The role of external development actors in post-conflict scenarios (original) (raw)
Related papers
State Building, States, and State Transformation in Africa: Introduction
Social Evolution & History, 2018
Postcolonial societies are a unique event in world history. Their emergence in the mid-twentieth century did not result from centuries-old internal social processes, but was directly determined by the formation and short-lived (by historical standards) existence and disintegration of the European colonial empires. The colonial borders reflected primarily the balance of forces between the metropolitan powers in this or that region, but not the preceding course of the region's own political, social, economic, and cultural history. With rare exceptions, many different peoples were forcibly united within a colony. Not only kinship but also cultural affinity among those peoples was often absent. At the same time, the colonial borders would divide one people or break the historically established regional systems of economic and cultural ties not less infrequently. Likewise, the colonialists would forcibly unite peoples that had never formed regional political and economic systems; moreover, had different levels of sociocultural complexity, and sometimes did not even know about each other or were historical enemies. At the same time, the colonial borders would often separate historically and economically connected peoples and societies. These features were supplemented by stadial and civilizational heterogeneity of the colonial societies. The elements of capitalism, implanted by the Europeans in different spheres, did not synthesize with a set of pre-capitalist features of the local societies. There was also a little intersection between the autochthonous and new sec
AN ANALYTICAL NARRATIVE ON STATE-MAKING
2007
Mozambique has been described as a model of 'state resilience' as the ruling Frelimo party has managed to maintain power through years of economic collapse and civil conflict. However, such a description can be misleading and I argue that in most senses, apart from the symbolic, the state largely collapsed through much of the country during the civil war (1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992). By tracing the social formation of the elite who eventually went on to dominate the Frelimo party leadership I demonstrate how they were able to maintain internal unity and survive the trials of the post-independence period. However, the social basis of the unity that has maintained the Frelimo party is also very exclusionary, and in many ways unique to themselves. Thus, instead of a model of state resilience I argue that it is the Frelimo party that has survived, but that the reestablishment of the hegemony of the party-state could deepen the divisions and inequalities that helped fuel civil war.
This article examines how the literature on state formation has formed the basis for recent statebuilding praxes to emerge. State formation debates offer a dominant theoretical framework focusing on power and realist concepts of security. The dominant focus on indigenous violence and self-interest, and its shaping of the state in response, has been an important motif of statebuilding literatures as well as for liberal peacebuilding, legitimating their interventionary basis. However, state formation literatures also offer an understanding of the formation of structure, social movements, social contracts, and an anthropological understanding of the state, as a basis for developing an institutional framework to provide peace, security, and order.
What's in a Name? Theoretical Perspective on State and Nation-building
To an outsider, the following seems breathtakingly absurd: relations between the Balkan nations of Greece and Macedonia have been defined by conflict for two decades, because the latter's constitutional name is 'Republic of Macedonia'. As a result of that, the small landlocked state with a population of just over two million, has been unable to join its post-Communist neighbours in accessing NATO and the European Union. The Hellenes refuse to allow the former Yugoslav republic to do so, unless the term 'Macedonia' is removed from its name. Although negotiations between the two parties have taken place for almost 20 years now, no compromise was reached. Currently, the situation has reached an impasse. This inevitably poses the question, why no middle ground could be established. This essay will put forward the argument, that both sides use historical aspects of the naming dispute for the purpose of nation-building. Using history for the creation and further consolidation of identity is an idea that has been discussed by numerous academics, and it will be argued that the naming dispute between Greece and Macedonia can be regarded as a critical case in an evaluation of the applicability of this idea. Firstly, the theoretical framework behind the processes of state and nation-building will be reflected on. The relationship between nations, Nationalism, states and history will be shown. Then the naming dispute will be presented as the case-study underlying the principal argument. The use of history by both Greece and Macedonia will be highlighted, and finally the role of external actors, particularly the EU, NATO and the UN, will be assessed. Finally, some conclusions will be drawn based in the findings presented here. History has shown that both states and nations are not rigid entities, but that they are constructed and sometimes even reconstructed. In order give an analysis of the processes of state
Developing the state of a nation in a post-colonial world: A review essay
Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2007
Remarking on the failure of most state-making efforts in early modern Europe, Charles Tilly noted more than 30 years ago that the 'disproportionate distribution of success and failure puts us in the unpleasant situation of dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are negative, while only the positive cases are well documented'. 1 A decade later, a well-known volume of essays on state and economic development, which appeared in the background of speculations about the 'disappearance' of the state in the wake of alleged 'globalisation', populated the spread between supposed success and failure in contemporary state-building with a range of possibilities deriving essentially from relations between states, societies and transnational actors. 2
History Repeating? Colonial, Socialist and Liberal Statebuilding in Mozambique
The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding, 2013
External statebuilders have been notoriously bad at making sense of the historical experiences and trajectories of state-society relations. As such, there is often the working assumption that externally-driven post-conflict statebuilding is substantially changing the dynamics of rule in a polity through the import of liberal ideas. Yet in practice this is often not the case. This chapter looks at three successive attempts at statebuilding in Mozambique and draws out interesting elements of continuity between them in terms of political authority, political economy and public administration practices. These are the colonial New State from 1930-1974, the socialist post-independence state from 1975-1989, and the liberal post-conflict restructuring from 1990 onwards. The discussion concludes that internal and external elites' unwillingness to address or re-structure some fundamental relationships between the state and the population sustains the tensions generated by strategies for political rule and development. This is especially evident where 'liberal' statebuilding practices have tended to have distinctively 'conservative' effects in terms of state-society relations, replicating rather than transforming power and authority.
POLS 3010-01 - THE PROBLEMATIC OF STATE BUILDING IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD (Fall 2010)
The main objective of this course is to understand the way in which modern states operate, with emphasis on the developing world. In other words, discuss how political and economic policy decisions affect society as a whole (the development process). The role of the state, mostly from the 1970s onwards, will be assessed in a critical way, using examples from around the world related to specific state reforms and processes of political and social change, some of them successful and some not. This course will allow mature students to build their own critical conceptions of what a 'modern state', and its set of institutions, should represent.