I

The Legacy of State Formation

‘The historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the State, and their history is essentially the history of States and of groups of States.’¹

Introduction

THE CONCEPT OF the state has always been flexible, as the word itself suggests (a ‘state’ among many possible ‘states’ and forms). The view that it indicates fixity of a sovereign and Westphalian sort following a Weberian perspective, which translates into a dominant, realist concern with power, security and territory, has a vice-like grip over IR and political science more generally. It represents the convergence, arising from nineteenth-century European politics, of a model of bureaucracy, intervention and the control of populations through the state, which would enjoy high concentrations of capital and thus the means of coercion.² This model was then exported from the West to the decolonising world during the course of the twentieth century.3 It requires strong state structures that can integrate the material and identity dynamics the state represents into a bureaucratic set of political institutions in order to produce viable state governance and a subjugated population, favouring powerful elites.⁴ Order and territory may eventually be assured, but this discursive process provides continuity for powerful interests. Populations and their elites use violence in order to form a state in their favour. Much of this discussion revolves around the way conflict and power shape the state, and whether this may eventually lead to a social contract or be shaped by the hegemonic power of elites.

Mainstream state-formation theory thus offers a Hobbesian view of a state of nature in which everyone is at war with each other, delving deep into ontological fear and a related perception of history as driven by primitive violence.⁵ The government, acting as a Leviathan, is the only actor that can secure peace, albeit in a negative form, by assuaging violence through a limited social contract. Such arguments have formed the basis for many contemporary analyses of conflict, statebuilding, state fragility, and weak or failed states.⁶ State formation theory offers a historical view of the emergence of the modern state, in European political history and philosophy, as well as a view from the American Revolution and Civil War, and the processes that led to the modern states of Japan and Germany before and through World War II.⁷ From this basis, a range of databases and indexes have appeared that connect the state with war and peace, such as the Correlates of War dataset, the Failed States Index and the Uppsala Dataset.⁸ All of these use the state and its role in violence as an organising framework. Such modes of thought in which the state is both the object and proponent of violence imply that anti-colonial conflicts, separatism, secession and post-colonial civil war – all examples of state formation – are the dominant forms of twentieth-century conflict.⁹

Derived from a strategic and somewhat parsimonious analysis of European history, this rationale has been used to describe the dynamics of conflict all around the world. Yet it represents a reductionist logic, based on the understanding that violence is a biological imperative, is inherent in human society, and is then transferred to the state and international relations, in classic realist fashion. This argument has, along with liberalism, influenced engagement with conflict and development issues, and has supported a link between peace, the state, security and development.10 A narrative linking localised and naturalised dynamics of violence, power and status with the formation of a state, itself a prototypical member of the liberal-peace architecture, has been widely accepted. The next step in this rationale is to legitimate intervention and an externalised and interventionary statebuilding or peacebuilding process. External and often relatively ignorant engagements with local and contextual dynamics of power have mainly led to the moderation of intervention but not its ending, as Kofi Annan argued when he described American ‘high-handed’ approaches in Iraq.¹¹ The elevation of Western rational-legal assumptions about institutions, security, property and power often equates to a form of Orientalism in relation to the state’s intended subjects.¹²

This chapter illustrates, through a range of case-study sketches, how the evolution of state-formation arguments through mainstream power modes to less well-known sociological, structural, and anthropological modes provides a basis for understanding why modern statebuilding tends to lead to negative forms of hybrid peace.

General Dynamics of the Debate

Despite the conceptual framing of Westphalian sovereignty for the modern state and indeed because of historical debates about its provenance, there are many terms available to describe different types of state. Communist, socialist, capitalist, democratic, monarchical, constitutional-monarchical, authoritarian, expansionist, totalitarian, bureaucratic, post-colonial, patrimonial, failed, failing, weak and collapsed remain in the lexicon of terms to describe states. The state has been written about ad nauseam in a number of different disciplines and from different methodological perspectives. In IR and political science, it is of particular interest for realist-theoretical approaches, which focus on power and sovereignty. Others versions may be found in sociology (Weber, Tilly), anthropology (Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe Brown), history and economics (Keynes, Marx, Friedman and many others).

The dominant assumption of state-formation literature is that a state provides security, autonomy, territory and an infrastructure in which conflict is mitigated by either exerting checks and balances on power and redistributing resources, or by merely assuaging power so that inequalities are maintained. State capacity changes over time and may produce a conservative and negative, rather than an emancipatory, form of peace. The state may be the instrument of structural violence or the instrument of its mitigation. According to Marx, the state is a vehicle for predatory elite interests that exploit society, whereas according to liberal theorists it offers the potential of checks and balances by which a civil society and a social contract produce a stable and relatively just order.13 In the nineteenth century, nationalism, a driver of state formation, was viewed as a positive process from the dominant elite perspective, whereas today most elites and societies hold very negative views about nationalism, even if they assume the state is naturalised.¹⁴

State-formation arguments are generally associated with the processes by which local actors gain power and eventually create a Weberian state, which falls under their control. States are both the product and the instrument of force.15 They require autonomy, central to traditional conceptions of sovereignty. Power is centralised, territory is clearly defined, and the state in Westphalian form is driven mainly by a struggle to be confirmed as the power holder. Its objective qualities and capacities focus on security, and its recognition arises from its capacity to make war, domestically or internationally. War-making is the basis of state formation because it leads to the centralisation of political power over a specific territory. Taxation is the basis for the internal expansion of state authority, success in which then leads to an expansion of its security, administrative and political capacities, and the emergence of a strong state.¹⁶ This may spill over into regional ambitions, meaning that state formation is not solely of domestic significance.

