State-building

Over the past two decades, state-building has developed into becoming an integral part and even a specific approach to peacebuilding by the international community. Observers across the political and academic spectra have come to see the state-building approach as the preferred strategy to peacebuilding in a number of high-profile conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. According to the political scientist Anders Persson, internationally led state-building is based on three dimensions: a security dimension, a political dimension and an economic dimension. Of these three, security is almost always considered the first priority.

The general argument in the academic literature on state-building is that without security, other tasks of state-building are not possible. Consequently, when state-building as an approach to peacebuilding is employed in conflict and post-conflict societies, the first priority is to create a safe environment in order to make wider political and economic development possible. So far, the results of using the statebuilding approach to peacebuilding have been mixed, and in many places, such as in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, the initial high expectations set by the international community have not been met. The literature on state-building has always been very clear in that building states has historically been a violent process and the outcomes in the above-mentioned cases and many others confirm the destabilizing and often violent nature of statebuilding.

There are two main theoretical approaches to definitions of state-building.

First, state-building is seen by some theorists as an activity undertaken by external actors (foreign countries) attempting to build, or re-build, the institutions of a weaker, post-conflict or failing state. This 'exogenous' or International Relations school views state-building as the activity of one country in relation to another, usually following some form of intervention (such as a UN peacekeeping operation).

The second, developmental, theory followed a set of principles developed by the OECD in 2007 on support to conflict affected states which identified 'statebuilding' as an area for development assistance. The result saw work commissioned by donor countries on definitions, knowledge and practice in state-building,this work has tended to draw heavily on political science. It has produced definitions that view state-building as an indigenous, national process driven by state-society relations. This view believes that countries cannot do state-building outside their own borders, they can only influence, support or hinder such processes. Illustrations of this approach include a think-piece commissioned for OECD and a research study produced by the Overseas Development Institute.

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