Conclusion: Transformed Statehood and the Politics of Scale

Abstract

On 20 January 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as American president, replacing the unpopular George W. Bush. The inauguration of the first African-American president, the son of a Kenyan father who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, has been seen by many as a sign that American foreign policy is about to change and that a new era of international cooperation is in the offing, following the acrimony and unilateralism of the Bush years. In particular, Obama’s longstanding resistance to the war in Iraq and his election promise to call back American troops from that country as soon as feasibly possible, seem to suggest that the neoconservative ‘Bush doctrine’ of military intervention and regime change has come to its final end. But are we also witnessing the end of ‘state building’? As I have shown in this book the answer to this question has to be an unequivocal ‘no’.