The processes of state formation are often given momentum by acute tensions between tradition and modernisation.¹⁷ Yet the state rather than society is the unit of analysis, even if society is deemed to be the source and target of violence. Depending on the perspective adopted, nationalism is seen as a way of mobilising en masse for a common good, or as a threat to social cohesion where identity is a contested factor in the state-formation process. It provides the power necessary for the state to consolidate and expand. This means the state is understood as a historical product of force, patronage and power, rather than mainly of recognition. Alternatively, it provides a range of core functions as recent debates on sovereignty argue (as in modern state contexts).¹⁸ State formation offers a narrative of modernisation and development, authority and power.

Tensions between local actors and elites over a range of historical, material, political, economic, social and territorial factors led to the emergence of violent and criminalised forces of state formation. These were, at least in the European experience, tamed by the modern sovereign state. This gave rise to an order maintained by an uncomfortable mixture of norms, law, expectations, force and institutions organised on a territorial basis. This was a state order based on a balance between force and compromise. From a contemporary perspective, rational-legal standards for statehood are paralleled by historical ‘shadow states’, where elites use the state for their own ends while partially reforming it to follow international standards.19 State formation often implies an illiberal social contract where state resources are used to support elites and to bribe citizens, for as long as this is domestically affordable. This is partly because it preserves local patterns of power responsible for state formation itself.²⁰ In modern terms, this process might be called the securitisation of the state.²¹ This dominant version of state formation implies the formation of unstable regional security complexes fed by localised dynamics of power, violence and criminality.

The literature on this dominant version of state formation confirms a Weberian focus on state sovereignty and territoriality, as well as on elites and the violence they mobilise in order to control the state and population, or to attain regional ambitions. Another characteristic, also borrowed from Weber, is the Orientalist tension between traditional, non-Western society, the modernity represented by the Westphalian or liberal state, and a hierarchy that places the rational-legal state structure at the pinnacle of contemporary political development²² by virtue of its bureaucratic power and core functions. This balances internal power structures in order to provide a legitimate authority structure.

Key State-Formation Debates

State-formation debates have been influenced by the work of Charles Tilly’s famous historical and sociologically informed narrative charting the emergence of the modern state. The state is fundamental both to the international system and also to the organisation of domestic political life, maintaining a division between the domestic and international spheres. This assumption is dominant in the revolutionary or evolutionary, indigenous or externally promoted canon of mainstream IR, development, and peace and conflict studies today. It carries the classic narrative of the emergence of a Westphalian form of sovereignty at the domestic level. The struggle to form a state is the basis for domestic power and order, as well as for status in the international system.23

The historically oriented literature explored the traditional power systems and socio-historical patterns of politics in Europe in order to show how they formed the state as a natural and inevitable outcome of their contests. This literature later influenced the more policy-oriented, political-science, anthropological, sociological or area-studies debates about the dynamics of a disorderly or orderly progression from a traditional or colonial territory, or a post-conflict environment, to the modern state. Accordingly, the nature of the state depends on the interests of dominant political classes, and their economic and ideational strength determines the level of conflict, the nature of the state, and its durability and responsiveness.²⁴

State-formation debates have revolved around four key state dynamics identified in Tilly’s work as summarised by Schwarz: the juxtaposition of capitalist accumulation and class conflict, and the contradictions they reproduce; crises in governance resulting from threats to political elites; challenges from the global political economy; and geopolitics.²⁵ The state-formation process represents the control of elites over society in order to mobilise collective agency so that the state can fulfil basic functions associated with sovereignty, security and some public services deemed necessary to provide a historical continuity of power or justice. The matrix of these functions leads to the particular character of the state, whether predatory, security-oriented or fulfilling a social contract in liberal style. The more one state in a region is security-oriented, the more other states in the region will tend to follow suit.26 Thus, ‘war made the state and the state made war’, as Tilly famously argued.²⁷ This underlies the fact that state formation may have both internal and external dynamics,²⁸ relating also to war preparation and to rentierism.²⁹

An extension of this argument has led to a focus on how in practice state formation requires mobilisation for development, security and the creation of institutions supported by power or consensus, enabling taxation to be raised. This enables the expansion of state power in both domestic and regional settings, making the state the centre of domestic and international discourse and an epistemic hierarchy. The formation of state power turned at some point in the post-colonial era into a simulation of state power, where quasi-states were formed with limited capacity based on an anti-colonial international legitimacy and limited juridical and material capacity.³⁰ Thus, war-making was not the only means by which a state emerged and maintained itself: it also needed to have economic and social capacities as well, engendering both local and international legitimacy that comes from being representative of local identity and historical narratives, needs and rights, as well as from fitting into the international system. War-making alone might lead to the demise of the state if it cannot fulfil such contextual and redistributive functions.³¹

This implies that state–society relations matter as much as material power. States are said to be the product of social as well as material forces, requiring an assessment of their ‘stateness’, in which these forces shape their institutions through social movements and non-state actors, as well as the projection of exclusive identities, as in the ethnic democracies of the contemporary Balkans.³² States may form from either (or both) the top down or the bottom up, depending on whether elite or social forces dominate. Soon, therefore, the debate turned into an investigation of the social processes inherent in state formation, in which power became accountable: a social contract.

