Considering Statebuilding, Publishing Statebuilding – On Being an Editor in a Changing Field

Abstract

Statebuilding has waned in importance, at least when we are looking at the two decades following the Balkans wars. Building a state which would provide a platform for peaceful resolution of conflicts was widely understood as a remedy to escape cycles of violence and counterviolence. The ‘multi-functional’ state, of course, was viewed as a somewhat a-political unit, not restricted to merely holding a monopoly to the legitimate use of violence; it would be manned (predominantly) with representatives who were technocratically able but bore little personal ambition (Ghani and Lockhart 2007). International interventions were meant to help, or enforce, building such a state, and how-to knowledge was in demand. When the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding was founded and first published in 2007, with three issues per year, the balance between academic analysis and practical requirements was hence very important (Chandler, Chesterman, and Laakso 2007) – and the requirement to bring practice and conceptual thinking and political into a productive dialogue is more valid than ever today. At the same time, it became clear over the years in contributions of many clever scholars that there were fundamental flaws in a liberal world view that guided action in international interventions, which not inevitably but almost naturally contained components of statebuilding (Jahn 2007a, 2007b; Richmond 2009; Goodhand andWalton 2009; Mac Ginty 2012; Greener 2012; Augestad Knudsen 2013; Charbonneau and Sears 2014; Philipsen 2014; Paffenholz 2021; see also Special Issues guest edited by Gabay and Death 2012; Mullin and Pallister-Wilkins 2015). Of the many findings, the most important were that, to many statebuilders’ surprise, statebuilding was political, not technocratic; politicians in intervened countries followed their own political considerations, in the process not necessarily supporting the norms the interveners claimed to hold dear; interveners themselves had narrow interests, career projections and organizational logics to follow rather than pursue lofty ideals they prided themselves officially to be supporting. After all, politics remained local, recognized in the local turn debate and its inherent limits (Roberts 2013; Chandler 2015; Abboud 2021; Randazzo 2021). The initial diagnosis, namely that in conflict settings the state which was unable to balance societal groups’ interest within its own institutions was somewhat deficient was correct. The reverse conclusion, that functioning institutions would prevent violent conflicts was not (Hehir 2007). Hence, statebuilding was not the ideal cure for violence, programmatically, even though several explanatory factors were routinely identified for dysfunctional, or fragile, statehood (Lemay-Hébert 2009; Barakat and Larson 2014): a lack of democratic participation in decision-making (Kurki 2011); a lack of monopoly of violence (Ahram 2011; see Special Issues guest edited by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara 2010; Schmelzle and Stollenwerk 2018); problematic security institutions (Sedra 2018; see Special Issues guest edited by Jackson 2018; Ansorg and Gordon 2019); a lack of economic development (Emmanuel and Rothchild 2007); abundance of resources (Kühn 2008; Bridoux 2011; Schwarz and de Corral 2013); lack of education (Shah, Paulson, and Couch 2020); or external meddling (Heathershaw 2008), colonial legacies (Gruffydd Jones 2012; Kühn 2016; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2017; Nakagawa 2018),