In the post-Cold War era, liberal statebuilding interventions have become a major tool of global governance. Yet, the variation in outcomes is still poorly understood. This article draws on state formation theory to elaborate a causal mechanism that can explain the successful monopolization of the means of violence in statebuilding interventions. Insights from the state formation literature suggest that the regional political system is crucial for state formation and statebuilding. In order to test the hypothesis, a novel process-tracing method is applied to the case of Sierra Leone. The case study suggests that only a cooperative regional setting enables interventions to succeed.
This article reviews three new publications on statebuilding interventions and examines to which degree sociological approaches are applied in the study of external statebuilding. It argues that macro sociology offers a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools that can be fruitfully applied to study the effects of statebuilding interventions.
Since the end of the Cold War, liberal statebuilding interventions in conflict-ridden societies have become a major feature of the international system. Although these interventions seek to export liberal statehood, they often fail to establish the minimum feature of the modern state: The monopoly on the use of force. The dissertation seeks to explain the outcomes of liberal statebuilding interventions in terms of violence regulation. Using a novel process-tracing method, the study looks for violence monopolization patterns within and across the cases of Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sierra Leone. The findings indicate that a liberal statebuilding intervention leads to a state monopoly on violence when the intervention is supported by key regional actors and when the target society had a history of strong statehood prior to civil war.
Are we experiencing a sociological turn in the study of statebuilding? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to delineate the discipline of sociology. Max Weber (1978: 4) defined sociology as "[..] a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences". Like all definitions, the Weberian is a contested one. Nevertheless, it might provide a useful starting point. In comparison to mainstream political science, there are some important differences. The main dividing line is certainly that sociology is not restricted to the political sphere, but is concerned with society as a whole. It deals not just with causal explanation of social behavior, but also with understanding human action. In addition, sociologists have extensively discussed and conceptualized the relation between individuals and social structure (e.g. Elias 1978;Giddens 1984). Taken together, these features have made sociological approaches highly valuable for International Relations Constructivists. Hence, the discipline of IR has experienced a revival of sociological approaches since the end of the 1990s, and the theories of thinkers such as Foucault, Giddens or Habermas have increasingly been adopted by IR scholars 1 .In contrast to the wider discipline, the sub-field of statebuilding research has largely ignored this trend until very recently. From a substantial point of view, it is rather surprising that sociology has received so little attention by scholars who examine the difficulties of building states in post-colonial, post-conflict settings. Historically, sociology emerged mainly as an effort to understand what happened to European societies in the process of modernization (Lawson and Shilliam 2010: 71). State formation, and the relation between the state and society in particular, has received much attention by sociologists such as Émile Durkheim (1893Durkheim ( [1964), Max Weber (1978), Norbert Elias (1939[2000), or Charles Tilly (1992). These types of macro sociology offer a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools that can be fruitfully applied to study the effects of statebuilding interventions. As this review
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