1 Mark Beissinger and Crawford Young, Beyond State Crisis (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002); Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Responding to State Failure in Africa’, International Security, 21:3 (1996–97), pp. 120–44; Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jennifer Milliken, State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction: Issues and Response (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Robert Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press 2003); Robert Rotberg, When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); William Zartman, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder: Lynne Rienner 1995).

2 See in particular, the World Development Report, 1997.

3 Although I use the term ‘post-colonial states’, parts of the argument refers mainly to Sub-Saharan Africa. There are two reasons for this. First, most of the states referred to in the ‘failed states’ discourse are African. Second, this is the region that I am most familiar with.

4 Zartman, ‘Collapsed states’, p. 5.

5 Rotberg, ‘State failure’ and Rotberg ‘When states fail’.

6 It also obscures the fact that the emergence of modern states in Europe had little to do with the provision of services. Instead, as has been shown by Charles Tilly, Michael Mann and others, it was mainly an unintended effect of military rivalry, driven not by any pressure from below for provision of services but by power struggles between pre-modern ruling classes. Geopolitical competition ensured that only those states that were able to defend themselves militarily were able to survive. In order to survive in this competitive environment, states were compelled to improve their own financial basis. This in turn forced them to improve their administrative capacity, in order to be able to tax their population. The provision of services other than security, such as infrastructure, property rights, health and education, was established much later, after the consolidation of statehood in the sense of a monopoly of violence, territorial control and international recognition. However, this critique should not be exaggerated. Viewing the state as essentially a service provider is not logically incompatible with a geopolitical explanation of its emergence. If we distinguish between origins and functions, it could be argued that states may have emerged as a result of war and conflict, but they nevertheless perform the functions of service provision. Of course, the provision of security can be seen as one type of service provision, but this does not mean that the state came into being as a result of a contract between states and citizens.

7 Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

8 Stephen Krasner, ‘Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States’, International Security, 29:2 (2004), pp. 85–120.

9 Giddens refers to this process as ‘internal pacification’. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, (Cambridge: Polity Press 1985).

10 Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, ‘Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood’, World Politics, 3 (1983).

11 Similar arguments on the importance of external funds for African states have been made by many others, including Jean Francois Bayart, ‘Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion’, African Affairs, 99:395 (2000), pp. 217–67; Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

12 Jackson, ‘Quasi-States’.

13 Krasner, ‘Sharing Sovereignty’.

14 Giddens, ‘The Nation-State’, pp. 263–64.

15 Although it is often assumed – for example, in ‘realist’ theories of international relations – that states actually possess the properties associated with statehood, the starting point for the discourse of failed states is that many states do not.

16 Using a limiting case as a standard is similar to what is done in the application of rational-choice theory. Here, one starts from an idealised conception of rationality, and assesses actions in terms of their degree of correspondence with this ideal. In this case, as in the case of an idealised concept of statehood, the usefulness of the concept depends on the degree to which the phenomenon it describes corresponds to the theory.

17 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 6.

18 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 9.

19 However, unlike the modernisation school, it does not see the development of such a state as inevitable. Failure is, quite simply, the absence of a certain form of state, and these theories of ‘failed states’ can therefore be considered as a version of modernisation theory, albeit stripped of teleology.

20 Pinar Bilgin and Adam David Morton, ‘From ‘Rogue’ to ‘Failed’ States? The Fallacy of Short-termism,’ Politics, 24:3 (2004), pp. 169–80, p. 173–4. To this, we could add that even if we allow for degrees of failure (or degrees of statehood (Christopher Clapham, ‘Degree of Statehood’, Review of International Studies, 24:2 (1999), pp. 143–57), we are still left with the problem that success or failure is defined in terms of deviations from a given norm, although we avoid the ‘binary opposition’ described by Bilgin and Morton. See also Pinar Bilgin and Adam David Morton, ‘Historicising representations of “failed states”: beyond the cold-war annexation of the social sciences?’, Third World Quarterly 23:1 (2002), pp. 55–80.

21 Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘The Age of Warring States’, New Left Review, 26 (2004), pp. 148–60.

22 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Modern State in India’, in Martin Doornbos and Sudipta Kaviraj (eds), The Dynamics of State Formation (New Delhi: Sage, 1997), p. 227.

23 This discussion is based on Weber's essay, ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’.

24 Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). This is emphasised by Krasner as well, who describes sovereignty as ‘organised hypocrisy’. Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organised Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). However, Krasner still defines failure in terms of the absence of specific features, and he does not explicitly discuss the inter-relationship between the idea of statehood/sovereignty and processes of state formation.

25 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

26 See, for instance, Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Hobsbawm & Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983) on how the colonial state's ethnic classifications came to help constitute ethnic identities in Zimbabwe.

27 As argued by Bourdieu, an epistemological break is required, through which the social scientist distances him/herself from the concepts and worldviews of those studied, while at the same time recognising that their concepts and ideas are a constitutive part of social reality.

28 Bilgin and Morton, ‘Historicising’.

29 Philip Abrams (‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1 (1988), pp. 58–89 makes this point. He makes a distinction between two objects of analysis: the state system and the state idea. According to Abrams, the state system can be studied without the concept of the state, while the idea of the state should be regarded as a form of representation. Students of the state, he argues, should abandon the aim of going behind the idea of the state in order to identify the state's real essence. There are two problems with this approach. First, it depends on a radical separation between idea and reality, or between representation and that which is represented. The only way to avoid this problem is to regard the state idea and the state system as two aspects of the same process (Timothy Mitchell, ‘Society, Economy and the State Effect’, in George Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 77. Second, it entails that one gives up the idea of analysing the state as something more than people's representations of it.