In liberal political theory, the state represents a ‘Great Arch’33 that binds rulers and citizens into a mutually dependent relationship. This emerges through historical violence between classes, and the outcome is dependent on their power relations, norms, interests, material capacities, culture and identities. The aim of the Great Arch is to form a solid institutional base through which parties can combat anarchy, revolution and insecurity. In this Great Arch, the state lives through its subjects in a relationship based on rights, law, a social contract and consent, rather than outright power.³⁴ The liberal political theorists of the Enlightenment, notably Locke, described how this would provide a solution to the internal and external violence that had blighted Europe and undermined what were to become known as human rights.³⁵ Before the Arch comes into being it must be forged, and this often occurs through violent contestation between different groups. It may well be that attempts to form this contract never come to fruition and that state formation thus describes a never-ending cycle of violence: instead of the state representing an architecture of peace, it merely represents a container for the contestation of power. If state formation is to lead to a Great Arch, a social contract between elites and citizens or subjects must be forged through a form of cultural revolution. In this sense, central and predatory authority is slowly dissolved and pushed out to the furthest reaches of society, interweaving tense relations, either violent or consensual, between governors and the governed (as in the liberal revolution in Mexico in the nineteenth century).³⁶

Through this account of the historical formation of European liberal states, what is normally emphasised in the engagement of IR and political science is a long-term historical process in which power is contested and rulers mobilise armies to ensure the flow of revenue required to make a state viable, without necessarily creating such an Arch.37 Such thinking is underpinned by a sense that state formation is an archaic or retrogressive process that needs to be tamed, and that might, if properly understood and countermanded, be progressively guided from war to peace and democracy. This perspective reflects the attempt in the twentieth century to transfer the European Enlightenment state to the post-colonial and post-socialist worlds.

The state has the advantage of internal legitimacy as well as being the sole recognised political form on the international stage. State formation – however violent – is internally driven, as opposed to being a result of invasion or colonial occupation. The role of external actors is crucial, however. The formation of international organisations in the twentieth century extended the European process of state formation to the rest of the world through decolonisation. Dominant states and former colonial powers guided new states³⁸ in the hope they would emerge peacefully in acceptable, modernised, later cosmopolitan and, more recently, neoliberal form, while not representing a burden on, or serving as a flashpoint in, the international system. External actors require an understanding of these processes in order to mitigate, intervene in, or influence them in order to build a state commensurate with international standards and interests.

The way in which state formation has been represented as an inevitable outcome of the clash between different interests and groups in society has been influenced by the methodological and epistemic implications of the ‘eternal wisdom of realism’, later modified to a degree by liberal thinking about the social contract. However, this is a contract formed through violence rather than negotiation, and may infect the international system unless it is tamed by hegemonic powers.

The type of state that emerges from state formation is controversial. Do the forces of violent contestation mean the resulting state is forever weak and about to collapse, or do they lead to the formation of a strong, but not necessarily equitable, state? If a strong state emerges it needs firm control not just of its territory and the means of violence, but also of its place in the global order and economy, in order to maintain a political and economic position that would enable domestic prosperity and stability, and international competitiveness. The race to achieve this may, however, be one of constant and violent setbacks. It may be that a strong state would resemble a neoliberal state, in which resources and security are controlled by a small, elite group who refuse to redistribute equitably. Or it may represent a socialist state where relative equality is used to assuage interest groups. It may represent a social welfare-oriented or social-democratic state, with significant military capacity, but also the necessary political freedoms and laws to promote national cohesion and political and economic dynamism. Thus, conflict can be seen as being about ‘development’ in a variety of different ways.39 All of these debates assume that the rational-legal, bureaucratic and sovereign state, projecting power or conforming to cosmopolitan norms, and embedded in the global economy, is the only type of architectural structure available.

Critiques of State Formation

Mainstream state-formation theory’s view of local agency as negative and violent represents a ‘romanticisation of the local’.⁴⁰ State-formation theory provides the basis for the differentiation between ‘closed-access societies’, which are fragile, underdeveloped, hier-archical, centralised, patrimonial and conflict-prone, and liberal, open-access societies.⁴¹ Such Orientalism justifies the interventionary and disciplinary character of the liberal peace and statebuilding, as well as the pre-eminence of international over local legitimacy (expressed through the right of humanitarian intervention over sovereignty).

What is crucial is Tilly’s insight into how ‘strong, durable, effective, and responsive to its own population’ a state is.42 Modernisation theorists argue that the consolidation of state power only occurs when security, institutions, ownership, rights, and domestic and international legitimacy have been achieved.⁴³ State formation also then becomes constitutive of the international system while also being shaped and even tamed by it. Tilly and others were reaching for a less reductionist understanding of state formation, and in doing so began to open up to a range of other possibilities in which structural, social, anthropological, post-colonial and subaltern dynamics influenced the nature of the international system, rather than merely being the subjects of states. Such arguments imply that the state has social, anthropological and redistributive functions: that is, it is an instrument of social justice. What is often missed in political analyses of state formation is that Weber, Tilly and others working in this area were always clear that the state was part of the social world, and could not be instrumentally separated into military, economic or political institutions without taking account of the broader context provided by history, culture and society.

