State effects and the effects of state building: institution building and the formation of state-centred societies

This article discusses the assumptions underlying state-building efforts and the effects of these efforts. It addresses two main questions: why has state building not led to the establishment of effective states? And what are the effects of statebuilding? It is argued that these efforts have been based on an institutionalist model of the state derived from a Weberian framework, and that the basic reason why state building has failed is that the creation of effective states requires the creation of state-centred societies, where both material and symbolic resources are concentrated in the state. This is very difficult to achieve for external actors. But, although state building has not achieved the kinds of effects associated with effective states, it has nevertheless had significant effects. These include, first, accentuating the patrimonialism which has led to state weakness in the first place; second, reductions in national sovereignty as external actors’ substantial influence on policy agendas renders the state itself subject to control and regulation by actors external to it; and, third, perpetuating the idea of the state, while undermining the possibility of creating actual states which conform to this idea.     

Fragility within stability: the state,the clan and political resilience in Somaliland

Abstract

Even in the context of a relatively flourishing state, fragility can be an enduring feature of a political system, particularly in the case of recently established or unrecognised states. This article examines the nature of state-building in a specific context to question the assumption that forms of hybrid governance or pre-existing forms of governance are a necessary evil to be tolerated but which needs ultimately to be overcome during state-building. It does this by adopting the language of resilience and focusing on the case of Somaliland to highlight the role of clan governance as a mechanism of political resilience and as a means of promoting the flexibility required for state-building. Yet, at the same time, the process of state-building often involves formalising governance and limiting the role of traditional social-political forms of governance such as clans, ignoring their role in legitimating and stabilising the political system. However, as this article argues, stability and fragility are inextricably linked; while the clan system has been an important force in stabilising the state, it has also become a pressure point for the state’s latent fragility. By contextualising fragility and stability within the language of resilience, though, this symbiotic relationship can be better analysed.     

State building and the non-state: debating key dilemmas

This article unpacks the relationship between state building and the non-state. While accepting both the positive and corrosive characteristics of non-state actors and informal practices of governance, it attempts to (1) advance an argument in favour of mainstreaming ‘non-state’ forms that are positive and useful for state building; and (2) highlight the tensions between the practice of state building and the reality of the non-state. In thinking beyond the state and non-state dichotomy, the article seeks to identify factors that are necessary if state-building programmes are to work in complex environments. Drawing on received wisdom from recent experiences, this conceptual study focuses on important contextual, local, political and legitimacy issues to highlight prominent dilemmas. The conclusion suggests four policy-relevant lessons that reinforce the argument in favour of mainstreaming the non-state agenda into the critical thinking about security and development.     

Discursive democracy and the challenge of state building in divided societies: reckoning with symbolic capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have so far contemplated. Theories of discursive democracy illuminate how this might be possible. We deploy the discursive idea of symbolic capital to show how one might identify the lines along which people in Bosnia could constitute meaningful, internally legitimated political communities – or that would indicate the experiment was not worth attempting. Unless advocates of democratic state building can articulate, rather than assume, a sufficiency of common ground among the populations' multiple, overlapping and conflicting identities, they may have to revert to the default of separate political communities.     

The securitisation of life: Eastern Kurdistan under the rule of a Perso-Shi'i state

Abstract

Since the 1979 Revolution, the Iranian state has adopted a sophisticated set of policies to assimilate the Eastern Kurds. The Kurds are often the main target of the Iranian state’s military operations, its assimilatory strategies, and its regime of surveillance. After the ‘conquest’ (fath) of Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhelat) in 1979, the state tried to retain control over the region through systemic militarisation, the establishment of ‘revolutionary institutions’, and new religious and cultural centres, to transform the demographic, religious and cultural profile of Kurdistan. This paper is an attempt to illuminate the state’s religious nationalism and various forms of assimilatory strategies that the Islamic Republic of Iran has employed to transform Kurdish regions.     

In-between anarchy and interdependence: from state death to fragile and failing states

International relations scholars concede a vital role for anarchy in structuring state behaviour towards survival. Anarchy provides strong incentives for power-maximising behaviour, since states that do not act accordingly risk death by conquest. This assumption raises an important question: if international anarchy is pervasive, leading to processes where only the fit survive, how do we explain the survival of fragile and failing states? Under conditions of self-help such states should be tempting targets, yet these vulnerable states avoid death by conquest. Fragile and failing states survive because international order is based on a sovereignty regime backed by major powers. International order is more salient than anarchy and provides better vantage points to understand the absence of state death. Elements of international order, like the relational hierarchies between dominant and subordinate states, no longer tolerate state death. This largely explains the survival of fragile and failing states.     

