State Building as a Chimera

Why do international state-building efforts so often fail? From Somalia and Lebanon to Afghanistan and Iraq, recent state-building practices have led to consequences so perverse that it is impossible not to question whether the entire process ought not to be rethought. In this book Daniel Biro argues that state-building projects are virtually doomed to failure by the fundamental misconceptions inherent in the institutions that support and execute them. He shows that the problem lies chiefly in the inability of the UN and major western states to fully account for the diversity and variability seen in the processes of polity creation and proposes an alternative framework for the analysis of polities that do not conform to the conventional model of the modern state. With illustrations from Asia, Africa and Central America Biro posits that it is more useful to consider local, alternative forms of 'governance without government' as genuine social orders rather than merely deviations from a preconceived ideal of state order that traditionally ignores contemporary actors such as warlords or militias and the co-constitutive relations they share with the states and societies in which they flourish.