Early on in the debate, Radcliffe Brown saw the state as a fiction, an ideological construct representing a collection of humans who are related in a complex manner.⁴⁴ Such an analysis meant that anthropologists focused on social, cultural and historical practices.⁴⁵ The state was consequently regarded by some anthropologists as a metaphor for a broad range of relationships at local and global levels. The neatness of its conceptualisation in political science, they argued, actually masked its social, chaotic and imperfect nature.

As the state became the focus for a discussion of institutional development, the capacity of civil-society organisations and their historic struggle for rights and reform became an obvious next concern for scholars. Sociologists, such as Michael Mann in his monumental Sources of Social Power,46 followed a similar path. They offered a sociological and structural perspective in which society and individuals exhibit political agency to address inequality or injustice, thereby also helping to shape the state.

Sociological and anthropological perspectives did not adopt an instrumental or technical view of state formation or indeed of the state itself. Ultimately, such analysis implied an ethnography of the state, by which the state’s positionality, characteristics, structures and social forces were interrogated, if only by using the methods of a colonial-style understanding of social context.⁴⁷ This critical possibility is an important part of debates about the state today. Tilly pointed out that ‘state intervention in everyday life incited popular collective action, often in the form of resistance to the state’.⁴⁸

Thus, a powerful critique has arisen from a long-standing anthropological engagement with the state. Mirroring Tilly’s interest in social movements and mobilisation, this has emphasised the need for historical, structural and sociological perspectives. It has had some impact on mainstream discourse. A dominant consensus has been arrived at through the evolution of these debates, that ‘complex networks of state and non-state actors can be understood in terms of an emerging shift from “government” to “governance”’. Thus, local and international forces converge on the state, which is why its form and formation are significant for both local and international order.

From this perspective, the state may be seen as a range of institutional and relational practices aiming at coherence, justice and legitimacy, even though they develop in the context of power relations.⁴⁹ Influenced by Foucault’s work on governmentality, state-formation and statebuilding processes are to be seen as ‘integrated into global and historical contexts … and as cultural processes’.50 From this perspective, state-formation processes can be seen as the means whereby local actors reappropriate political control from external or elite power for indigenous social groups or networks. This means that states have the potential to be both socially organic and sovereign.⁵¹ They are a product of cultural revolution,⁵² a social process related to the political, economic and securitised dynamics of state formation, but also representative of a significant set of agencies, and in particular connected to contextual legitimacy rather than merely an elite compact or international law and norms.

Such social and anthropological conceptions of the formation of the state set into sharp relief the reductionism of mainstream approaches focused on political economy or security, and their bureaucratic and institutional imperatives, which also tend to favour masculine and patronage-based networks of power and control.⁵³ They also point to the importance of rituals and symbols of statehood,⁵⁴ its meanings, norms, assumptions and non-rational elements.⁵⁵ They highlight the everyday cultural dynamics and forms of state practices that arise from the interaction of power and agency at multiple levels to produce a state.⁵⁶ This reproduces the modern state not solely as a result of rational and bureaucratic knowledge. From this perspective the state is a hybrid international, liberal and local framework, where power is exercised from the local to the international standpoint. Such an analysis of state formation moves away from material interests and an international- or state-level, industrial-scale mobilisation of agency towards everyday dynamics.

The state should be considered as being formed via the intersection of many different group relationships.⁵⁷ The production of subjects (citizens) within a state is therefore a much more complex and difficult affair than many elites or internationals imagine, collapsing the distinction between the international system, state and society. Even the concept of civil society is not as clear-cut as it is in IR and statebuilding or peacebuilding debates, where it has until recently been unthinkable that local agency should be acceptable in anything other than a liberal-civil form. The state is not simply a set of interlocking institutions, but rather a constant performance of power relations and encounters, everyday and social practices, meanings, identities and alterities (that is, acute differences).58

This means that the contours of the debates on state formation range from a violent clash of interests resulting in domination to the mitigation of violence and abuse of power through systems designed to provide checks and balances in response to the claims of citizens, and their agency and rights. From the former perspective, the state is an ever-changing arrangement of power relations and resistances,⁵⁹ whereas from the latter it is a fixed, liberal architecture that guarantees rights and lends itself to being ‘built’ through formulae and blueprints. Essential to state formation is the control of the means of violence by a local compromise between elites and subjects within an epistemic context, which has material substance and meaning for the self-determination and autonomy, identity and rights of a given population.

