1 Introduction
State fragility has been top of the agenda for practitioners and academics since the end of the Cold War, not least because “[f]rom a historical perspective, much of the developing world today is characterized by states in the process of formation” (CSRC 2005:2; Carothers 2002). While the ten years after 1991 saw attention chiefly focused on ‘weak’, ‘failed’, and ‘collapsed’ states, the post-2001 decade saw a shift to the more programmatic issue of ‘state-building’. Following an extensive period dominated by the Washington Consensus paradigm with its overly optimistic emphasis on the market (Milliken/Krause 2002:753), this interest in state-breaking and state-making signaled an incremental realization of the need for ‘bringing the state back in’ (Evans et al. 1985). Yet, as the post2001 decade drew to a close, concepts of ‘hybrid political orders’ (Böge et al. 2008) and the ‘negotiated state’ (Menkhaus 2006/07) heralded a further rethinking of the state, in which earlier negative interpretations of non-state orders (Jackson 1990; Zartman 1995; Rotberg 2003; Bates 2008) came to be praised as autochthonous ways of state-building.
At least as long as states remain peaceful. For war, the orthodox dictum goes, constitutes “development in reverse” (World Bank 2003; Collier 2004), which often can only be stopped by outside intervention (Leander 2004:78; Weinstein 2004:11; Collier 2007). Yet, given that, historically, the war made states and states made war (Tilly 1992:67), this liberal perspective on violent conflict “may only be sustained by a form of historical amnesia” (Cramer 2006:9). The latter feeds into the frequent perception that countries emerging from the war were ‘blank slates’ particularly suited for “radical policy reform” (Collier/Pradhan 1994:133), due to their alleged institutional tabula rasa. While commonly neglecting institutional trajectories, war-to-peace continuities, and, more generally, the “historicity of the state in Africa” (Bayart 1993:viii; Elias 1977), the general focus on institutions and institutional reform has come at the expense of an equally important component for state-making: the nation. Although nationalism continues to represent “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (Anderson 1983:3; Comaroff/Stern 1995:3), the need for ‘bringing the nation back in’ has frequently been neglected (Helling 2009; Lemay-Hébert 2009).
In light of these debates, this thesis aims to explore and explain processes of state-building, their interrelation with nation-building, and the constitutive role war may play in state-making in the contemporary world. With divergent state-making developments in the Somali territories providing the arena of this analysis, the empirical core issue examined is why and how certain Somali state-making projects undertaken between 1960 and 2010 differed, and under what condition war was detrimental or beneficial to these endeavors. As well as setting out to develop an original analytical prism that combines insights from the too-often unconnected literatures on state-building and nation-building to enhance our theoretical understanding of processes of state-making and state-breaking, this dissertation also sheds new light on the trajectories of the state in Somalia and Somaliland. Although both theoretical propositions and empirical findings partly challenge the established literature, the thesis generally seeks to advance rather than dismiss past accounts.
The project’s relevance lies in scrutinizing current conceptualizations of state-making and state-breaking, in advancing an alternative analytical approach that combines valuable insights from the literature on state-building, nation-building and warfare, and in addressing some of the central gaps in the existing theoretical as well as empirical literature. Its originality is grounded in the proposition that processes of institutional and socio-cognitive standardization – i.e. the homogenization of particular sets of ‘rules of the game’ and ‘rules of the mind’ – within a politically delineated and geographically defined society lie at the heart of state trajectories, and that it is central administration that provides a key tool for advancing such mechanisms of standardization. When war contains dynamics that catalyze processes of standardizing an authoritative set of ‘rules of the game’ and ‘rules of the mind’, it is constitutive of state-making. The empirical value of this research project lies in contributing to a deeper understanding of why Somalia’s state-making projects collapsed and uncovering some of the underlying processes that informed the seemingly successful state-making endeavor of Somaliland – both of which remain under-researched to date.
To further develop these and other thoughts and frame the evolving theoretical propositions and empirical findings in a broader context, this introductory chapter proceeds as follows. The first section briefly presents the iterative process behind the research project and highlights its central propositions. Section two situates the thesis in the broader literature and depicts some of the chief theoretical and empirical gaps it aims to fill. After describing the methodology applied in carrying through this project in section three, a roadmap of the thesis is outlined in section four.
[su_button url=”https://saxafimedia.com/state-making-in-somalia-and-somaliland/3/” style=”soft” size=”12″ wide=”yes” center=”yes” text_shadow=”0px 0px 0px #FFFFFF” rel=”lightbox”]CONTINUE READING ON THE NEXT PAGE >[/su_button]
