Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention

This book focuses on the social processes surrounding statebuilding and explores what actually happens when conscious efforts at statebuilding #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;meet#xE2;#xAC;" social contexts, and are transformed into daily routines. Using process-oriented approaches instead of #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;pathological#xE2;#xAC;" descriptions of what has not been achieved, the authors describe what actually happens in the course of statebuilding projects. A terminology is introduced which distinguishes between #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;statebuilding#xE2;#xAC;" as a conscious attempt at establishing an order, and #xE2;#xAC;#xDC;state-formation#xE2;#xAC;" as the contingent social processes that accompany and deform this politics. This can be utilized as an analytical frame for all the case studies because it does not limit the notion of statebuilding to certain actors or tasks, but allows the filling of the analytical frame with historically specific contents. At the same time, the conception captures the core of any statebuilding process: the inevitable deformation of original intentions in the process of politics. This volume shows that the explanation for the limits of statebuilding is that they share structural characteristics. The most basic one is their embeddedness in the structures of world society, understood as a global interrelation of political, economic and ideational reproduction that encompasses all societies. The hurdles which hinder the consolidation of Western-type states in the non-Western world are rooted to a high degree in international structures of power and domination. Contemporarily, there are two dynamics common to processes of state-formation: increased internationalization of the non-Western state and its informalization. These two structurally-determined dynamics contribute to the stabilization of formal state fa#xC3;#xA7;ades while, simultaneously, hindering the consolidation of legal-rational rule. The international politics of statebuilding contributes to the internationalization and informalization of non-Western states and therefore produces its own limits. The book will be of great interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, war and conflict studies, internatonal security and IR .