. This, however, is not the case in the Third World, where
the internal dimension must be accorded equal, if not greater, weight.11 Second, this
conception goes beyond a narrow focus on military/security issues to include a range
of politically relevant 'threats' that can emerge from many directions. Thus, for
example, ecological destruction or minority movements can become a security issue
when they 'acquire political dimensions and threaten state boundaries, state institu
tions, or regime survival' (p. 9). This can be nicely contrasted with Homer-Dixon's
restriction of environmental security to the possibility of interstate conflict. Finally,
Ayoob claims that his formulation 'retains its analytic utility' and 'has adequate
explanatory power' (pp. 8, 11), at least relative to the woollier formulations in the
literature.
There are, however, at least three objections to this resolution of the issue of how
to conceptualize security. The first, and most general, is that in order to judge
whether or not a concept has analytic utility and adequate explanatory power we
need to be clear on what we are trying to explain. Ayoob wants to explain the
'dominant concerns of Third World state elites and the major determinants of Third
World state behaviour' (p. 11), but this is not translated into concrete terms. Are we

8
This parallels Azar's claim that the traditional focus on narrow military threats ismisleading, that the
accumulation of military force does not 'solve' Third World security problems, that domestic factors
(legitimacy, integration, ideology and policy capacity) play an important role in shaping security
policies, and that 'national security management tools and techniques' are inappropriate. See Edward
Azar and Chung-in Moon, 'Rethinking Third World National Security', in Edward Azar and Chung
inMoon (eds.), National Security in the Third World (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 11-12; Edward Azar and
Chung-In Moon, 'Third World National Security: Toward a New Conceptual Framework',
International Interactions, 11:2 (1984), pp. 103-35.
9
See Steven David, 'Explaining Third World Alignment', World Politics, 43:2 (Jan. 1991), pp. 233-56;
Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY, 1987); Stephen Walt, 'Testing Theories of
Alliance Formation: The Case of Southwest Asia', International Organization, 42 (1988), pp. 275-316.
10 on the security dilemma
Parenthetically, Ayoob's emphasis does distance him from Azar's
formulations.For Booth's work see 'Security and Emancipation', Review of International Studies, 17
(1991), pp. 313-26.
11
This is also captured by Steven David's notion of 'omnibalancing' (balancing against both internal
and external threats).

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 Security, state formation and the 'Third World' 129

trying to explain the levels of military expenditure of Third World states; the size of
their military establishments; the incidence of state repression or authoritarian rule;
the appearance of internal rebellion; the role of the armed forces in politics; the
totality of Third World security and defence policies; or simply the future trajectory
of the Third World state? Aside from several suggestive examples, Ayoob does not
help us with this question.
The second objection is that conflating state and regime security in the Third
World context is analytically unhelpful. In South America, for example, there have
been relatively few threats to state boundaries or state institutions (that is, to the
legitimacy of the state qua state), but many threats to regimes, most of which have
stemmed from their authoritarian or repressive nature. It is not clear what
explanatory value is gained by categorizing such cases along with the radically
different threats faced by states that possess only low levels of legitimacy qua states,
as is the case throughout much of Africa.12 Further, the prescriptions one might
want to make are quite different in each case: regime insecurities can be caused
simply by the behaviour of the regime itself, while state insecurities have deeper, and
perhaps irresolvable, roots.
This conflation illuminates the final objection: that Ayoob's understanding of
security rests on a narrow conception of 'the political' that privileges the state
without even raising the question whether or not it should be the proper subject of
security. This choice is not accidental, since the focus on state-making contains a
clear teleology with which one can take issue. Ayoob's definition almost entirely
occludes what Robert Jackson calls the 'paradox of the state', in which the most
important threats to security in the Third World (and often elsewhere) arise from
states and regimes, and are directed against individuals and communal groups.13
Instead, Ayoob argues that 'internal insecurities fundamentally determine the
security predicament of the Third World state' (p. 42). His defence, that he is trying
to explain the world as seen by Third World state elites in order to understand the
policies they pursue, is not entirely convincing, since it seems to rest on this
problematic understanding of 'threat'.
The potentially negative results of these choices can be seen in the chapter on
regional insecurity. It focuses almost exclusively on state interactions and the
possibilities of regional conflict management, in particular in three regional
organizations, the ASEAN, GCC and SAARC. But this collapse into a discussion of
alliance formulation and interstate relations seems no different from the many
Western-centric analyses from which Ayoob wants to distance himself. In light of the
fact that 'regionalization' is one of the more prominent consequences of the end of
the Cold War, one would have expected a discussion of the complex patterns of
interaction that characterize regional relations, and which go far beyond state
interactions. In the Middle East, for example, the tug of a residual pan-Arab identity
(however weak) simultaneously sharpens the competition between particular rulers
for the mantle of 'regional leader', renders difficult adversarial relations between