It is notable that Tilly himself engaged with issues of civil society and social mobilisation, commenting somewhat wryly that ‘progress’ had been abandoned and that the state had taken over the political imagination as shorthand for the relationship between peoples and territories.⁶⁰ He appealed for a weakening of the sort of state that was evolving from power-dominated state-formation processes because it was contrary to the requirements for a social peace.⁶¹ What is clear is that the mainstream debates on state formation prioritise both the state and the negative, violent agencies of local elites and populations, while ignoring other, more positive capacities. Individual autonomy is an expression of power-seeking and violence is a natural political tool vital for the formative state. Thus, mainstream state-formation debates offer a logic arriving eventually at a victor’s or negative peace, mainly maintained through power-sharing and balance-of-power arrangements within and between states, dictated by a security dilemma and the relative power of various factions. It offers a crude version of conflict management in first-generation, victor’s-peace form. All local agency is dominated by violence and its perpetrators. Foucault perhaps best captured the range of dynamics the state-formation literature presents, as well as the inherent possibilities of the state. In an often-quoted statement he argued:

To pose the problem in terms of the state means to continue posing it in terms of sovereign and sovereignty, that is to say, in terms of law. If one describes all these phenomena of power as dependent on the state apparatus, this means grasping them as essentially repressive: the army as a power of death, police and justice as punitive instances, and so on. I don’t want to say that the state isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state … because the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth. … [T]his metapower with its prohibitions can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power.62

Structural forms of critique, including Skocpol’s, exposed the inequalities that drive state formation.⁶³ Such revolutionary processes involved the breakdown and reformation of state structures according to class, inequality and grievance, and subsequent resistance, solidarity and mobilisation. As Marxist theorists also argued, the uneven development of states via the dynamics of state formation and its consequences for the international system (or international community) have far-reaching implications for the state’s legitimacy.64

Furthermore, the history of the states-system is ‘post-colonial’ rather than merely representing a replication of European history, as state-formation debates normally imply. The post-colonial (rather than subaltern) critique of the modern state is often rather ambivalent in that it both embraces the Westphalian state and simultaneously argues that it is a product of Western power.⁶⁵ The formation of the international system is partially predicated on external hegemonic forces that create certain kinds of state, rather than internal forces. Post-colonial theorists add the argument that Weberian, Orientalist characterisations of other societies as traditional, pre-modern, customary or non-Western perpetuate the hierarchy that places the state as a specific form of polity at the apex of an international system designed to regulate violence and interests, rather than as representing the interests of widely divergent social groups. This leads to a concern about the construction of legitimacy, whether international or local, connected to justice or power.

Scholars in the Western European context have generally emphasised the role of formal institutions, whereas in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America they have uncovered a more complicated picture, blurring the boundary between formal and informal, tradition and modernity. In these contexts politics and institutions are more thoroughly embedded in issues relating to culture, custom and history, often connected to both colonial praxis and resistance, as well as the growing influence of Western modernisation or development principles.⁶⁶ Family dynamics, tribes and parallel political structures in so-called ‘segmentary societies’ which may lead to fragmented states or prevent an industrial-scale mobilisation of economic or political capacity from a formal perspective are often cited as playing a more significant role than Tilly envisaged. They introduce a dimension of both political economy and political culture beyond the assumptions of the Western European historical processes of statebuilding, in an increasingly significant informal terrain and interaction of politics and society.67

Starting an analysis of local agency from the premise of mainstream state-formation literatures replays the argument that all local agency and all resulting states rest on inherently violent tendencies. The state’s role is to enact prohibitions and exercise productive, rather than progressive, power. Thus, state formation brings about a negative peace at best. Historical, structural, sociological and anthropological approaches attempt to break out of this narrative but they too are constrained by the fact that the state is ultimately representative of power relations. For example, anthropological approaches have often been applied in recent practice to instrumentalise social processes – as with the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan,⁶⁸ and to romanticise local agency as either primitive or ineffective.

Links with Liberal Peace and Neoliberalism

This is perhaps why much of the literature that has emerged utilising the state-formation approach is aimed at explaining and preventing not just internal violence but also regional escalation. The earlier focus on states, power and interests lends itself to a positivist and realist methodological and theoretical orientation, which goes some way to explaining why so much of the recent generation of statebuilding literature, particularly from the US, is positivist, focused on problem-solving (how to build/fix a state), and adopts the lens of realism. Much of the discussion of state formation from the 1970s until the end of the Cold War focused on the emergence of European states along Westphalian lines. States were contested at the elite level in order to maintain security, power and privileges, access to resources and control of institutions, while also creating or maintaining territorial sovereignty and boundaries, and constructing a regional system of states or a balance of power. Devoid of its sociological, structural or anthropological dimensions, this logic was extended to explain processes of decolonisation, development and ethnic conflict after the end of the Cold War, and later peacekeeping, peacebuilding and statebuilding. This set the scene for the neoliberal statebuilding practices that emerged in the 1990s, under the rubric of liberal peacebuilding, in which states were built as part of an envisaged liberal peace.

Given that mainstream state-formation theory points to the emergence of ‘state-makers’ who suppress participation and rights, adopting the neoliberal state as the model for external intervention is in itself paradoxical. It exposes the new state to the global economy and has in practice been unable to engage with the rights, representation and transformation needed on the ground to escape embedded structures of power and conflict. Tilly argued that embedding the state in the global economy enhanced social and class divisions on the ground and disguised the importance of elite control of material resources, which are then used to co-opt state institutions.69 Sovereignty is essential to prevent this process because it provides a level of autonomy from international intervention.⁷⁰ But it has not prevented the double rupture that state formation dictates for society: first war may form the state, and secondly external intervention may reconstruct a very different form of state.

Accordingly, this rationale indicates that violent state-formation processes could only be curtailed by the peace, security and development structures that gradually came into being after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and including the UN Charter (1945), the Agenda for Peace (1992), the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (2005). During this period of global institutional and state development, the forces of state formation were gradually brought under control by an emerging international peace architecture and social demands for a just order, as exemplified in the epoch of decolonisation. Much of the post-Cold War period of humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding can be read as a similar endeavour to control the violence of state-formation processes.

