State-building

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State-building as a specific term in social sciences and humanities, refers to political and historical processes of creation, institutional consolidation, stabilization and sustainable development of states, from the earliest emergence of statehood up to the modern times. Within historical and political sciences, there are several theoretical approaches to complex questions related to the role of various contributing factors (geopolitical, economic, social, cultural, ethnic, religious, internal, external) in state-building processes.

Since the end of the 20th century, state-building has developed into becoming an integral part and even a specific approach to peacebuilding by the international community. Observers across the political and academic spectra have come to see the state-building approach as the preferred strategy to peacebuilding in a number of high-profile conflicts, including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and war-related conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The general argument in the academic literature on state-building is that without security, other tasks of state-building are not possible. Consequently, when state-building as an approach to peacebuilding is employed in conflict and post-conflict societies, the first priority is to create a safe environment in order to make wider political and economic development possible. So far, the results of using the state-building approach to peacebuilding have been mixed, and in many places, such as in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, the initial high expectations set by the international community have not been met. The literature on state-building has always been very clear that building states has historically been a violent process and the outcomes in the above-mentioned cases and many others confirm the destabilizing and often violent nature of state-building.