12
I am thinking of the disintegration of Somalia or the Sudan, and the potential for similar situations
in places such as Kenya and Congo/Zaire. For an excellent discussion of this see Robert Jackson,
Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge, 1990).
13
Jackson, Quasi-states, p. 140. See also Buzan, People, States and Fear, ch. 1.

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 130 Keith Krause

Arab states in the presence of outsiders ('my brother and I against my cousin; my
brother, my cousin and I against the outsider'), and has generated a variety (albeit
diminishing) of regional or sub-regional political projects. It has also provided
licence for a high level of overt and covert reciprocal interference in the internal
affairs of Arab states. This sort of analysis of the ideational and contextual elements
behind state policies is critical to any understanding of the future of different
regional orders.
The defence against these difficulties is Ayoob's argument that the weakness of
Third World states dooms them to defend the Westphalian system, and therefore
that the realization and amelioration of the Westphalian state is the best?or only?
solution to their security predicament. He explicitly dismisses 'the fashionable
criticism' that his argument is deterministic, and argues that since 'the rhetoric as
well as the policies of Third World governments make it clear that the model they
emulate is the developed world', and since 'effective participation in the system of
states remains the goal for [Third World] countries', the option of opting out of the
state system is purely a theoretical one (pp. 27-8). This is not a naive argument, and
in this ethical defence of the modern state Ayoob is aligned with such thinkers as
Michael Walzer, who argue that sovereign statehood is the best way to guarantee the
security and well-being of diverse cultures, peoples and societies.14 Some of the
limitations of this argument, however, can be revealed through an examination of
the postulated link between state-making and security in the Third World.

State-making and security in the Third World

The situation of the Third World security problematic against the backdrop of the
process of state formation is the strongest element of the book. Ayoob, drawing on
the work of scholars such as Charles Tilly, reminds us that this process was violent
and protracted in modern Europe. Third World state-making is even more difficult
(and possibly more violent) because of the compressed timeframe in which it is
occurring, and the systemic pressures that come from late entry into a state system
in which such norms as territorial inviolability are already fixed (p. 32). Weak states,
for example, are seldom permitted to exit gracefully from the international scene,
and the demands of mass politics render internal state-making extremely difficult.
This historicizing of the security problematic is a forceful corrective to much
contemporary analysis that treats states, once granted formal independence, as 'like
units' for all purposes.
WTiat is curious, however, is how little use Ayoob makes of a potentially powerful
insight. For scholars such as Tilly, Otto Hintze or Samuel Finer, it is systemic
pressures?the competition between states for territory and power, often culminating
in war?that provide the motive force for state-making. As Tilly puts it, 'war makes
states': the main impetus for the consolidation of national states in Europe was

14 see 'The Moral

For Michael Walzer's argument Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics', in
Charles Beitz et al. (eds.), International Ethics (Princeton, NJ, 1985), pp. 217-37.