Drawing on state-formation approaches, some key motifs emerged in peacebuilding and statebuilding. Framed by its own disciplinary limitations, Huntington’s work suggested that ‘civilisational forces’ define the state and international order, in turn defining conflict:71 Rotberg connected weak and failed states⁷² to discussions of conflict prevention, regional security and US foreign policy. Thus, emergent states were ‘nativised’ in an Orientalist fashion in which violence and ignorance drove their formation. Posen’s ‘ethnic security dilemma’ is an excellent example.⁷³ This premise was used to produce a problem-solving analysis of an ideal state’s core functions, and thus their comparative viability. Formation dynamics could now be measured against a modern notion of the state and replicated through statebuilding practices. As Tilly himself explicitly argued, drawing on his observation of European history, states may be built by external intervention in a state-formation process to prevent violence and to influence the nature of the states-system that emerges.⁷⁴ The European or Western state thus became an ideal for political order.

State-formation literature is also crucial to the progressive aspects of the contemporary projects of both peacebuilding and statebuilding through its alternative structural, sociological and anthropological strands. A more nuanced and paradoxical view sees the state both as a danger to others and to human rights, and as a potential framework for liberal rights and law. On the one hand, the Tillyian version of the state has what Mann has termed ‘infrastructural power’, which enables it to exploit civil society.75 On the other hand, historical and structural dynamics raise the issue of equality, sociological approaches raise the issues of identity, cohesion and a social contract, and more informal processes illustrate the potential of critical, social agency to shape the state as a framework for peace.

Consequently, processes of peacebuilding and statebuilding have been designed to develop a liberal social contract in contrast to the predatory state. Informal processes seek to mitigate or control the state and its discursive framework. The reality is that both infrastructural power and critical agency are at play in state formation. Ultimately, statebuilding and liberal peacebuilding aim to build a framework that runs against the current of both elite power and social critical agency (though the latter is normally a supporter of substantive democracy and human-rights processes). Yet neoliberalism and global capital tend to support elites over social actors, accumulation over solidarity.

Empirical Rationales

The state-formation literature provides an intensely depoliticised, ahistorical and sometimes apocalyptic view of what might happen where predatory, violent and weak states emerge, where past practices of politics, identity and custom fail to prevent war, and where constant collapse threatens and undermines political, social and economic order. An excellent example can be found in Robert Kaplan’s analysis of sub-Saharan Africa states, where state formation is seen as a realist process in which the inevitable clash of primitive interests creates local, regional or global disorder.⁷⁶ Such assumptions are also commonly made about historical and tribal dynamics in the Middle East,77 determining the heavily securitised architecture of the putative Palestinian state, as well as in the context of Afghanistan’s long civil war, the attempt to undermine the Taliban and the latter’s links with terrorist actors.⁷⁸ These assumptions were used to justify the statebuilding mission that followed the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.⁷⁹ From this perspective, the various forces of state formation proved too pernicious in their regional and global effects to be allowed to continue.

This logic focuses on power and predation. The sociological and anthropological possibilities of state-formation debates, conversely, are only used instrumentally to expose violent resistance and its networks (as with the COIN strategy approach in Afghanistan). Similarly, instrumental support of civil society or peace movements rarely reaches beyond a superficial approach to NGO-supported peacebuilding, where NGOs become the subcontractors for donor ‘programming’ aimed at building a liberal state. This avoids the possibility of alternative currents of agency or forms of polity. The sociological and anthropological possibilities are used to expose these dimensions in order to ‘neutralise’ them, rather than illustrate the possibilities of alternative currents of agency, forms of polity or issues.

Cambodia

In Cambodia, ongoing state-formation analysis has meant the country’s problems have been identified as mainly relating to a specific feudal, ideological and predatory elite at the apex of a complex social and kinship network.⁸⁰ Despite the impact of colonialism, local conflict dynamics were used to justify liberal peacebuilding through a UN mission after the Paris Peace Agreement in 1991, which was deemed necessary to remove the Khmer Rouge and previous modes of politics. A contest over the nature of the Cambodian state in recent history, running through power relations (both local and Cold War), historical identity and political organisation, ideology and, of course, the regional impact of the Vietnam war, eventually led to the emergence in 1975 of the Khmer Rouge, whose goal was an agrarian and socialist transformation of the state.81 This in turn led to an invasion by Vietnam in 1978. Social, economic and patronage issues led to a situation where the contestation of power meant state formation and collapse, as well as societal and economic collapse, which all went hand in hand. State-formation arguments allowed many of Cambodia’s problems to be identified as local and regional rather than globally influenced. Heritage, identity, and social and political structures (including language) were rejected, and the focus of internationals rested solely on mitigating power via the liberal-peace framework. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 1991 was an amalgam of modernisation and development, peacebuilding, transformation and reform practices. It pointed towards the creation of a liberal state⁸² with the support of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia.⁸³

Of course, state formation was a historical contest for power but it was also a social process.⁸⁴ Negative anthropological arguments were used to ignore heritage, identity and social structures. This oversight established the basis for the focus of liberal peacebuilding.⁸⁵ A Western and Weberian perspective on state control of power veered towards a territorial and interest orientation, missing much of the historical complexity of its social aspects. Thus, state-formation processes were said to depend on a network of patronage and domination rather than on a social contract. State formation historically favoured a neofeudal state presided over by elites who controlled patronage networks.

