Republican Commonwealths versus State-Building (original) (raw)

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2011

Abstract

I have argued throughout this book that the state as the dominant paradigm for ordering politics manifests itself in two ways: an analytical lens which makes it difficult to distinguish political organization beyond the state, particularly if said organizations control the means of force; and a normative-political programme, which explicitly states or tacitly implies, that the sovereign state is the optimal form of political organization. This paradigm causes problems for our understanding of the HRE, the USA and the EU. It also creates problems for how we perceive, understand and grapple with issues of political organization in the developing world. The most extreme difficulties of rule are coded by the state paradigm as “state failure” and the solution as “state-building.” The two complementary issues have become politics of considerable magnitude and now occupy centre stage in the security and development policies of most Western countries, international organizations and NGOs. External state-building operations have found it difficult to achieve durable order in several of the dire cases. Therefore, we must rethink the diagnosis as well as the remedy. The principal components of this book — resurrection of the republican tradition, making it empirically applicable through modern sociological theory and the comparative investigation of the three cases — impart three lessons for how we understand and attend to fractured societies in Africa and Asia. All three do not provide definite answers but produce different questions.

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