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 Security, state formation and the 'Third World' 131

preparation for, and actual fighting of, wars.15 Yet Ayoob himself points out that in
the Third World the incidence of interstate war is low, and although intra-state strife
is relatively high, the norms of territorial inviolability and state preservation
(however weakened they may be) actually ameliorate the fear of conquest or
extinction that drove early European state-makers to consolidate their states through
frequent battles. WJiat, then, are the major motive forces driving the process of state
formation in the Third World, and are they directed towards the same end point as
in the European case?
Likewise, scholars of state formation have been attentive to the complex dynamic
relationship between state-makers, war-makers, and nascent 'citizens', and have

traced out different paths that state-making could follow. Tilly argues that although
state-makers started by extracting resources for war-making and promising
protection and security (against both internal and external threats) in return for a
monopoly over the use of force, over time this required the forging of broader
alliances within society. As he says, 'agents of states bargained with civilian groups
that controlled the resources required for effective warmaking, and in bargaining
gave the civilian groups enforceable claims on the state'; these claims were ultimately
politically enfranchising, and 'led to a civilianization of government and domestic
politics'.16 Precisely how this process operated depended on particular constellations
of domestic forces and pressures. Brian Downing, going further, has argued that the
sixteenth-century 'military revolution' (which has perhaps an analogue in the
dramatic transformation of war-making in the Third World) exerted an enormously
destructive impact on the emergence of constitutionalism and democracy in parts of
Western Europe. As he concludes, 'in countries that avoided the military revolution,
or found alternative methods of financing war than domestic resource mobilization,
military did not destroy constitutional
modernization government, and a liberal
not assured . . .
was at least more Hence
political outcome, though likely'.17 English,
Dutch and Swedish constitutionalism can be contrasted with the absolutism of
France or
Brandenburg-Prussia.
This suggests that a focus on processes of state-making should be a starting point
for a rich analysis of different evolutionary trajectories that could be present in the
Third World, one that takes into account the changed pressures of external conflicts
and internal resource mobilization (rentier versus taxation states), or that analyses
the relationships between the state-makers and existing or nascent social formations
(traditional political institutions, a bourgeoisie, other institutions in civil society that

15 as Organized
See Charles Tilly, 'War-making and State-making Crimea in Peter Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 170,
169-91; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1990 (Oxford, 1990); Karen
Rasier and William Thompson, War and State Making (Boston, MA, 1989); Otto Hintze, 'Military
Organization and the Organization of the State', in Felix Gilbert (ed.), The Historical Essays of Otto
Hintze (New York, 1975), pp. 178-215; Samuel Finer, 'State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The
Role of the Military', in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe
(Princeton, NJ, 1975), pp. 84-163.
16
Tilly, Coercion, p. 206. See also Reinhard Bendix, Nation-building and Citizenship (London, 1964).
17 Brian
Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in
Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 3.

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 132 Keith Krause

could act as sites of resistance to state power). Some of these elements are present as
anecdotal examples in Ayoob's volume, but much more could be made of this.18
Perhaps more troubling is Ayoob's Western-centric presentation of state-making
as a linear process that can be compressed or extended, but which has only one
outcome. This argument echoes now-discredited modernization theory and is in
harmony with aWaltzian realism that sees stasis after the historical crystallization of
the state system. Yet the insight that concepts of security are intimately linked to
processes of state formation need not fall into this trap. In fact, one could argue that
although Third World states are condemned to engage in state-making, the circum
stances under which this is occurring are so different from those of seventeenth- to
twentieth-century Europe as to make any attempt to posit parallel historical paths
mistaken. This could lead either to more pessimistic or more optimistic predictions
than Ayoob's. On the pessimistic side, the near-complete destruction of pre-existing
political structures and processes in colonized regions, the absence of an 'emigration
option serving as a social safety valve', and the dependent and exploitive economic
relations with the industrialized world could lock many (if not most) Third World
states into a permanent cycle of weak or collapsing institutions, predatory rule and
violent communal conflict.19 On the optimistic side, the normative structure of
international society, with its relatively (in historical terms) strong emphasis on
human rights and representative institutions, the emergence of global networks that
are supportive of nascent institutions in domestic civil society, and the crucial (if not
always helpful) role of international institutions in creating domestic governance
structures might help bypass some of the worst ancillary consequences of the state
making process.20
Either way, keeping the focus on security and the Third World would require an
acknowledgement that the claim of the state to loyalty and legitimacy that is at the
heart of the modern project is rooted in its promise to evacuate organized (and
sometimes random) violence from political life, to provide at least the minimal
conditions of order, and perhaps (although not always) to support some measure of
representativeness in its political institutions. As the Commission on Global
Governance notes, 'to confine the concept of security exclusively to the protection of
states is to ignore the interests of people who form the citizens of a state and in
whose name is exercised'.21 A too-narrow state-centrism, however
sovereignty

