State-building Project Research Articles

SAHARA OCCIDENTAL Y EL SISTEMA DE SEGURIDAD INTERNACIONAL. Relaciones de poder al descubierto, ¿y el Derecho internacional?

La autoproclamación de independencia del pueblo saharaui fue reconocida por 72 Estados y posteriormente el Sahara Occidental fue admitido en la OUA durante 1982. No obstante, las fallidas negociaciones entre Marruecos y el Frente Polisario han incidido en que la resolución del Tribunal Internacional de Justicia no pueda aplicarse, manteniendo en espera la autodeterminación del reconocido pueblo saharaui. A su vez el apoyo político al proceso de reconocimiento de los saharauis, desde que España en los setentas del siglo pasado se retiró de su ocupación sobre la zona, se ha ido mermando puesto que en la actualidad varios países han retirado su reconocimiento al proyecto de construcción estatal. La estrategia por parte de Marruecos y de los Estados Unidos como garante del proceso de negociación ha sido dilatar y/o inviabilizar la realización del referéndum, que permita manifestar la voluntad de los saharauis respecto de su destino como nación. En efecto, es cada vez más difícil realizar la consulta puesto que se ha alterado la composición de la población nativa, cuestión que hace inviable la creación del padrón electoral y por ello cada vez más lejana la aplicación de la justicia internacional, que a través de TIJ ha reconocido la existencia de un pueblo con derecho de autodeterminación que aún espera y, todo parece indicar, que esperará desde su memoria su reconocimiento político.

Statebuilding and the Politics of Budgeting in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT Anchored in a framework drawn from the public finances literature and executive–legislative studies, the purpose of this article is to assess the impacts of Afghan budgetary institutions on the statebuilding project. Two main questions drive the analysis: what is the nature of the relationship between central government and subnational units concerning the allocation and distribution of resources, and – regarding budget preparation – what is the role played by the legislature? It is argued that beyond Afghanistan’s dependency on foreign aid to fund ordinary expenditures and development projects, the presence of a set of budgetary rules which not only centralizes the preparation and execution of budget decisions at the expense of provinces but also marginalizes the legislative involvement in the decision-making process are two important features that prevent further development in state capacity and the representative government.

The Land Sparing Complex: Environmental Governance, Agricultural Intensification, and State Building in the Brazilian Amazon

Since 2004, annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen nearly 80 percent, even as agricultural production in the region has increased. Understanding this land use transition requires a theorization of the relationships among environmental governance, agricultural intensification, and state building. Drawing on key informant interviews, municipal-level case studies, and an organizational ethnography of an international environmental organization, I argue that declines in deforestation engineered by new governance arrangements are part of a project of economic development and state building through environmental regulation. This project is implemented by a complex of government, nongovernmental, and corporate actors. I describe the emergence of this complex and the land sparing logic that animates it. Land sparing policy inverts previous logics of state territorialization and environmental conservation with the aim of shifting the Amazonian economy from an extensive mode of extraction to an intensive mode of production. Two municipal case studies follow variation in land sparing policy implementation. The cases identify determinants of land sparing policy effectiveness and collateral effects, including tendencies toward agro-industrial consolidation at the expense of smallholders.

Road maintenance – patching a hole in mobilities‐roading research: A case study of the Longbeach Road Board, Canterbury, New Zealand, 1911–1938

With respect to transport and mobilities literatures this paper (1) offers from historical geography, the suggestion that mobilities insights are not restricted to the present or future, (2) illustrates this through a microscale analysis of road maintenance and (3) and, most importantly, focusses on the upkeep of the road network whereas most of the existing work is on the creation and extension of roads as part of state building projects. Road maintenance it is concluded is itself a highly mobile activity and it is also contended that the road itself is a mobile and not a stable platform.

