In the last decades, the United States Army has often been involved in missions other than conventional warfare. These include low-intensity conflicts, counterinsurgency operations, and nation-building efforts. Although non-conventional warfare represents the majority of missions executed in the past sixty years, the Army still primarily plans, organizes, and trains to fight conventional ground wars. Consequently, in the last ten years, there has been considerable criticism regarding the military’s inability to accomplish tasks other than conventional war. Failed states and the threat they represent cannot be ignored or solved with conventional military might. In order to adapt to this new reality, the U.S. Army must innovate. This text examines the conditions that have allowed or prevented the U.S. Army to innovate for nation-building effectively. By doing so, it shows how military leadership and civil-military relations have changed. Nation-building refers to a type of military occupation where the goal is regime change or survival, a large number of ground troops are deployed, and both military and civilian personnel are used in the political administration of an occupied country, with the goals of establishing a productive economy and a stable government. Such tasks have always been a challenge for the U.S. military, which is not normally equipped or trained to undertake them. Using military effectiveness as the measurement of innovative success, the book analyzes several U.S. nation-building cases, including post World War II Germany, South Korea from 1945-1950, the Vietnam War, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. By doing so, it reveals the conditions that enabled military innovation in one unique case (Germany) while explaining what prevented it in the others. This variation of effectiveness leads to examine prevailing military innovation theories, threat-based accounts, quality of military organizations, and civil-military relations. This text comes at a critical time as the U.S. military faces dwindling resources and tough choices about its force structure and mission orientation. It will add to the growing debate about the role of civilians, military reformers, and institutional factors in military innovation and effectiveness.

René Grotenhuis analyses policies intended to bring stability to fragile states and shows how they ignore the question of what gives people a sense of belonging to a nation-state.

Why Nation-Building Matters establishes a framework for building security forces, economic development, and political consolidation that blends soft and hard power into a deployable and effective package.

What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this innovative work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups - individuals perceived as an ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state - are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that how a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism.

This volume tracks the complex relationships between language, education and nation-building in Southeast Asia, focusing on how language policies have been used by states and governments as instruments of control, assimilation and empowerment. Leading scholars have contributed chapters each representing one of the countries in the region.

The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.

"While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television."--BOOK JACKET.