This book explores the contradictions that emerge in international statebuilding efforts in war-torn societies. Since the end of the Cold War, more than 20 major peace operations have been deployed to countries emerging from internal conflicts. This book argues that international efforts to construct effective, legitimate governmental structures in these countries are necessary but fraught with contradictions and vexing dilemmas.. Drawing on the latest scholarly research on postwar peace operations, the volume: addresses cutting-edge issues of statebuilding including coordination, local ownership, security, elections, constitution making, and delivery of development aid features contributions by leading and up-and-coming scholars provides empirical case studies including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Croatia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and others presents policy-relevant findings of use to students and policymakers alike The Dilemmas of Statebuilding will be vital reading for students and scholars of international relations and political science. Bringing new insights to security studies, international development, and peace and conflict research, it will also interest a range of policy makers.

After civil wars end, what can sustain peace in the long-term? In particular, how can outsiders facilitate durable conflict-managing institutions through statebuilding - a process that historically has been the outcome of bloody struggles to establish the state's authority over warlords, traditional authorities, and lawless territories? In this book, Timothy Sisk explores international efforts to help the world’s most fragile post-civil war countries today build viable states that can provide for security and deliver the basic services essential for development. Tracing the historical roots of statebuilding to the present day, he demonstrates how the United Nations, leading powers, and well-meaning donors have engaged in statebuilding as a strategic approach to peacebuilding after war. Their efforts are informed by three key objectives: to enhance security by preventing war recurrence and fostering community and human security; to promote development through state provision of essential services such as water, sanitation, and education; to enhance human rights and democracy, reflecting the liberal international order that reaffirms the principles of democracy and human rights, . Improving governance, alongside the state's ability to integrate social differences and manage conflicts over resources, identity, and national priorities, is essential for long-term peace. Whether the global statebuilding enterprise can succeed in creating a world of peaceful, well-governed, development-focused states is unclear. But the book concludes with a road map toward a better global regime to enable peacebuilding and development-oriented statebuilding into the 21st century.

Weak or failed states - where no government is in control - are the source of many of the world's most serious problems, from poverty, AIDS and drugs to terrorism. What can be done to help? The problem of weak states and the need for state-building has existed for many years, but it has been urgent since September 11 and Afghanistan and Iraq. The formation of proper public institutions, such as an honest police force, uncorrupted courts, functioning schools and medical services and a strong civil service, is fraught with difficulties. We know how to help with resources, people and technology across borders, but state building requires methods that are not easily transported. The ability to create healthy states from nothing has suddenly risen to the top of the world agenda. State building has become a crucial matter of global security. In this hugely important book, Francis Fukuyama explains the concept of state-building and discusses the problems and causes of state weakness and its national and international effects.

The central task of all statebuilding is to create a state that is regarded as legitimate by the people over whom it exercises authority. This is a necessary condition for stable, effective governance. States sufficiently motivated to bear the costs of building a state in some distant land are likely to have interests in the future policies of that country, and will therefore seek to promote loyal leaders who are sympathetic to their interests and willing to implement their preferred policies. In The Statebuilder's Dilemma, David A. Lake addresses the key tradeoff between legitimacy and loyalty common to all international statebuilding attempts. Except in rare cases where the policy preferences of the statebuilder and the population of the country whose state is to be built coincide, as in the famous success cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, promoting a leader who will remain loyal to the statebuilder undermines that leader’s legitimacy at home. In Iraq, thrust into a statebuilding role it neither anticipated nor wanted, the United States eventually backed Nouri al-Malaki as the most favorable of a bad lot of alternative leaders. Malaki then used the support of the Bush administration to govern as a Shiite partisan, undermining the statebuilding effort and ultimately leading to the second failure of the Iraqi state in 2014. Ethiopia faced the same tradeoff in Somalia after the rise of a promising but irredentist government in 2006, invading to put its own puppet in power in Mogadishu. But the resulting government has not been able to build significant local support and legitimacy. Lake uses these cases to demonstrate that the greater the interests of the statebuilder in the target country, the more difficult it is to build a legitimate state that can survive on its own.

This book explores the conditions of state formation and survival in the Middle East. Based on Historical Sociology, it provides a model for study of the state in the Arab world and a theory to explain its survival. Examining states as a ‘process’, the author argues that what emerged in the Middle East in the beginning of the twentieth century are ‘social fields’—where states form and deform—and not states as defined by Max Weber. He explores the constitutions of these fields—their cultural, material and political structures—and identifies three stages of state development in which different cases can be located. Capturing the dilemmas that ‘late-forming states’ face as regimes within them cope with domestic and international pressure, the author illustrates several Middle East cases and presents a detailed analysis of state developments in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He maintains that more than the domestic characteristics of individual states, state survival in the Middle East is also a function of the anarchic nature of the international (and by extension the regional) states-system. The first to raise the question on the survivability of the territorial states in the Middle East while engaging with both International Relations and Comparative Politics theories, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East politics, Comparative Politics and International Relations.

This new Handbook offers a combination of theoretical, thematic and empirical analyses of the statebuilding regime, written by leading international scholars. Over the past decade, international statebuilding has become one of the most important and least understood areas of international policy-making. Today, there are around one billion people living in some 50-60 conflict-affected, 'fragile' states, vulnerable to political violence and civil war. The international community grapples with the core challenges and dilemmas of using outside force, aid, and persuasion to build states in the wake of conflict and to prevent such countries from lapsing into devastating violence. The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding is a comprehensive resource for this emerging area in International Relations. The volume is designed to guide the reader through the background and development of international statebuilding as a policy area, as well as exploring in depth significant issues such as security, development, democracy and human rights. Divided into three main parts, this Handbook provides a single-source overview of the key topics in international statebuilding: Part One: Concepts and Approaches Part Two: Security, Development and Democracy Part Three: Policy Implementation This Handbook will be essential reading for students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, peacebuilding, development, war and conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.

This book provides an internationally accepted conceptual framework for statebuilding, informed by today’s realities of conflict-affected and fragile situations.