Underdevelopment and Economic Theory of Growth: Case for Infant Industry Promotion

The article reviews the literature on economic development, critiques neoliberal economic theories, and advances the theory of infant industry promotion as an alternative model for development in Africa. The essay argues that for developing countries to catch up to developed countries requires contextualizing development theory, applying selective economic policies to industries where productive capacities can be developed, and localizing the policy lessons to develop the productive abilities of local industries. The role of state in development and implementation of protective measures such as tariffs, import bans on key raw materials, and rebates on industrial inputs is discussed. To escape the Resource Curse, African states will have to develop an alternative source of employment, an industrial base, and strengthen the productive powers of infant industries if those industries are to survive fierce international competition. To be durable in the African context, economic policy must reflect local conditions, vary from one historical context to the next, use readily available resources, and adequately respond to local problems. Author’s Note Christopher Zambakari is a candidate for a Law and Policy Doctorate (LPD) at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. His interest is in political reform, economic development, presence of postcolonial violence, and progress in nation and state building projects in Africa.

Nation and State-Building in South Sudan: Violence, Development, and Democracy

This paper contributes to the on-going debate about nation and state building projects in Africa by focusing on the case of South Sudan. I discuss South Sudan’s political challenges by analyzing the factors that fuel the problem of violence. This study situates the problem within the socio-historical context of state formation. In the first section, I quantify the determinants of violence, present frequencies and percent distribution of incidents resulting in documented deaths, and tabulate the ratio of person(s) killed to number of incidents in the states most affected by violence. I exposit on the legal dualism of an individual right to land running parallel to communal land ownership, and the tension that exists between the two systems and its relationship to fueling violence over access to land. I then argue that South Sudan must reconcile differences between private, public, state ownership of land (freehold/leasehold land tenure) and communal land ownership. Lastly, I provide a discussion on the New Sudan Framework (NSF), presented as one alternative model for nation building in South Sudan. I conclude the study with a call for a better understanding of the issues that drive violence, and enumerate a number of tentative reforms that may bring peace to a war-torn South Sudan and enable it to build a peaceful society for its citizens.

Europeanization and minority policies in post-conflict Kosovo. Genuine inclusion or window dressing?

Abstract This paper examines the position of minorities in Kosovo in the light of Kosovo’s potential candidacy as a member state of the European Union (EU). The paper contends that although the international community has constructed a comprehensive suite of protections and guarantees for minorities, nation-building by internal actors in Kosovo has followed an exclusively ethnocentric dominant narrative, running counter to the state-building project, which promotes a multiethnic Kosovo. The paper considers this dichotomy in the context of Kosovo’s Europeanization. It is concluded that the conditionality principle is not sufficiently defined or measurable in order to set criteria relating to the inclusion or exclusion of minorities in Kosovo to significantly influence decisions on EU membership.

A capitalising foreign policy: Regulatory geographies and transnationalised state projects

Proposals for regional economic integration, namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the One Belt One Road proposal, have recently been driving the security dynamics of the Asian region. To explain the growing ‘economic’ focus of states’ foreign policies, we need to go beyond the dominant approaches in International Relations and International Political Economy, which are limited in their analytical power because they often make a distinction between politics/security and economics, and prioritise one over the other, rather than seeing them as internally related. Drawing on Leon Trotsky’s theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ and Nicos Poulantzas’s notion of ‘internalised transformations’, we develop a ‘Poulantzian-uneven and combined development’ framework to argue that the increased focus on economics in foreign policymaking represents a fundamental change related to the transnationalisation of capitalist state-building projects. The paper argues that while the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflected an attempt by the Obama administration to fashion a new stage in the transnationalisation of American capital, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal reflect an emerging China-centred transnationalised state project. We characterise the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and One Belt One Road proposal as constituting different forms of a particular type of geoeconomic strategy called ‘regulatory geographies’ because they entail the export of distinctive modes of regulatory governance that aim to overcome key contradictions of uneven and combined capitalist development in the US and China. As the recent demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the election of Donald Trump shows, however, these transnationalised state projects generate resistance and contestation within, as well as between, states.

