Since the end of the cold war international state-building has become a key instrument of peace-building. Yet, its results have at best been mixed and particularly large-scale operations such as state-building in Afghanistan or Iraq have not even resulted in basic stability or put an end to violent conflict. In this paper, I bridge the state formation – international state-building divide in research and argue that the practice of international state-building must take classical theories of state formation as a starting point to improve its results.
State formation research argues that the emergence of states occurs either through a bellicose or a cooperative process. Bellicose theories bear little relevance for international state-building as this instrument is usually applied to cases in which warfare has not led to the hegemony of a powerful coercion organization. Cooperative theories, by contrast, emphasize a coalitional approach towards state-making in which self-interested powerful social groups coalesce to form a new order and therefore suggest that the main purpose of international state-building is to facilitate domestic social coalitions.
Against this theoretical background, I will analyze the failed attempt of international state-building in Iraq as of 2003 and compare it with the relatively successful externally supported (de-facto) state formation in Iraqi Kurdistan. While the USA failed at building an encompassing social coalition in Iraq, they managed to achieve this in Iraqi Kurdistan where former enemies cooperated for state-making. I argue that this varying outcome resulted both from the different type of incentives the USA could offer to domestic agents and from the relationship between interveners and local authorities which differed markedly due to the contrasting character of external intervention in the two cases. Iraqi Kurdistan suggests that targeted incentives and limited involvement can lead to more success than full-blown state-building and points to a way forward how to engage with fragile states.
