State-failure or polity-creation? : world politics beyond state-centrism

The prominence of state-building in contemporary practice is hard to overstate, being variably described as "one of the most important issues for the world community ... having risen to the top of the global agenda" and as constituting "the dominant framework for the international regulation of non-Western states". Designed in the 1990s as a reactive strategy of interventions on humanitarian or post-conflict reconstruction grounds, state-building becomes increasingly perceived, after 9/11, as "the preventive solution to a wide range of economic, social and political problems facing ... weak or failing states". Despite the increased centrality of international interventions subsumed under this label, the gap between ambitions of exporting Western templates of "good governance" and the reality on the ground can at best only modestly be said to be bridged, and is frequently regarded as having been widened by "building state-failure". Furthermore, despite undeniable progress on the quantitative dimension, the frameworks of state-failure and state-building remain conceptually underdeveloped. This thesis suggests a set of ideas that can form the starting point for the (re)conceptualization of these frameworks. At the core of this alternative framework is the conviction that, by naturalizing an idealized Weberian model of the state based on the centralization and bureaucratization of political institutions monopolizing the means of violence, the concepts of state-failure and state-building are not so much incorrect as incomplete. As a concept based on a "negative logic", the narrative of state-failure tells the story of what the respective units are not, but cannot appropriately analyze the existing political and social relations on their own terms. In tum, although an important process which cannot be ignored by analysts as long as it remains a strategic option for policy-makers, state-building can best be conceptualized as only one process in the dynamic construction of local political communities and institutions of governance. To correct these limitations, my suggestions are in line with Wallerstein's call to engage in unthinking both the state and state-building as ultimate, teleological projects by conceptualizing the former as a particular instantiation of the open-ended concept of polity and the latter as just one element of the process of polity-creation. Rejuvenating the Tillyan logic of unintended consequences, the Westphalian Periphery could thus be analyzed as the result of a dynamic interaction between three waves of polity-creation -labeled here as state-formation, state-making and state-building carried out by different actors with different, sometimes compatible, but mostly incompatible objectives. The thesis closes by speculating about the consequences of such a framework for the way we theorize International Relations. On a domestic level, the like-units assumption would have to be abandoned given the hybrid nature of polities resulting from the confluence of two or even all three processes of polity-creation. At the intemational Ievel, the neo-medievalist scenario could be re-articulated away from the image rejected by Bull, towards an image including co-existence in the international system of a diversity of polities, of which the modern state remains the dominant, but not the only form