analytically defensible, not forget that 'human beings are the ultimate members
must
of the society of states'.22 Ayoob's foundational argument for his conception of

18 see Jill Crystal, in the Gulf: Rulers and

For just three contemporary examples, Oil and Politics
Merchants inKuwait and Qatar (Cambridge, 1990); Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States:
State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ, 1988); Thierry
Gongora, 'War Making and State Power in the Contemporary Middle East', International Journal of
Middle East Studies, 29 (1997), pp. 323-40.
19 and Political
The quote is from Downing, The Military Revolution Change, p. 6, who also emphasizes
the role that medieval constitutional structures played in the emergence of representative institutions
in Europe.
20 I am social movements in such areas as
thinking here of normative influences and transnational
human rights, or non-governmental networks in areas such as healthcare, agricultural development,
or women's rights, or the World Bank's and International Monetary Fund's emphasis on 'good

governance' and structural adjustment.

21 on Global Governance,
Report of the Commission Our Global Neighbourhood, p. 81.
22
Jackson, Quasi-states, p. 144.

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 Security, state formation and the 'Third World' 133

security?that the state is the historically best option?would be greatly

strengthened if his analysis of state formation offered a more nuanced and detailed
account of different kinds of state-making outcomes that could result in the Third
World from the radically different constellations of historical circumstances that
many of these states face.

'Third Worlds' as the object of study

The rich diversity of state forms in the modern world does not render illusory the
quest to devise some general theoretical categories to capture their common
elements. Ayoob is surely correct to point out the limitations of the central realist
premise that the institutional forms of a state, its relative strength or weakness, and
its historical development are more or less irrelevant for explaining the causes of war
or conditions of peace in the Third World. But his central analytic category, the
'Third World', suffers too from a similar blurring of distinctions.
While acknowledging the diversity among Third World states, Ayoob's defence of
the continued relevance of the concept to describe 'the underdeveloped, poor, weak
states of Asia, Africa and Latin America' (p. 12) is that the similarities between these
states exceed their differences, and that insecurity and vulnerability are the
determining conditions of their foreign or security policies. These similarities include
the experience of conquest and domination, a particular sort of economic develop
ment, a fractured social order, and extreme weakness vis-?-vis the developed world
on most indices of economic, military or technological capabilities (pp. 14-15).
Obviously, the most troublesome region for this claim is Latin America (although
the newly industrialized countries of East Asia also pose difficulties), so Ayoob
argues that the discontinuities introduced by colonial rule, the fractured nature of
most of these societies, and the self-identification of Latin American elites argue in
favour of their inclusion in the Third World (pp. 33, 93).
Whatever the merits of the category of Third World, however, his reliance on the
concept of Third World veers perilously close to three pitfalls. The first is a
reification of the category Third World, which could reinforce Western tendencies to
see these regions as an undifferentiated zone of turmoil contrasted to the Northern
zone of peace, and which conceals massive differences in the historical trajectories of
states and regions.23 The second pitfall is the 'ghettoization' of his argument: by
confining his analysis of state-making to the Third World, and accepting that state
making has a definable end point, Ayoob diminishes the relevance of his own
insights. Less modestly, he should have claimed that since the processes of state
formation (and possibly fragmentation) are ongoing, the entire problematic of
security studies
should be recast, for both the North and the South, around the
concepts he develops. Several illustrative examples can be offered: the domestic
dimension of the American 'war on drugs' or the rise of various armed 'militias', the
prospects of terrorist attacks from Islamicist groups in France, and the severe social
23
These two pitfalls are nicely discussed by Himadeep Muppidi, 'The Production of Insecurity in
Postcolonial India', unpublished paper, 1995. The terms 'zones of peace/zones of turmoil' are from
Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of PeacelZones of Turmoil
(Chatham, NJ, 1993).