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

ABSTRACTThis paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.

Criminalizing Resistance: The Cases of Balata and Jenin Refugee Camps

The Palestinian Authority (PA) adopted donor-driven security sector reform (SSR) as the linchpin to its post-2007 state-building project. As SSR proceeded, the occupied West Bank became a securitized space and the theater for PA security campaigns whose ostensible purpose was to establish law and order. This article tackles the consequences of the PA's security campaigns in Balata and Jenin refugee camps from the people's perspective through a bottom-up ethnographic methodological approach. These voices from below problematize and examine the security campaigns, illustrating how and why resistance against Israel has been criminalized. The article concludes by arguing that conducting security reform to ensure stability within the context of colonial occupation and without addressing the imbalances of power can only ever have two outcomes: “better” collaboration with the occupying power and a violation of Palestinians' security and national rights by their own security forces.

Colonial protection and the intimacies of Indigenous governance

Recent scholarship on colonial Protectors of Aborigines has examined the unclear line they walked between advocating for Indigenous rights and advancing the project of colonial state-building. Their task to bring Indigenous people within the fold of Christian civilisation and within the reach of settler law involved more than an attempt to implement colonial policy, however. It also brought Protectors into daily personal contact with Indigenous people in multiple settings. With reference to the overlooked colonial protectorate in South Australia, where the position of Protector of Aborigines was guaranteed as a condition of the colony’s foundation in 1836, this article draws out some of the ‘strategic intimacies’ that underpinned protection as an early mode of colonial governance. By examining more closely the varied ways in which Protectors and Indigenous people intersected in first-contact settings, it explores the fluid configurations of power in a colonial social order that was only just evolving.

‘The Common Camp’: temporary settlements as a spatio-political instrument in Israel-Palestine

From their emergence in the 19th century to their current global proliferation, camps have been created extensively by and for different populations under the modern state order. Whether employed by national and colonial powers as instruments of control, or constructed ad hoc by displaced populations as makeshift spaces of refuge, camps are used as a versatile instrument for the rearrangement of people in space. In Israel-Palestine, camps are part of the significant geopolitical changes related to the state-building project and to the mass displacement it caused, providing a core example of similar enterprises of territorial alternation and social engineering. While the Palestinian refugee camps are well recognised and studied, many other types of camps which have appeared in the region over the last century together form a distinctive spatial paradigm. Through its particular manifestations in Israel-Palestine, this article examines the camp as a central instrument by which modern societies and territories are administered, negotiated and reorganised. The identification, understanding and re-definition of the camp’s multifaceted spatial vocabulary allows to better understand this encompassing phenomenon which becomes increasingly relevant and urgent in today’s migration age.

Illuminating a State: State-Building and Electricity in Occupied Iraq

The U.S. statebuilding project in Iraq is a modern phenomenon of political engineering. Statebuilding, a set of practices and forms of knowledge that are produced and re-produced in academic and policy centers, is involved in perpetual forms of interpreting and intervening on the empirical reality in order to shape a particular order (the “state”). Under the U.S. occupation, electricity was one site of such interventions that was important for illumination and powering of machinery and the oil economy. The grid became a site for contesting the state power, sectarian and ethnic reformulations and relations of political and criminal violence.

Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State

Pensions and ProtestFormer Slaves and the Reconstructed American State Dale Kretz (bio) A chilling wind tore through central Georgia in the winter of 1865. Huddled in tents near Atlanta was the 138th U.S. Colored Troops, organized nearby just months before. One of the last black regiments formed in the Civil War, it drew its numbers from the formerly enslaved populations fleeing plantations in the wake of Sherman's March. One unhappy night, the icy current ripped a tent away from its stakes, leaving exposed a man who would endure the consequences for sixty-five years. As a slave, he had been known as Anderson Odom. Now he was Anderson Freeman. After escaping Jack Odom's plantation at age twenty, Freeman had made the one-hundred-mile journey northward through Georgia from Columbus to Atlanta, where he enlisted in the 138th USCT in July 1865. Following the winter storm, he could not walk for nearly a month. He spent that time in his quarters, treated by the regimental surgeon. He would walk again but would always be left with rheumatism, a broad nineteenth-century term for a range of arthritic symptoms. When Freeman was forty-four, he applied for a pension from the U.S. government, alleging he was "still suffering from the effects" and "cannot perform the labor of an able bodied man caused by my exposure in the service of the U.S. Army." A board of federally deputized physicians measured every part of the former slave's body, concluding rheumatism had disabled him 4/18ths for the performance of manual labor and therefore merited a pension.1 Anderson Freeman was one of hundreds of thousands of freedpeople who came into contact with the federal government in the four decades after the Civil War.2 They did so by actively pursuing military pensions through the U.S. Pension Bureau. In the past two decades, historians have used USCT pension files as an invaluable window into African American experiences of slavery, war, and freedom. Most notably, they have used them to explore social and work relations in slavery; the experiences of soldiers and veterans; and the politics of sex, family, and citizenship.3 This article attempts to situate the pension struggles of former slaves within [End Page 425] the larger project of state building embodied by the U.S. Pension Bureau.4 Indeed, the pension files of former slaves allow us to reconceptualize fundamental assumptions about the federal government and the aftermath of emancipation in America. The post-Reconstruction era is conventionally narrated in terms of exclusion. The federal government, betraying the revolutionary promise of wartime abolition, soon abandoned the cause of freedpeople, essentially leaving them to their own devices in the sharecropping South without meaningful access to or support from the federal state. Widespread disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and the rise of Jim Crow all negated the constitutional rights of African Americans. And so, though not without good reason, even as scholars uncover extraordinary grassroots movements in the rural South, African Americans are still largely painted as outsiders to the state building projects of postwar America. This article challenges the conventional narrative by detailing the extensive interactions that formerly enslaved veterans had with federal officials of the Pension Bureau.5 Freeborn veterans of black state regiments and the USCT, as well as their widows, had always been officially included in the application process for federal pensions. For a decade, however, formerly enslaved veterans of the USCT faced legal prohibition. Yet on March 3, 1873, Congress passed a vitally important act consolidating procedures and increasing pension rates. One provision of that bill stipulated that every pensioner listed as a slave on his regiment's rolls "shall be on the same footing as to bounty and pension as though they had not been slaves at the date of their enlistment."6 On the surface, the Consolidation Act of 1873 was one of great generosity, finally securing the extension of justly earned benefits to the most dispossessed of veterans and widows. In the words of the bill's spokesman in Congress, "if any one class of our soldiers deserve more at our hands than any other, it is that class which...

Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War by John Deak

Reviewed by: Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War by John Deak Peter Höyng John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2015. 355 pp. While John Deak's thorough study was not written to coincide with this year's commemoration of Francis Joseph's demise one hundred years ago—the book begins, after all, with the dynamics of Austrian governance under Joseph II in 1780—it is certainly a welcome and valuable contribution to the remembrance of Francis Joseph and his long reign of nearly seven decades. Deak counters the dominant paradigm of Francis Joseph as the last towering figure of an empire that was destined to fail because it was an outdated, medieval, multinational state entrenched against the modern nation-state model Hegel proclaimed as the endpoint in history. What Deak offers instead is "a new [End Page 127] history of the Austrian state-building project" (4), focusing on the intentions of central reformers "who continually sought to refine the Austrian state between 1740 and 1914" (6); he also tells the story of "how the bureaucracy came to be both the glue which held the state together and the lubricant which ameliorated its natural friction" (9). In short, instead of regarding Francis Joseph as synonymous with the decline of the Habsburg Empire, Deak seeks to "convince" (17) his readers that the Habsburg's complex monarchy was "a continually evolving polity" (16), not unlike the current European Union, providing a counterpoint to the all-too-popular bashing of (the imperial) bureaucracy or civil service (9). In addition to relatively accessible documents, Deak cites a variety of primary sources he uncovered, including "memoirs, handbooks, reports, private letters, statistical handbooks, and manuals on regulations" (7–8), materials that allow him to present in six chronological chapters how the central imperial state was able to set up multiple levels of intertwined administrative layers fueled by an ethos of civil service that persisted after the reign of the reformer Joseph II. Deak's perhaps too-friendly view of the Habsburg Empire and its educated elite leads, however, to several rather questionable assessments, such as his observation that "while Francis and Ferdinand ruled under the banner of reaction, they were not reactionaries" (61), supposedly because they left untouched the ethos of Josephinism, maintaining their "faith in its role as the motor of progress and development" (62). Similarly, he evaluates in contradictory terms Alexander Bach's administration by suggesting that it "may have been oppressive in the public sphere, but this guardianship of society also came with, and supplemented, both institutional modernization and economic development" (132). Deak's favorable opinion of the ever-evolving multinational and complex empire stems from his positive attitude toward the educated elite, or the Beamten, and their best intentions for a functioning, impartial, and progressive state in which central and local needs are ever coordinated or balanced. The author correspondingly downplays social frictions resulting from the economic modernization process or national conflicts, contextualizing them within continuous attempts to stabilize or make the empire-state work from within its administrative structures. A case in point is the so-called Stremayr Language Ordinance, which "elevated the Czech language to official status alongside German in Bohemia and Moravia" (203). Yet for Deak these nationalist politics "played an insignificant role in comparison to the qualities [End Page 128] necessary to represent the empire" (204). In other words, when taking consistently the view from the center of the empire "without privileging ideas of decline or a particular nation's rise" (271), a narrative emerges by which the paternalistic state flexibly deals "with the complexities of multinational, popular participation in policy making" (269). From this vantage point, Deak then concludes that the Habsburg Empire "was not ultimately defeated on the field of battle," noting that "in 1918 were no areas of the Habsburg Empire under enemy occupation" (264–65). Rather, the "war did not continue the process of state making, but ended it" (274). And while Deak admits "signs of decline in the long sweep of history in Habsburg monarchy...

Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late Nineteenth Century . By Ulf Brunnbauer

During the great nineteenth-century labor migrations, over half of all Croats and Slovenes working in the United States eventually returned home. The figure was still higher for Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Turks. In his sweeping work, Globalizing Southeastern Europe, Ulf Brunnbauer assesses the impact of these returnees and the migration regimes that guided and monitored their behavior. Viewing this movement through the prism of sending countries, from the Habsburg Monarchy to the Ottoman Empire and the newly formed independent states in between, Brunnbauer traces the interplay of individual and familial decisions, state-building projects, and the fortunes of nationalist movements over a century of transatlantic interactions. He analyzes the migration patterns and popular memories that culminated in the resurgence of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter to North America in the 1960s. As Brunnbauer depicts it, migration from the village was neither exceptional nor traumatic for most peasant households but reflected individual and communal choice or rational reactions to moments of crisis. Travelers did not take to the road because of larger demographic or economic shifts, though such trends played a role, nor were they victims of nefarious migration agents hawking steamer tickets and false promises. Rather, networks of information and assistance from local priests, innkeepers, and notaries paved the way; letters and stories from migrants themselves communicated the lure of America. In the end, migrants “pushed and pulled on their own” (83), says Brunnbauer. Independent émigré activity continued in the founding of mutual aid and charitable societies to help keep migrants in touch with home villages and to maintain their status as a “constitutive part of the native household” (110). These associations (totaling over 1,100 separate bodies for Slovenes in the United States alone), Brunnbauer argues, were unlike anything workers had experienced before leaving home, reflecting a spirit of self-organization that belies “the notion that migrants are only victims of circumstances” (104).