International peace building and the emerging inclusivity norm

This paper draws on constructivist theory to assess the contemporary debate around inclusion within peace-building and state-building processes and on inclusivity as an emerging norm within international policy processes. Within the wider context of an ongoing but still incomplete normative shift in terms of how peace building is both understood and practised, it focuses on the case of the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, and makes the case that the inclusivity agenda marks a significant shift towards fulfilling a longstanding commitment to respecting national ownership of peace-building processes.     

Humanitarian aid and host state capacity: the challenges of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Colombia

How can humanitarian actors operate in a host state with significant subnational variations in willingness and capacity to meet its obligations? This is an issue of pressing importance, given the expansion of humanitarian aid to middle-income countries with growing state capacity, but with persistent infrastructural weakness in their periphery. The article illustrates the challenges and potentialities of engaging these states through the case study of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Colombia. It describes the way the NRC has located its offices in peripheral areas, and how its activities have fostered the rule of law, successfully using rights-based approaches to strengthen subnational state institutions, activate and mobilise citizen demands and bridge national and subnational administrations. The article concludes that these activities, operated by officers with extensive practical knowledge and local trust networks, can open the way for durable solutions for humanitarian crisis, but can also provoke backlash from subnational actors.     

The rise of an anti-politics machinery: peace,civil society and the focus on results in Myanmar

‘Results’, ‘value for money’, ‘effectiveness’ and similar buzzwords have become commonplace in development cooperation and peace building. The use of technical instruments such as project cycle management and evaluations is hardly questioned anymore: these are presented as a minor shift of focus to make current practice more effective. This paper argues that there is far more to this shift: a machinery of practices and institutions has been installed that removes political questions on development or peace from the political realm and places them under the rule of technical experts. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse analysis, the paper analyses how this machinery prioritises gradual reform, subjugates other approaches to societal change and reproduces power/knowledge networks in both the global South and North. Based on ethnographic field research in Myanmar, it also explores discursive strategies of local actors and assesses how they are aiming to create spaces to challenge this machinery.     

European Union anti-piracy initiatives in the Horn of Africa: linking land-based counter-piracy with maritime security and regional development

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has resulted in a steady decline in trade through the Arabian Sea and higher costs of doing business for multiple world regions. The EU has responded to the threat with a large-scale anti-piracy operation in the Horn of Africa, which constitutes the first free-standing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) military operation that is not entirely dependent on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planning and assets. The operation is designed to interdict Somali piracy operations across the Gulf of Aden and to keep some of the world’s busiest sea lanes open for reasons of world trade. This article argues that the EU preoccupation with military solutions to the piracy problem, based on interventions through the Somali federal government with an emphasis on security, is insufficient because it fails to address the underlying causes of piracy and misunderstands the Somali socio-cultural-security nexus and the need for practical longer term land-based approaches to development. The reduction of Somali piracy activities can be linked to this increased military response capacity as well as to increased security precautions undertaken by shipping companies, but none of these strategies has succeeded in dismantling piracy networks. They therefore offer only a temporary and costly stopgap measure.     

Authority in rebel groups: identity,recognition and the struggle over legitimacy

This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.     

Measuring state fragility: a review of the theoretical groundings of existing approaches

State fragility has become a resonant term in the development discourse over the past decade. In its early days it served as a catch-all phrase used by donor organisations to draw attention to the need to assist ‘fragile states’. In response to the call for a better understanding of how to deal with these countries, there was a surge in measures of fragility. However, it was not long before academics pointed to the murkiness and fuzziness of the term, and identified several caveats to most of the proposals for quantification. This paper reviews existing approaches to operationalise this concept, distinguishing between those that offer no ranking or only partial rankings of fragile states, and those providing ordinal lists of countries. The examination of their theoretical underpinnings lends support to the critical view that most existing approaches are undermined by a lack of solid theoretical foundations, which leads to confusion between causes, symptoms and outcomes of state fragility.     

A tale of three bridges: agency and agonism in peace building

This article explores agonistic processes of peace, which are situated within and constitutive of different spaces and places. Three contested cities, Sarajevo, Mostar and Vi?egrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina, provide us with local sites where peace and peace building in various forms ‘take place’ as people come together in collective action. Through a close reading of three symbolically and materially important bridges in the towns, we reveal meaning-making processes, as agentive subjects struggle around competing claims in the post-conflict everyday world. The collective, situated and fleeting agency that we explore through the Arendtian notion of ‘space of appearance’ invests space with meaning, belonging and identity. Thus, this article grapples with agonistic peace as it manifests itself in materiality and spatial practices. We use the social and material spaces of the city to locate agency and agonism in peace building as they relate to the conflict legacy in Mostar, Vi?egrad and Sarajevo in order to advance the critical peace research agenda.     

