The contemporary struggle to significantly address violence and insecurity highlights the existence of a double crisis in the system of nation-states and in global development. This Third World Quarterly paper, the introduction to the publication’s 30th anniversary issue, examines the contemporary crisis of both the nation-state system and global development. Despite the evident weaknesses of the state-centric model, state intervention is still necessary in order to successfully realise globalisation.
Efforts to realise the promise of progress in the 20th century have played out against colonialism, national liberation, decolonisation and the rise and fall of Third Worldism. The short life of Third Worldism has been superseded by global development.
Proponents of progress continue to focus on the nation-state as the natural mechanism for the realisation of development, security and protection of human rights. However, struggles to achieve progress may be better viewed as struggles for recognition and redistribution rather than by realising statehood per se. Moreover, development may benefit from alternative paths to progress that have not yet been addressed at a systemic level.
The following themes and issues dominate the current discussion of the combined nation-state and global development crises:
- The overriding focus on nation-states persists, despite the fact that social and political relations and experiences have never been confined to the boundaries of the nation-state.
- Development and security can only be successful when we move beyond state- and capacity-building and address establishment of legal and political frameworks for genuinely existing liberal capitalism.
- While neo-liberal globalisation has reoriented states away from national development, state intervention continues to be necessary in order to successfully realise the globalisation project.
- Current instability, terrorism and criminality in marginalised regions have precipitated a renewed emphasis on the connection between security and development.
- The new decentralised approach to nation-building reflects the shift from state-guided national development to state building vis-à-vis liberal capitalism.
- Nation building in the 21st century remains constrained; methods to build nations are more limited than those available during decolonisation and the Cold War.
New analytical approaches to the double crisis should include the following:
- A new appreciation of the social and psychological dimensions that underpin violence in relation to perceived security assumed to derive from the state.
- Application of the social-relational approach in order to reconstruct the state failure crisis more accurately.
- Alternative prospects for social and political order and progress.
- Acknowledgement that states are integrally connected to development and (in)security.
- Recognition that current ecological, social and economic crises point to the need to rethink global development and its institutional framework.
