State-building is the creation of
new government institutions and the
strengthening of existing ones.
State-building is one of the most important issues for the world community because weak or failed states are the source of many of the world’s most serious problems, from poverty to drugs to terrorism.
While the world leaders know a lot about state-building, there is a great deal theh don’t know, particularly about how to transfer strong institutions to developing countries.
Theh know how to transfer resources across international borders, but well-functioning public institutions require certain habits of mind and operate in complex ways that resist being moved.
World leaders need to focus a great deal more thought, attention, and research on this area.
State is almost as old as live, after the state of nature. The state is an ancient human institution dating backsome 10,000 years to the first agricultural societies that sprangup in Mesopotamia.
In China a state with a highly trained bureaucracy has existed for thousands of years. In Europe the modern state, deploying large armies, taxation powers, and a centralized bureaucracy that could exercise sovereign authority over a large territory, is much more recent, dating back fouror five hundred years to the consolidation of the French, Spanish, and Swedish monarchies.
The rise of these states, withtheir ability to provide order, security, law, and property rights,was what made possible the rise of the modern economicworld.
States have a wide variety of functions,
for good and ill. The same coercive
power that allows them to protect
property rights and provide public safety
also allows them to confiscate private
property and abuse the rights of their cit-
izens.
The monopoly of legitimate power
that states exercise allows individuals to
escape what Hobbes labeled the “war
of every man against every man” domestically but serves as the basis for
conflict and war at an international
level. The Russia-Ukraine war is case in point.
Comments
Post a Comment