…Warfare…
This research project also speaks to the proposition that “war makes states, and vice versa” (Tilly 1992:67), which is hotly debated in academia. Although it is generally acknowledged that “the experience of warfare has played a central and indeed essential role in the process of state and nation formation in Europe” (Clapham 2001:1; Huntington 1968) and that “violence […] is an integral part of the processes of accumulation of power by the national state” (Cohen et al. 1981:901), the validity of this assertion is frequently called into question in the context of the contemporary world of developing states (Leander 2004; Herbst 2000). Although some accounts suggest that the ‘war makes states’ hypothesis holds not only for Europe but also for Africa and that the constitutive role of warfare can not only be observed for past but also present state-making endeavors (Deflem 1999; Cramer 2006; Niemann 2007), the view of the ‘war makes states’-critics prevails. In the shadow of the ‘new wars’ literature (Kaldor 1999) and the proposition that “the European experience does not provide a template for state-making in other regions of the world” (Herbst 2000:22), scholars such as Leander (2004) cast doubt on Tilly’s dictum and propose that war is a “political retrovirus […] about nothing at all” (Enzensberger 1994, as in Cramer 2006:77).
Apart from the classical accounts on war and state-making in historic Europe, war has more recently been conceptualized as a rational economic strategy (Keen 1994, 1998; Reno 1995; Duffield 2001). These approaches suggest that “war may be a continuation of economics by other means” (Keen 2000:7), and, building on Foucault (2000), highlights the fact that wars might serve important (rational, economic) functions for some members of a society in conflict. Yet, by focusing on particular (groups of) individuals, they tell us little about the forms of social transformation that may occur during conflict (Bakonyi/Stuvøy 2005:363), even though it is acknowledged that “[i]nstitutions are altered by conflict” (Aron 2003:481; Schlichte 2003:33). Furthermore, concepts such as the rebel-centered models of Collier and Höffler (1998, 2004) as well as Fearon and Laitin (2003) do not consider the question of why and how particular states come to be vulnerable to violent conflict in the first place.
Based on the insight that “[not] all types of violent conflict are equivalent in their historical significance” (Cramer 2006:48), the debate has come to an impasse at which the inconclusive argument is made that “[t]he effects of contemporary wars on statehood are ambivalent” and that there is “no single unambiguous causal relation between states and wars” (Schlichte 2003:38). Although it is argued that one needs to differentiate between different kinds of war in order to assess its implication for state-making (Rasler/Thompson 1989; Kestnbaum/ Skocpol 1993:667), a central feature of the debate’s deadlock remains – namely that the considerable span in time and space that renders a sound comparison of the role war has played in state trajectories then and now, here and there, impossible. Indeed, Tilly’s ‘war makes states’ thesis is only partly applicable to the Somali case, for example, largely because the wars that can be considered constitutive of state-making have involved recurrent events that unfolded over centuries, rather than more isolated instances of war. Yet, rather than outright abandoning war as an explanatory variable, I propose that its context-specificity calls for the necessity to disaggregate its ‘black box’, in order to identify particular components that might be constitutive of state-making. The analytical framework presented in Chapter 2 aims at precisely this.
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