This paper is part of the project “The Influence of DFID-Sponsored State Building-Oriented Research on British Policy in Fragile, Post-Conflict Environments,” a three-year, ESRC/DFID funded research led by the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit at the University of York. The paper crystallises the findings of the first year of the project, and of the analysis of state buildingoriented research commissioned by DFID since the end of the Cold War. The paper firstly gives an overview on the evolution of the concept of state building and its increasing importance in postwar reconstruction interventions. It then focuses on DFID’s understanding of state building, as derived from an analysis of research projects and programmes, websites of the DFID Resource Centres, briefing papers, occasional papers, books, journal articles, Strategic Conflict Assessments, evaluations, and ad hoc research commissioned by DFID since the end of the Cold War. The paper underlines how, according to DFID, responsive state-building involves three necessary areas of progress: political settlement, survival functions, and expected functions. It then indentifies some peculiar research clusters which concern similar sets of issues pertaining to state building and which emerged from the analysis of DFID-commissioned research.
