Political Economy Of Statebuilding Research Articles

The political economy of state building

Externally assisted state-building efforts cost trillions but typically fail to produce states capable of providing public goods and services on their own. Drawing on the public choice literature and evidence from historical state-building processes, we argue that political self-sufficiency depends on political institutions that allow for self-governance, reasonably high levels of fiscal and administrative capacity, economic institutions that encourage wealth creation, and social institutions that reinforce political and economic freedom. Importantly, we do not expect that democracy is a critical determinant of political self-sufficiency. Our theory explains why state building in Afghanistan in the two decades since 2001 did not produce a more functional state. Despite massive international investment in blood and treasure, the state-building effort prioritised national elections over institutional reforms that encourage local self-governance, failed to establish meaningful constraints on national political decision-makers (especially the president) and disregarded customary private property rights and customary processes to adjudicate land disputes.

Statebuilding and Foreign Direct Investment: The Case of Post-2003 Iraq

Within the broader debate over the political economy of statebuilding, the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in fragile and post-conflict settings is increasingly controversial but still understudied. This paper examines the tensions between the good governance agenda currently being implemented in Iraq and the investment dynamics occurring at the country's national and provincial levels. Drawing on disaggregated data, the paper argues that the flow of FDI is reinforcing destabilizing dynamics in Iraq by increasing levels of inequality, deepening the decentralization process, and undermining internal and external balances of power.

The Political Economy of State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper explores the state-building process in the developing world through an application of the European-inspired predatory theory of the state. Predatory theory relies heavily on war as a catalyst for state-building activities, but since it is such a rare event in the developing world, the paper turns to the literature on interstate rivalry for a theoretical and empirical substitute. The paper investigates whether this modification of predatory theory is portable to a spatial-temporal domain outside of early modern Europe by applying it in the context of the postcolonial developing states of sub-Saharan Africa. This is accomplished by examining the effects of both internal and external rivals on state extractive capacity in the region from 1975 to 2000. A series of pooled, cross-sectional time-series analyses suggest that both interstate and intrastate rivals affect state extractive capacity much as predatory theory would expect. However, predation to enhance state revenue in Africa has not set in motion the kinds of processes that ultimately led to the development of strong, cohesive, and responsive states as in the European experience.