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State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.1
EAN: 9780801442926
ISBN: 0801442923
Label: Cornell University Press
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: 2004-05
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Studio: Cornell University Press
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Editorial Review:
Francis Fukuyama famously predicted "the end of history" with the ascendancy of liberal democracy and global capitalism. The topic of his latest book is, therefore, surprising: the building of new nation-states. The end of history was never an automatic procedure, Fukuyama argues, and the well-governed polity was always its necessary precondition. "Weak or failed states are the source of many of the world's most serious problems," he believes. He traces what we know—and more often don't know—about how to transfer functioning public institutions to developing countries in ways that will leave something of permanent benefit to the citizens of the countries concerned. These are important lessons, especially as the United States wrestles with its responsibilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
Fukuyama begins State-Building with an account of the broad importance of "stateness." He rejects the notion that there can be a science of public administration, and discusses the causes of contemporary state weakness. He ends the book with a discussion of the consequences of weak states for international order, and the grounds on which the international community may legitimately intervene to prop them up.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Cogent analysis of the difficulties of state-building
Weak or failed states like Somalia and Afghanistan are quietly causing some of the world's most pressing problems and will continue to do so, according to political analyst Francis Fukuyama. In this elegant, sobering critique based on his 2003 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Fukuyama uses a simple, two-dimensional model of "stateness" to analyze why states fail. He focuses on what countries can do, rather than using some theoretical model of what they ought to do. Fukuyama describes the ... Read More
Rating:  - Key Distinctions
Francis Fukuyama, in an important slender volume, sees nation building as the process of helping to ". . .create self-sustaining democratic political institutions and robust market-oriented economies. . . ." He draws a critical distinction between "nation building" and "state building." The former refers to ". . .creating or repairing all the cultural, social, and historical ties that bind people together as a nation." The latter, in contrast, aims at ". . .creating or strengthening such government ... Read More
Rating: - An apologetic defense from a neo-con theorist
This book seems like an introductory political science book but its language is simple enough for a general audience to understand. Everyone who has an interest in the political background and details of the current World events can find a lot of interesting discussions.
The author often tends to schematize some ambiguous concepts and ideas very successfully, e.g. the graphs of "strength of state vs. scope of state functions" and "specificity vs. transaction volume" are some outstanding cases. ... Read More
Rating: - Key distinction
One of the main contributions of this book is the underappreciated distinction between state-building and nation-building. Anyone interested in democractic nation-building ought to consider reading this volume. A clear analysis with obvious implications for American policy in places like Iraq. This is part of an increasing body of work on nation building that, collectively taken together, provides a good handle on the difficulties in creating democracy where previously there was none (and see the work of ... Read More
Rating:  - Disappointing
This was disappointing reading for me--after a rather abstruse (but perhaps technically useful to some) delineation of various factors involved in analyzing "state building," the application to any real situations was extremely thin and nothing new. Nor was much "meat" put on the skeleton. It reminded me of university situations where publishing periodically is a necessity. (However, the subject area is only an interest of mine--my Ph.D. is in a different field.)
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