Liberal Statebuilding Interventions and the Monopoly on Violence

Abstract

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.