Mohammed Ayoob – State Making, State Breaking, and State Failure

Lp,ISHINGTHE DocsoF'WtR CoxFLICT M,tx,tcEMENT TNADtvtDEDWonLD Edited by Cltester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and PamelaAall UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE PRESS Washington, D.C. SrnrpMnKrNG, Srnrp BnBnKrNG, AND SrnrnEmLURE MohammedAyoob TATE BREAKING AND STATE MILURE, sources of conflict, is confirmed by the latest both unavoidable accompaniments of data presented in the ,S/PRI Yearbook 2005. the state-making process, lie at the root These data demonstrate that all nineteen ma- of most conflicts that the international system jor armed conflicts thatwere recorded rn2004 has witnessed since the end of World War II. were classified as intrastate in character. How- The veracity of this assertion is demonstrated ever, the report makes clear that "[i]n a reversal by two generally accepted facts. The first is the of the classic spill-over of conflict from intra- incontestable reality that the overwhelming to inter-state, developments in Iraq during majority of conflicts since the end ofWorld 2004 raised the prospect ofan international War II have been located in the postcolonial conflict creating a firlly fledged civil war.'z lraq, countries that constitute the Third World. The therefore, stands out as the exception that second is the equally incontrovertible fact that proves the rule. In the previous year,2003, most such conflicts either have been primarily SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace intrastate in character or have possessed a sub- Research Institute) had identified nineteen stantial intrastate dimension, even if they ap- major armed conflicts as well, but had noted pear to the outside observer to be interstate that two of them, the conflict between India conflicts.l This means that problems of in- and Pakistan over Kashmir and the invasion ternational and domestic order have become of Iraq by the United States and the United closely intertwined during the current era and Kingdom, were interstate in character.3 While are likely to remain so well into the foresee- both Kashmir and Iraq continued to figure in able future. the 2004list, the basic character of these con- The validity of both these assertions, that flicts was perceived as having been changed is to say, the concentration of conflicts in the by the amelioration of the India-Pakistan di- Third World and the primacy of domestic mension of the Kashmir conflict on the one 95 96 MoHelauBo Ayoos hand and the "success" of the U.S. invasion on augmented the impression that there are ac- the other. tually two distinct zones in the international Almost all of the conflicts in 2003 and2004 system-the zone of peace in the North and were located in the old or newThird World, the zone of turmoil in the South-and that as had been the case in previous years. The new the two work according to different logics, a Third World refers to states in Central Asia, Lockean one in the former and a Hobbesian the Caucasus, and the Balkans that emerged one in the latter.s out of the disintegration of the Soviet Union However, this dichotomous representation and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. In ofthe First andThirdWorlds hides the essen- terms of their colonial background, the arbi- tial similarity in their process of state making, trary construction oftheir boundaries by ex- which has been (and is) crucial in determin- temal powers, the lack of societal cohesion, their ing the political trajectories of states. This recent emergence into juridical statehood, and point becomes clear if one compares the cur- their stage of economic and political develop- rent situation in the Third World, not with ment, the states of the Caucasus and Central that prevailing within and among the indus- Asia and of the Balkans demonstrate oolitical. trial democracies today, but with the situation economic, and social characteristics that are in from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century manyways akin to those of the Asian, African, in Western Europe, when the eadiest of the and Latin American states that have tradition- modern sovereign states were at a stage of ally been considered as constituting the Third state making that corresponded with the stage World. There are abundant data, therefore, to where most Third World states find them- support the conclusion that the overwhelming selves today.b majority of conflicts in the international system Youssef Cohen and colleagues have most since 1945 have been "a ubiquitous corollary succincdy defined the process of state making of the birth, formation, and fracturing of as "primitive central state power accumula- Third World states."4 tion."7 Thus defined, state making must in- clude the following: SrerB MaruNG rN THE THrRD WoRLD r The expansion and consolidation of the The events since the eady 1990s, by removing territorial and demographic domain under the SecondWorld from the intemational equa- a political authority, including the imposi- tion, have helped present the dichotomy be- tion oforder