Certainly, because authoritarianism still dominates politics and institutions, and because a vast cross section of society remains politically and economically marginal to the modern state as well as to the liberal international, politics remain undemocratically contested, poverty is rife, human-rights regimes are weak, development is limited and the free market, despite drawing in foreign investment, still works against the vast bulk of society. From a mainstream state-formation perspective, this indicates that the state has formed to maintain embedded structural violence, and that this is essentially a local process. Conveniently, state-formation analysis provides the basis for statebuilding and peacebuilding as legitimates both on their own terms. Yet conflicts in and around the Cambodian polity have long been heavily influenced by regional and global interests and ideologies. The dominant state-formation debates set the scene for a victor’s or negative peace. This warrants an international discourse that is both absolved of responsibility for the historical state of Cambodia and provided with legitimacy for intervention. It implies there are no local practices or institutions that are of value for peacemaking and the modern state.

Timor-Leste

Though Timor-Leste had suffered a colonial history, had declared its independence in 1975 and was promptly invaded by Indonesia, when the UN became involved in peacebuilding and statebuilding there in 1999, it was assumed that self-determination, self-government and statehood had emerged from the contested dynamics of a primitive process of state formation.86 This perspective pitted local elites and much of Timorese society against the Indonesian state and military (and divided the Timores) – as well as ultimately against the UN. State-formation processes led to contradictory processes of state formation: guerrilla and civil support for, and opposition to, both internal collaborators and the Indonesian occupiers. These tensions were finally brought to an end after the Indonesian government agreed to a referendum on independence, meaning state formation would be replaced with international peacebuilding and statebuilding in 1999. New norms and processes of politics based on liberal law and economy were to be established in the context of a modern, secular state rather than of local and regional contestation of the territory.

State formation did not end at the point of international intervention, however: internationals became only one of several groups that contributed to the process. Sociological, structural and anthropological analysis also revealed how politics were being contested on the grounds of identity, custom and inequality. This is very different from the realist perspective, even though the facts observed are similar. These societal dimensions did not become apparent to international actors until after several new rounds of violence in the mid-2000s. Internationals thought these problems were a function of an incomplete state, incapable of controlling violence, offering rights and attracting investment. Their biased perspective obscured customary cohesion, historical issues and inequalities relating to colonisation and identity as political forces. Thus, there emerged a general consensus that the externalised attempt to build both peace and the state had been unsuited to contextual conditions, which were driven by more than a simple contest over power.87 Rather than the new state representing an end to a solely negative process of state formation, it actually represents its continuation.⁸⁸ It has only been because local actors took it upon themselves to address inequality and bring in customary processes to ground the state in local culture and legitimacy that matters eventually appear to have improved. This points to the value of the sociological and anthropological dimensions of state-formation theory as bottom-up counterpoints to the negative perspectives of peace that state-formation theories imply.

Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo

Several states in the former Yugoslavia in the period 1990–99, including Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, have often been analysed through state formation’s power perspectives. From this perspective, the collapse of a state that guaranteed social property and rights led its constituent peoples towards a focus on exclusive identities, which was exploited by ethno-nationalist politicians.89 The US-brokered Dayton Agreement in 1995 brought to an end the war between the various Serb, Croatian and Bosniac disputants in Bosnia-Herzegovina, establishing an ethnically organised state chaperoned by the international community through the Office of the High Representative. In Kosovo, the NATO intervention in 1999 was designed to prevent Serb forces from repeating their violent tactics in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this time directed at the long-oppressed Kosovo Albanian community. In both cases, the ethnic framing of international analysis and the resulting institutional frameworks rested on a primordial view of power and identity, in which the state becomes a vehicle for deep political contests and a negative peace framework at best.⁹⁰ This led to the emergence of ethnic democracies in the Balkans. The choice for the role of the state was between sharing power between ethnic groups by mitigating their state-formation impulses, and giving in to them and allowing new nation-states to emerge from the violence.

In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, identity, religion, security, military force, territory and civil society were all swept along in a state-formation project driven by the idea of a ‘Greater Serbia’. Such contestation has continued in ‘negative peacetime’, indicating the ways in which indigenous processes of state formation are conducted not only through violence but also through structural forms of violence. Indeed, it is no surprise that Dayton is now seen less as a peace settlement and more as a ceasefire, commensurate with state-formation processes’ power dynamics.91 The process of state formation has also transferred itself from a state that few of its participants want after Dayton to the Republika Srpska, the other political entity that constitutes Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In general, Bosnia-Herzegovina appears from a top-down perspective to be becoming more, not less, ethnically polarised,⁹² providing a warning about how assumptions regarding state formation drive internationals into adopting the very particularistic and ethnicised binaries they claim to be seeking to transform. At the same time they may have missed signs of local legitimacy and capacity to manage conflict. The state continues to rest on elite politics (which are often predatory) rather than building a local social contract, democratisation and reconciliation, or reconstructing the regional pluralism that existed before the war.⁹³ In practice, state-formation debates have been used to legitimate the construction of a neoliberal state with no regard for pre-war structures and the hard-won agreements they rested upon.

