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Failed States or a Failed Paradigm? State Capacity and the Limits of Institutionalism

Author: Shahar Hameiri
Date: 2007
Size: 28 pages (193 kB)

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Summary

How useful are current conceptions of state failure for dealing with problems of state fragility? This article from the Journal of International Relations and Development argues that the international community has adopted an overly technocratic notion of the state, which does not view power and conflict as intrinsic to the phenomenon of the state, conflates politics with governance and masks the political nature of state-building. It concludes that a new framework is needed, one based on system-level analyses of social cleavages and their impact on the state and state institutions.

The post-Cold War era has been a time of exponential growth for scholarly and policy-makers’ interest in state failure. Major political leaders have placed failed states and the problems associated with them at the centre of their countries’ foreign policy agendas. This concern has been translated into a number of forceful interventions in states such as Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands, with the proclaimed objective of stopping and even reversing state decay and failure.

Current dominant approaches to state failure, however, are limited by their reliance on institutionalism. Both of the principal theoretical schools in the literature, neo-liberal and neo-Weberian, focus on measuring and improving the functionality of institutions and remain constrained by unhelpful dichotomies such as state–society, formal–informal and traditional–modern, which are drawn along institutional lines. As a result, state failure is defined only in terms of technical state capacity, thus masking the political nature of state-building.

This analysis is reflected in donor programmes that seek to build state capacity as a means for resolving and mitigating social and political conflict. Current state-building interventions generally:

• Adopt a technocratic notion of the state, which does not view power and conflict as intrinsic to the phenomenon of the state, and conflates politics with governance.
• Do not recognise that state and institutions develop and change in the context of social conflict and structural cleavages. These approaches therefore fail to account for why certain institutions emerge in the first place and why they operate as they do.
• Become a way of mobilising the political projects of state building and of managing social and political conflict in a manner that favours particular interests.

Consequently, ascertaining which interests are involved in and which interests are left out of such processes is an essential but often neglected part of understanding state failure. The need for a new approach is readily apparent on examination of the patchy success record of state building interventions, which attempt to build institutional capacity as if this is a separate issue to power and interests. State-building therefore requires a new framework based on system-level analysis. Future research should examine social and political conflicts and the ways in which social cleavages, pertaining to historical patterns of economic development, relate to the state and to state institutions. 

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Source: Hameiri, S., 2007, 'Failed States or a Failed Paradigm? State Capacity and the Limits of Institutionalism', Journal of International Relations and Development, 10, pp.122-149.
Author: Shahar Hameiri , s.hameiri[at]murdoch.edu.au