The missing link? Police and state-building in South Arabia

ABSTRACTThe failure of the state-building project, the insurgency and, to use the famous phrase, Britain's ‘scuttle’, or ignominious withdrawal, from South Arabia have long been the subject of study, receiving attention from many angles and new perspectives. One aspect which has received less attention is the role of policing in the state-building project of the Federation of South Arabia. This article sets out to explore this lacuna by contextualizing the role of policing in state-building and examining the impact of its absence in the case of South Arabia. It is clear that Britain left it very late to attempt the construction of a Federal State in the face of mounting pressures and challenges, and even later to establish a proper Federal Police Service. The article thus examines the argument that the lack of developed policing structures was the missing link in the state-building process before asking if Britain simply left the construction of effective and unified policing structures too late, or whether this was simply an impossible task.

Statist political science and American Marxism: A historical encounter

This article reexamines the disciplinary origins of American political science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the field was engaged in a project of ideological state-building, relying on the concept of the state to put forward a particular normative vision of the American polity. This professional language of governance was developed partially in response to the democratic pressures of the period and to the growing prominence of socialist ideas, which were excluded from the framework of systematic political knowledge. Drawing upon the example of Daniel De Leon, a political scientist turned Marxist theorist, this article contrasts the disciplinary and radical socialist views of the state developed at the time. It suggests that these coexisting perspectives articulated competing notions of political agency, rights, and citizenship. Bridging the history of American political science with that of Marxism in the United States highlights the contested character of disciplinary knowledge, and the relationship between the concept of the state and its legacy in American political development.

Towards the Expert Governance: Social Scientific Expertise and the Socialist State in Czechoslovakia, 1950s–1980s

This article is concerned with the process of introduction and the further expansion of social scientific expertise in state socialist Czechoslovakia from the mid-1950s until 1989. It presents these developments in the context of the changing policy strategies of the Communist Party elites and describes how closely social scientific expertise, and social scientific knowledge production in general, was interconnected with the broader development of the state socialist governance from the post-Stalinism of the second half of the 1950s to the 1980s perestroika period. This text is structured around three crucial realms of the state socialist governance: state, economy and labor, and socialist society. The first part of the article is concerned with the expertise in the field of state, law and political sciences, which played a significant role during the late 1950s, when the socialist statebuilding project was finished. The following section focuses on the rise of social scientific expert culture during the reform communist period of the 1960s. The third part of this study analyzes how the reform communist expert culture was transformed by the post-1968 regime in a large expert apparatus in order to build strictly centralized technocratic governance. Finally, this article describes how social scientific expertise responded to the crisis and disorganization of state socialist governance during the perestroika period.

Camp evolution and Israel's creation: Between ‘state of emergency’ and ‘emergence of state’

This paper examines the central role of the camp in the early Israeli state period and its spatial and geopolitical evolution. Unlike official Israeli history, which presents the immigrant camps as an inevitable improvised response to the unexpected problem of mass immigration, I examine the camp as a strategic modern biopolitical instrument that allowed for the state's profound geopolitical changes and was itself altered according to them. The paper analyses the ways in which the camp facilitated the creation of Israel as a state formed by two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conditions: on one hand, a product of a chaotic ‘state of emergency’ and a form of ‘ordered disorder’ created by mass immigration, and on the other hand, a product of a comprehensive, tightly controlled modernist project combining physical planning and social engineering. This duality reveals the role of these immigrant camps, which were created both in Israel and abroad, as spatial ‘black holes’ which swallowed the contradiction between the radical geopolitical transformation and the rational self-image of the Israeli state-building project. The evolving and hybrid typologies of the camp in Israel's pre-state and early-state periods expose it as a versatile instrument, highlighting the need for informed spatial and geographical genealogies of the camp in order to illuminate its various transformations.