Debates about state formation in Kosovo rest on ethnic mobilisation and violent resistance to Serb control in recent times, drawing their sustenance from historical identity factors embedded in a ‘shadow state’ that paralleled formal government in the 1980s.⁹⁴ The NATO and UN strategy tried to shift the process from state formation to liberal peacebuilding whereby sovereignty was not necessarily a key aim; instead, norms and law were the focus in a framework that kept alive the hope of reintegration into Serbia. However, local actors aiming at the creation of a Kosovo Albanian state had been engaged in their own state-formation process, both through violence and by moving more subtly into the open via a creeping administrative occupation of the core functions necessary for governance. Though these were controlled by internationals after 1999, a long-term goal had been independence for local actors, harnessing what were often neopatrimonial dynamics to create the institutions necessary for the state. Eventually, this led to the cooptation of international peacebuilding, such that it was guided towards the self-determination cause of the Kosovo Albanians.95 The state in Kosovo has hence become implicated in the ethnic, sovereign and territorial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and rejection, and there is limited space for pluralism in between these positions despite concerted local and international efforts. State formation appears to provoke conflict, at the expense of international and local peacebuilding movements, from a top-down perspective. In both Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the neoliberal state itself has formed around sovereign exclusivity where a more pluralist framework is necessary.

Conclusion

What has emerged from mainstream state-formation analysis is a focus on the state as mainly aimed at security and the mitigation of power struggles through direct and structural forms of power, meaning a victor’s peace at best is possible. As the examples above show, the states that have formed from a mixture of local and international involvement tend towards a negative form of peace purely on the basis of an internal struggle for power and resources. However, the focus on power tends to obscure more positive aspects of state formation. From this perspective, state formation represents an extension of early twentieth-century colonial-style analyses of local politics.

To summarise, state-formation debates have moved through three stages: a mainstream and top-down, externally driven debate focused on power and clashing interests at an elite level; a turn towards bringing in social and structural forces in a more liberal sense (representing the formation of a Great Arch) and leading to the formation of institutions that balance elite and social power; and a sociological and anthropological turn, offering contextual, bottom-up, post-colonial and subaltern insights relating to questions of inequality and justice as well as agency. The latter two stages offer a more sophisticated understanding of how a society develops its own legitimate peacemaking mechanisms, leading to a contractual state with a negotiated identity, while the mainstream power approach rests on a Northern blueprint for the modern, neoliberal state. The tension between these various understandings of the formation of the state is illustrative of the potential for either a negative or positive form of peace to emerge.

The first and second stages illustrate clearly how statebuilding and peacebuilding may be a response to state formation, because they concur on the probability of a mainly negative peace. They show how statebuilding extends the link between external intervention and local dynamics of conflict, in which elites retain control of power with greater or lesser respect for the rights of citizens. Such realist and liberal approaches to state formation have also been influential in inadvertently describing the process of the formation of a post-colonial international system whereby the state has become naturalised over the interests, rights and needs of subaltern subjects. The social and anthropological dynamics of state formation have been partly drawn on in more critical approaches that suggest that both positive and negative forms of peace are possible. State formation is also driven, at least in part, by subaltern resistance both to violence and to state intervention in everyday life.96 Historically, of course, it has been common for elites to bargain with restive populations, often in a heavy-handed manner.⁹⁷

The sociological, anthropological and structural, as well as the broader historical, dimensions of state-formation debates have yet to make a significant impact. Yet these imply an engagement with the everyday dynamics of life within a post-colonial, post-liberal and probably post-Westphalian understanding of the state in question.98 They indicate how the emergence of the modern state carries forward a historical perspective of identity, rights, needs, justice and alterity in both the state and international system, which cannot alone be resolved by power or by externally designed institutions. An understanding of how any society produces compromises, institutions, justice and legitimacy would be a next step. This would suggest that there are alternative types of polity to any mainstream state-formation architecture or its statebuilding counterparts.

State-formation debates that focus on violence tend to reflect the Hobbesian, problem-solving and positivist bias of the day, and have led to the formation of theory and policy designed to create states that can respond to such forces. The legacy of state-formation debates in this mode is paradoxical: the state ameliorates itself via a struggle between domestic and international agencies. Internal struggles to produce nation-states in which specific elites harness the state’s resources for their own interests (often expressed via regional or imperial ambitions) have normally led to national states emerging through complex configurations of power.⁹⁹ These are not well suited to development settings, identity and cultural differences, or alternative epistemologies; rather, they are suited mainly to maintaining the continuities of injustice and power. In sum, state-formation debates have undermined the possibility that peacebuilding and statebuilding approaches may aim at developing a positive, emancipatory peace.

On the other hand, the social/anthropological and structural turn in state-formation debates raises issues such as human security, identity, inequality, local ownership and a social compact.¹⁰⁰ These are connected to subaltern frameworks of power and to contextual forms of agency. They challenge the teleology of violence that may lead to a sovereign state, instead acknowledging the historical and socio-political compromises associated with internal struggles for justice. They highlight the influence of local agency in mitigating the conditions of everyday life, along with the consequences of elite power struggles, inequality and difference. Positive, and probably hybrid, understandings of peace and the state may be drawn from such views.101