The Beginner&amp;rsquo;s Guide to Nation-Building

Dobbins, James T.; Jones, Seth G.; Crane, Keith; DeGrasse, Beth

doi:10.7249/mg557

Cited by 67 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…The RAND study that calls for emphasizing security over democratization also notes that "representative institutions based on universal suffrage usually offer the only viable basis for reconstituting state authority." 171 Clearly, however, U.S. political leaders had some wiggle room on the questions of troops and resources. The decision to go to war had strong congressional support and was politically popular.…”

Section: Democratic Dilemmas At Homementioning

confidence: 98%

“…The situation is highly malleable." 129 As a result, the violence took on aspects of path dependency, where the failure to stop initial problems snowballed into even more difficult challenges. 4.…”

Section: Failures Of Occupationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, a RAND nation-building study and several academic works cite a typical requirement of one security official per five hundred people in the population: for Iraq, a figure that would be around five hundred thousand. 90 Before the war began, General Shinseki noted the need for a much larger force to occupy Iraq, giving the figure of several hundred thousand, and that was the initial army recommendation. 91 A lack of sufficient troops can contribute to occupation problems similar to what the United States faced in Iraq.…”

Section: Bymanmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

Byman

2008

Security Studies

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This article examines whether the outbreak of an insurgency after the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an avoidable policy failure or whether the structural conditions surrounding the occupation made such an outbreak inevitable. Several U.S. policy mistakes, in particular the deployment of too few troops, a lack of comprehensive political and military planning for the occupation, disbanding the Iraqi military, the failure to establish a government in waiting, and overly aggressive de-Baathification, greatly exacerbated rather than ameliorated the various structural problems. More fundamentally, structure and policy choices interacted at all levels to explain the Iraq failure. The unavoidable conditions that coalition forces encountered in Iraq-a divided society devastated by years of war, sanctions, and misrule-and the political context in the United States made the challenge for successful policy execution difficult. This structure constrained and delimited the options open to U.S. policy makers but, even within those narrow limits, the United States made many bad choices that further diminished the chances of success.A particularly important series of policy mistakes occurred well in advance of the buildup to war itself. The orientation of the U.S. armed forces away from counterinsurgency, the failure to establish a political settlement before invasion, and other controllable policy choices in the prewar period all led to enormous difficulties during the occupation itself. Thus, by the time of the invasion, these policy choices had become almost like structural constraints and the failures had a snowballing effect, making policy corrections far more difficult.Daniel Byman is an associate professor and Director of

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Section: Democratic Dilemmas At Homementioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Failures Of Occupationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Bymanmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

Byman

2008

Security Studies

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“…New interests, connected to this shift, included nation-and state-building programmes and 'post-conflict peace-building' theories, as the literature on the involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates (e.g., Dobbins et al 2003Dobbins et al , 2007Paris 2004;Talentino 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…I use the term 'IR theory' as an umbrella, referring to studies that deal with, for instance, states' war and peace inclinations (e.g., Van Evera 1994;Miller 2007); civil war; 'ethnic conflict'; conflict resolution and 'post-conflict peace building'; and 'nation-and state-building' (e.g., Brown 1993Brown , 1996Gurr 2000;Walter 2002Walter , 2003Dobbins et al 2003Dobbins et al , 2007Paris 2004;Stepan 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

One state-one nation: the naturalisation of nation–state congruency in IR theory

Mandelbaum

2012

J Int Relat Dev

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This paper suggests that the notion of nation-state congruency has become a 'leitmotif' in International Relations (IR) theory, especially since the end of the Cold War. Congruent states are often constructed as the precursor of liberal democracy, peace, and modernity, while security in particular is discursively intertwined with nation-state congruency. This paper asks: how has this congruency discourse become so embedded in IR theory and, consequently, what can we learn about the nexus between IR and the states/international system? These questions are of a 'how-possible' and critical nature that engage with the power dynamics and thus the effects that emerge from this 'congruency bias'. To answer these, I deploy the 'discursive practices approach' and show the various practices/ strategies through which congruency is constituted and established, naturalised and legitimated. Finally, I conclude by proposing to inquire genealogically into the conditions of emergence of nation-state congruency in IR and modernity.

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Emergent conditions and multiple criteria analysis in infrastructure prioritization for developing countries

Karvetski

Lambert

Linkov

2009

Multi Criteria Decision Anal

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With coordinated military and civil operations in developing countries, the integration of local stakeholder values with the goals of security and nation building is crucial. Such integration encourages innovative and effective courses of action and prioritization of resources. Although tools of multi-criteria decision analysis are well suited for resource prioritization, designing practical stakeholder value judgment elicitation in developing countries is a challenge because of cultural, organizational, and other barriers. Specifically, the weight of individual decision criteria can increase or decrease when diverse scenarios of emergent conditions are introduced or advocated by various stakeholders. This article develops methodology to identify the most important emergent conditions for infrastructure planning among a set of scenarios involving military and civil stakeholders. Across the infrastructure development alternatives, we identify scenarios that represent opportunities and those that represent threats. We adapt the framework of the swing weighting method for recalibration of a baseline value function with a variety of assumptions of scenarios, where each scenario is composed of one or more emergent conditions. The approach reduces the typical demand on stakeholders for elicitation of preference weights, as the entire value function is not entirely reconstructed per scenario. The approach and methodology were tested in a strategy workshop with more than 50 international participants and presented to ministry officials in a developing country. The testing integrated political, economic, environmental, and technology emergent conditions for prioritizing among infrastructure projects.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building

Cited by 67 publications

References 0 publications

An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

One state-one nation: the naturalisation of nation–state congruency in IR theory

Emergent conditions and multiple criteria analysis in infrastructure prioritization for developing countries

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