What is the potential for statebuilding interventions to foster domestic legitimacy? This article advocates a shift in current approaches to statebuilding. Rather than inserting modern institutions that create external legitimacy, statebuilding should focus on closing the gap between civil society and the state. More emphasis should be placed on building domestic legitimacy by fulfilling basic welfare needs. This approach would stimulate local-level state legitimacy while formalising social justice and positive peacebuilding.
Most authors have seen statebuilding as a way of securing ‘negative peace’ or the absence of war. Few have viewed statebuilding as a means of achieving a deeper ‘positive peace’ (the absence of both war and social injustice). While most of the literature analyses state legitimacy in relation to global ‘best practice’, this article focuses on the extent to which post-conflict policies are able to foster societal or domestic legitimacy, and proposes a revised approach to statebuilding.
There are two approaches to achieving state-level democracy within the statebuilding literature: a ‘transitionist’ version focused on the holding of elections, and a ‘structuralist’ version based on both internal societal consent and external legitimacy. The history of domestic legitimacy in the developing world reveals few signs that a concept of social contract, a neutral bureaucracy, or an impartial and legal rule existed in these countries. During the Cold War, domestic legitimacy was eroded further by alliances between major Northern states and political elites in the South.
International institutions have had only limited success in improving local legitimacy. They should therefore change their approach, and target public lending to local state institutions for essential welfare provision, particularly in the field of health and sanitation. Although conditional lending has proved controversial in the economic sphere, it would be less inflammatory if linked to issues such as child healthcare.
- The effects of this lending would be more rapid and visible than the development of political institutions and economic wealth, and would be more universally acceptable.
- These interventions could have a ‘trickle up’ effect, whereby benefits aimed at the under-fives would also lead to wider improvements in national development.
- The approach could also be more accountable, by avoiding cash transactions that could be absorbed into the workings of the state.
The version of statebuilding proposed here would help to bring states into line with global governance regimes, and global governance rhetoric into line with existing international legislation. By doing so it would construct a mutually beneficial relationship between needs in the South, power in the North, and stability for both. It would also provide a strong basis for fostering positive peace via structural statebuilding.