30 Centeno, Miguel and Fernando Lopez-Alves, The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin-America (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001).

31 Bourdieu, ‘Outline’; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). See also the contributions in Theodore Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike von Savigny, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

32 Georg Sørensen, Changes in Statehood: The Transformation of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

33 Joel Migdal, The State in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 15–6.

34 William Munro, ‘Power, Peasants and Political Development: Reconsidering State Construction in Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38:1 (1996), pp. 112–48, p. 115.

35 The recognition of the differentiation between the private and public spheres is a key feature of the modern state. See, amidst a vast literature, Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics’, American Political Science Review, 1:85 (1991); Jeff Weintraub, ‘The Theory and Politics of the Private/Public Distinction’, in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds), Public and Private in Thought and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

36 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), ch. 4.

37 Mitchell, ‘The Limits’; Mitchell, ‘Society, Economy’.

38 Mamdani, ‘Citizen’. The authority of local leaders was originally embedded in tradition, and the proper rule of conduct for both leaders and subordinates was defined by what was recognised as established convention. Clearly, ‘tradition’ itself changed in the course of this process. As shown by several authors (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Sudipta Kaviraj', On State, Society and Discourse in India', in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London: Orient Longman, 1991) traditions and traditional leaders can in some cases be created by the state - intentionally or accidentally.

39 Bruce Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism’, African Affairs, 97 (1998), p. 314.

40 Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power, 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986).

41 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Modern State in India’, in Dornboos and Kaviraj (eds), The Dynamics of State Formation (New Delhi: Sage 1997), p. 232.

42 This idea originated in the Western colonising powers, but its key features (monopoly of violence, control over territory, service provision, separation between state and society and between the internal and the external, unity of ruler and ruled, bureaucracies, courts, armies, police forces) were shared by the Soviet state model, which was influential in some countries.

43 Beissinger and Young, ‘Beyond State Crisis’, p. 35.

44 Policies aiming at ‘development’ were actually initiated before independence – from the late 1940s (see Berman, ‘Ethnicity’; Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Towards the end of the colonial period, the colonial powers sought to promote ‘development’, both economically and socially, and to transform what they saw as ‘backward’ societies. This had to be done from the outside, by the colonial powers, precisely because the inhabitants themselves were seen as too ‘backward’ to undertake such a task themselves.

45 Geir Sundet, ‘Beyond Developmentalism in Tanzania’, Review of African Political Economy, 59 (1994), p. 40.

46 Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), ch. 6.

47 Richard Sandbrook, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 84.

48 Sandbrook, ‘The Politics’, p. 90–1; Migdal, ‘Strong Societies’, p. 217–8.

49 Ibid., ‘The Politics’, p. 93–6; Migdal, ‘Strong Societies’, pp. 214–7, 219–20; Patrick Chabal and Jean-Francois Daloz, Africa Works (London: James Currey, 1999).

50 Beissinger and Young, ‘Beyond State Crisis’, p. 42.

51 Catherine Boone, ‘States and Ruling Classes in Post-Colonial Africa: The Enduring Contradictions of Power’, in Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli and Vivienne Shue (eds), State Power and Social Forces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994), p. 131–2.

52 In fact, to the extent that access to aid depends on assessments of need, they may have an interest in not promoting growth, since a lack of growth will ensure that they continue to be considered worthy of assistance.

53 Bayart, ‘Africa in the World’. African politicians, Bayart argues, have become experts at manipulating international organisations, foreign governments and aid agencies. Resources acquired in these dealings and through such devices as trade policies, export taxes and the manipulation of exchange rates, have funded the reciprocal assimilation of elites through the use of patronage.

54 William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner), p. 21–2.

55 Reno, ‘Warlord Politics’, p. 2–3.

56 This may be the reason why donors rarely define their conditions as ‘political’. Instead, they are described as ‘technical’, without direct political content (Partha Chatterjee, ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’, in Terence Byres (ed.), The State and Development Planning in India (New Delhi, Oxford University Press 1994); James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Thus, when the World Bank is preoccupied with ‘good governance’, this is considered as a means of improving ‘efficiency’, and not as a political issue. (‘The State in a Changing World’, World Development Report (Washington DC.: World Bank 1997).

57 David Chandler, Empire in Denial: The Politics of State Building (London: Pluto Press, 2006); John Pender, ‘Country Ownership: The Evasion of Donor Accountability’, in Chris Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch (eds), Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (London, University College London Press, 2007), Graham Harrison, The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States (Milton Park: Routledge, 2004). Conveniently, this arrangement also serves the interests of national governments, by enabling them to present a given policy as being imposed from outside, and thereby avoid being held responsible by citizens.

58 Martin Dornboos, ‘State Formation Processes under External Supervision: Reflections on “Good Governance”’, pp. 377–91 in Olav Stokke (ed.), Aid and Political Conditionality (London: Frank Cass, 1995), Ferguson, ‘Global Shadows’.

59 Ferguson, ‘Global Shadows’.

60 This also implies that, to the extent that programmes of state building and capacity building have been influenced by the ‘failed states’ discourse, this discourse has itself contributed both to undermining state power and to reproducing the idea of the state.