State Building, Risk Management and the Transformation of the State

Abstract

The first chapter demonstrated the weakness of both capacity and sovereignty as ways of evaluating the effects and understanding the dynamics of state building interventions (SBIs). One of the primary implications of the state building literature’s failure to problematise the state is that the interventions themselves remain under-theorised. Because the focus is on how they affect the capacity of the state, interventions are viewed in essence as collections of actors, agencies and organisations operating ‘inside’ other states with varying degrees of coordination and success. In this chapter, I move beyond the critique of state building in its own terms to theorise the form and structure of SBIs and the social and political power relationships they embody, as well as the way in which these interventions relate to institutional and jurisdictional arrangements in the intervened state. What the preoccupation with capacity and sovereignty neglects is that these interventions constitute political regimes — sets of social and political relationships, institutions and ideas — that affect the ways in which political power is produced and reproduced within intervened states, though not necessarily in the way intended by interveners. Premised on the idea that the weakness of the governing institutions of intervened states represents an unacceptable security risk to intervening states and their societies, SBIs are set up to manage risk by transforming these states from within.