A Sociological Turn in Statebuilding Research?

Abstract

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