What is state collapse and how should external actors address it? This essay reviews the literature, outlining the ‘institutional’ and ‘legitimacy’ approaches to the state and statebuilding that emerge. It argues that to be effective, statebuilding needs to consider both the efficiency of state institutions and their legitimacy, (and in terms of the latter, the impact of external intervention on socio-political cohesion, or ‘nation-building’). Statebuilding and nation-building should thus be understood as a single process, in which local ownership and perceptions are vital.
While there is a consensus concerning the importance of state collapse in contemporary world politics, there remains significant ambiguity as to how to define and address the phenomenon. The literature on statebuilding is characterised by two approaches, differentiated by their conception of the state. One is an ‘institutional’ view of the state that focuses on the efficiency of its institutions; the other a broader ‘legitimacy’ approach that takes into account the rebuilding of state institutions but puts greater emphasis on socio-political cohesion (sometimes referred to as nation-building) and the legitimacy that central authorities generate. This distinction has implications for the solutions proposed when dealing with state collapse.
By isolating the state from the nation, and statebuilding from nation-building, the institutional approach regards the state primarily as a set of governmental institutions. While this allows for easier analysis, its reduction of complex political interactions into a technical and administrative process ignores important elements of state collapse and statebuilding:
- As a state represents more than the mere expression of its institutions, state collapse encompasses more than the failure of governmental institutions
- State collapse is not only driven by institutional collapse, but by the collapse of the legitimacy of the central authority
- Statebuilding has significant limits when unrelated to the needs and perceptions of the local population.
- State- and nation-building are related and must be understood as a single process.
All statebuilding policies affect socio-political cohesion, intentionally or not. The institutions which external actors help create affect society as a whole, thus bringing outside actors into the sphere of nation-building. External actors must therefore take into account the impact of their statebuilding interventions on legitimacy, particularly on socio-political cohesion. Recommendations for development agencies include the following:
- Take into account local perceptions of the legitimacy of both the outside actor and the statebuilding process it tries to reinforce, implementing policies that will generate and then preserve this legitimacy.
- Rather than an endpoint at the culmination of the statebuilding process, local ownership has also to be understood as a vital constitutive element of the process, without which external actors risk falling into irrelevance or worse.
- Each statebuilding operation has to be unique and must not be determined by generic templates but ‘by the aspirations and deliberations of the men and women who will live with the results’.