on contested territorial and de- tween the global core and the global periphery mographic space (war) First and o -the World the Third World-in The maintenance of order in the territory very stark terms. By eliminating the Cold War where, and over the population on whom, overlay from Third World conflicts and thus such order has already been imposed (po- exposing their fundamental local dynamics, iicing) the end ofbipolarityhas also demonsffated the o The extraction of resources from the terri- close linkage between these conflicts and the tory and the population under the control dlnamics ofstate making (and its obverse, state ofthe state, resources essential not only to breaking and state failure) currendyunderway support the war-making and policing ac- in the global periphery. The proliferation of tivities undertaken by the state but also to conflicts in the periphery, when compared maintain the apparatuses of state necessary with the image of relative tranquillitywithin to carry on routine administration, deepen and amity among the industrialized countries the state's penetration ofsociety, and serve ofWestern Europe and North America, has symbolic purposes (taxation)8 SrerB MarrNc. Srem BnpexrNc. eNo SretB Ferlunr 97 All three broad categories of activities out- nineteenth and twentieth centuries.lo So'ter- lined here, however, depend on the state's suc- eign and relatively centrahzed states that have cess in monopolizing and concentrating the performed successfully over a long period of means of coercion in its own hands in the ter- time-and have therefore knit their people ritory and among the population it controls. together in terms of historical memories,legal That is why the accumulation of power be- codes, language, religion, and so forth-may comes so crucial to the state-making enterprisel evolve into nation-states or at least provide the more primitive the stage of state building, the necessary conditions for the emergence of the more coercive the strategies employed to nation-states, but they are not synonymous accumulate and concenffate power in the hands with the latter. Historical evidence has con- ofthe agents ofthe state. Cohen and colleagues vincingly demonstrated that in almost all stated in a seminal article published in 1981, cases in Europe, with the exception of the "The extent to which an expansion of state Balkans (an exception that may provide the power will generate collective violence depends clue to the current violence and strife in that on the level of state power prior to that expan- region), the emergence of the modern sover- sion. The lower the initial level of state eign state was the precondition for the for- power, the stronger the relationship between mation of the nation.11 the rate of state expansion and collective vio- This generalization applied as much to late- lence."e One needs to be reminded that the comers such as Germany as it did to the ear- violence generated during the process ofstate liest examples of modern states, such as En- making is the result of actions undertaken gland and France. Without the central role both by the state and by recalcitrant elements performed by the Prussian state, Germany within the population that forcefi.rlly resist the would probably have remained nothing more state's attempt to impose order. than a geographic or cultural expression. The The inherent similarity in the logic of the similarity betvveen the German experience on state-building process provides us explana- the one hand and the French experience on the tions for the current replication by Third other has been summed up well by Cornelia World states of several dimensions of the early Navari: "When Hegel insisted that it was the modern European experience of state making. state that created the nation, he was looking Simultaneously, the difference in the pace at backurards to the history ofFrance, not for- which state building has to be undertaken and ward to the history of Germany. When Ger- completed in theThirdWorld and the dramat- many was unified'from above'in 1870 and ically changed international environment in the Reich was formed, this way of proceed- which Third World state making has to pro- ing did not appear to most Germans to be at ceed explain the divergence in other dimen- variance with the experience of their Western sions from the earlier European model of state neighbors-a substitution of Union'by force' building. The similarities and the differences for the brganic growtti of France and England. are equally important, as is the bearing they It appeared to be a repetition ofit, differing have on problems of authority and governance only in that it was less bloody. Here, as there, within Third World states. the state was moving outwards into diverse It should be noted that in most of Europe, feudal remnants of the old order, dissolving state making usually antedated the emergence them, making all obedient to the same law."72 of nations and nation-states by a couple of The chronological sequence of the estab- centuries.

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