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 134 Keith Krause

tensions around ethnic minorities in Germany (and other European states) all pose
in at least some way a security problem as defined by Ayoob (and by state elites) that
is part of an ongoing process of making and transforming the modern state.
The last deleterious consequence of the continued use of the Third World as a
conceptual category is that it obscures the different possible trajectories of state
formation that should be highlighted in the study of state formation and insecurity,
and it renders us unable to scrutinize creatively various more positive future
alternatives. What may matter most in the future is not a choice between 'strong
states', 'failed states', 'mini-states' (pp. 173-6) or 'opting out of the state system', but
different kinds of looser governance arrangements, which could evolve in response
to the pressures (war-making, wealth creation, internal consolidation, communal
protection) that drive the historical process of state-making. The emphasis on strong
states?making their empirical sovereignty catch up with their juridical sovereignty?
seems to exclude consideration of the decentralized (such as Switzerland or Canada)
or more regionalized alternatives that could emerge in the next century as a response
to various of these pressures. None of this, parenthetically, requires us to abandon
Ayoob's central premise that 'the state' is the only organizational form on offer for
the foreseeable future, but it opens up consideration of what kinds of states might be
most appropriate to deal with the challenges diverse social and communal groups
face.

Violence and the state: the security problematic of the post-Cold War world

One can, by way of conclusion, suggest two broad sorts of 'amendments' to Ayoob's
analytic framework that could enrich our analysis of the security problematic of
contemporary world politics. The first amendment, now being outlined by scholars
such as Ole Waever, is a methodological one, and would subject to critical scrutiny
the question of how issues are defined as security threats. At present, Ayoob takes
this point as given: security threats are as defined by Third World state elites. But
closer attention to the process by which phenomena are 'securitized', taken out of
the sphere of everyday politics and 'presented as an existential threat requiring
emergency measures, and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political
procedure', would provide a powerful analytic tool for capturing the essentially
intersubjective understandings of threats to security, and the political struggles that
are undertaken to establish certain 'threats' as significant for a particular group of
people.24 Itmakes a difference that the Peruvian state enjoyed significant support for
its battle against Sendero Luminoso, while the Burmese state enjoys much less
support for its policies against various ethnic and tribal minorities. Likewise,
whether an environmental issue represents a security threat should be determined
not by whether it contains the risk of violent conflict between states, nor by whether
it threatens state institutions, but by whether it is defined as a security threat by the
group in question.
24
Ole Waever, in Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, 'Environmental, Economie and Societal
Security', Working Papers, 10 (Copenhagen: Centre for Peace and Conflict Research, 1995), p. 1. This
working paper is part of a larger book project, provisionally titled A Theory of International Security:
Threats, Sectors, Regions.

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 Security, state formation and the 'Third World' 135