Corporatism packaged in pluralist ideology: the case of Slovenia

Corporatism has been an influential doctrine in the Slovenian polity since its beginning. After the onset of democratization in the early 1990s, its influence remains strong. Forms of corporatism are embodied in the National Council as the second chamber of parliament, in the chamber system, the system of social partnership and the RTVS (Public Television of Slovenia) Council. It is also present in certain socio-political priorities such as a higher value being placed on partnership over competition, on fairness over human rights, on community over individualism. Social pluralism has always been a part of Slovenian public life. Political pluralism emerged at the end of the 19th century and was never fully developed. There has always been a strong inclination in the political life of Slovenia to organize around interest groups and editorial boards of various publications, a tendency that reveals a plurality of voices but a general unwillingness to fight for political power. It could also be concluded that the development of pluralism in Slovenia relies heavily on corporatism because of the general lack of liberal foundations.     

Ashes from the phoenix: state terrorism and the party-list groups in the Philippines

An ongoing theme in Filipino history has been the exclusion of the left from electoral politics. Something that may provide an aperture facilitating left-wing participation are the provisions of the 1987 Constitution providing for the election, based on proportional representation, of representatives from traditionally marginalized sectors of society. Since the implementation of these provisions, six party-list groups have become the visible face of the left in Philippine politics. However, since 2001, the Philippines have experienced a wave of assassinations targeting leftists. These killings, an emulation of the Phoenix Program implemented by the United States in Vietnam, are designed to destroy organizations used as ‘fronts’ by the Communist Party of the Philippines and the progressive party-list groups have been specifically targeted. These killings, and the fear they generate, are an example of state terrorism and, eventually, will prove themselves to be flawed counterinsurgency doctrine because, by precluding left-wing participation in electoral politics, they force the left into armed opposition.     

The revenge of the Caucasus: Chechenization and the dual state in Russia

Post-communist development in Russia has been characterized by the development of a dual state in which the constitutional order is balanced by the consolidation of an arbitrary prerogative state. This horizontal dualism has taken root in Russia's regions; and this is accompanied by the establishment of a form of vertical dualism in relations between the regions and the center. Attempts to overcome this form of segmented regionalism under president Vladimir Putin have been undermined by the development of Chechenization, which represents not only the repudiation of dualism in this republic, but threatens to undermine the precarious balance between the constitutional and prerogative states at the federal level as well. Chechenization has its opponents in Moscow as well and its fate is defined by the struggle between the factions at the center. The process of “separatism without secession” is a highly ambiguous one and reflects broader developments in the Russian state as president Dmitry Medvedev seeks to strengthen the constitutional pillar of the dual state.     

History,memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.     

The politics of convergence in Bolivia: social movements and the state

Abstract

The convergence of social movements in Bolivia was a decisive factor in bringing President Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, hereafter MAS) to power in 2006. Yet in recent years, this convergence has become fraught with internal tensions as the state’s extractivist development model and promises for plurinationalism and alternative forms of development reveal fundamental contradictions. This paper traces the formation of social movement alliances over time, revealing their power to effect change and their strength when there is unity in diversity. Rather than ‘neoliberalism’ which represented the injustice frame and united identity- and class-based politics during the rise of the MAS, the single greatest threat to the indigenous, peasants, originarios, women and the youth in the current context is extractivism.     

Regionalising the state: political topography of regulatory regionalism

In recent years new modes of regional governance such as peer review, policy networks, and multi-level governance, have emerged not only in the European Union but in other regions such as the Asia Pacific. This article explains the rise of these new modes of governance in terms of the framework of regulatory regionalism. It suggests that these new modes of governance constitute distinctive forms of regionalised governance within the state. Hence emerging practices of regional governance are not above the national state, but instantiated within it. Just as much as the national territorial state was consolidated over the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is likely to see the consolidation of new forms and practices of regional governance in which the ‘regional’ becomes incorporated within the political space of the state.     

The politics of state capitalism in a post-liberal international order: the case of Turkey

Abstract

This article discusses the transformation of the liberal international order, with reference to the ways in which global shifts affect the developmental paradigms among the emerging middle powers. Although it is rarely contested that the liberal order is being severely tested, the dynamics and potential consequences of this transformation are a matter of intense controversy. Also, the debate mainly focuses on great power politics, without paying adequate attention to the ways in which middle powers are influenced by and inform the transition to a post-liberal international order. By focusing on the case of Turkey, this article addresses whether non-Western great powers (Russia and China in particular) are leading the emergence of alternative order(s), and if so, through what mechanisms. Based on the reciprocal interactions between ideas, material capabilities and institutions, I argue that the preferences of the Turkish ruling elite seem to be gradually shifting from a Western-oriented liberal model towards a variety of ‘state capitalism’ as an alternative developmental paradigm in a post-liberal international order.