This argument concedes that the state is perhaps the most significant referent
object for security (although not necessarily the only one). It argues, however, that
threats are not always physical, but rather can be tied to the more elusive notion of
'survival' (especially when the referent object is not the state, but the 'nation' or
other identity group).25 The most important issues, therefore, are to determine the
referent object and the process by which threats are represented politically. As
Waever points out, the goal is to study 'who can "do" or "speak" security success
on what issues, under what conditions, and with what effects . . .
fully, [W]hat is
essential is the designation of an existential threat . . . and the acceptance of that
designation by a significant audience.'26 This sort of amendment goes beyond the
truncated view of politics that claims the only relevant actors in the process of
defining security are policy-makers (supported, of course, by appropriate academic
experts), avoids the sterile debate over whether or not a particular issue was 'really' a
threat to security, is analytically robust while incorporating a broader understanding
of security, and incidentally contains an interesting and challenging research agenda.
The second 'amendment' would retain Ayoob's focus on state formation processes
and historical change (albeit without the ideological end point), but would shift the
optic slightly away from 'political phenomena relevant to state elites' and towards
the role of organized violence in political life. Without diminishing the importance
of other potentially 'existential' issues, historically the idea of 'security' has been
inextricably intertwined with the struggle to control the institutions and instruments
of organized violence, which in turn has been central to the emergence of the
modern state, and its conception of representative political institutions, civil society
and civil-military relations. The relatively successful evacuation of violence from the
public sphere is inmany ways a precondition for politics as we understand it.
What this implies for the study of security in today's 'third worlds' is that the most
significant feature of the insertion of post-colonial states into the Westphalian
system has been the 'military revolution' that most of them have undergone: the
dramatic transformation by which modern ideas, institutions and instruments of
organized violence were transmitted from the North to the South. This diffusion of
modern military technologies and techniques of organization to post-colonial states
goes beyond the modernization of armed forces or the transfer of weapons to
encompass the development of military doctrines (mass versus elite armies, central
ized versus decentralized control, defensive versus offensive force postures); the
creation of ancillary state and societal institutions and practices (forms of civil
military relations, patterns and norms of military recruitment and education, claims
on economic and social resources) and choices between different overarching
concepts of security (who or what represents the threat, and how best to counter it)
that are accepted by (or imposed on) societies and states as the justification for
constructing modern military establishments.
In many cases, this 'military revolution' resulted in the institutions of organized
violence being the only remotely 'modern' institutions in newly emerging states. The
armed forces did not, as early modernization theorists had hoped, play a positive
role as an integrative force in fragmented societies or as a vehicle for the diffusion of
modern ideas of development. Instead, they represented a tremendous reservoir of

25
Waever, 'Societal Security.'
26
Waever, in Buzan et al, 'Environmental, Economic and Societal Security', p. 4.

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 136 Keith Krause

political power that was often captured by particular groups, and used to impose a
particular (often violent) order on civil and political life. The transplantation of
unprecedented means of institutionalized violence and surveillance into political
arenas that were empty of the countervailing checks and balances that developed in
the emergence of the modern state in Europe also produced some of the worst forms
of state terror in the twentieth century. Yet as Anthony Giddens has pointed out,
few scholars have attempted to 'analyze the consolidated political power generated
by a merging of developed techniques of surveillance and the technology of
industrialized war', and the role of these technologies and techniques in creating
new methods of surveillance, social control and repression.27
This shift in optic from 'political phenomena relevant to state elites' towards the
role of organized violence in political life would maintain Ayoob's analytic focus on
the external and internal dimensions of security, but avoid the pitfalls created by his
state-centrism. Instead, scholars could concentrate on all three dimensions of the
security/violence nexus: the threats states pose to each other, the threats institutions
of organized violence (formal or informal) pose to states and regimes, and the
threats control the means
those who of violence pose to citizens and society. In
addition, it opens the path for a more nuanced analysis of the processes of state
making that are under way in different regions of the world, and highlights the
pathological avenues that this process can take. Certainly the central role of
institutions of organized violence in political life inmany parts of the world begs to
be better understood within security studies.
This critique of some elements of Ayoob's analysis should not obscure the
distinctiveness and originality of his contribution. His book fruitfully moves
scholars a great distance away from the analyses provided by John Mearsheimer,
Stephen Walt or Steven David, and his challenge cannot (or at least should not) be
ignored. His work is already a standard reference point in the debate. But the overall
issue that his book helps raise?what is the appropriate problematic for security
studies in the post-Cold War world??is still open, despite the efforts of scholars in
the orthodox tradition to invoke closure on this messy debate. One can only hope
that the 'disciplining' practices of security studies do not prevent Ayoob's book, and
other work in this vein, from being recognized as an essential contribution to a
broader definition of security studies.

27 see
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-state and Violence (Cambridge, 1981), p. 295. For exceptions
Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity (London, 1990), ch. 3; Samir al-Khalil,
Republic of Fear (Los Angeles, 1989); David Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction
of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600-1914 (Chicago,
1990).

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