International statebuilding after war

Publications | Working papers

My newest project examines the domestic politics of international statebuilding after war. As my first project showed, external actors sometimes deliberately undermine and weaken states. However, other external actors expend considerable resources to build, strengthen, and reform states after war. Much of the international statebuilding literature focuses on the statebuilders themselves. In contrast, in this project I examine the interactions between the international statebuilders and the domestic political elites in the host states.

“International Statebuilding and the Domestic Politics of State Development” 2022. Annual Review of Political Science 25: 261–281.

Managing the threat of violence remains a central concern in international security and development. International actors seek to terminate civil wars and prevent conflict recurrence by building peace and strengthening state institutions. In this article, I review the scholarship on international statebuilding, defined broadly as external efforts to create, strengthen, reform, and transform the authority structures of the state. Much of this literature models international statebuilding as provision, in which external actors provide a solution to the enforcement problem that plagues post-conflict bargains. However, in many cases the assumptions about domestic politics underpinning the provision model do not hold. When the central problem of domestic politics concerns bargaining over the distributional consequences of the peace rather than the parties’ ability to credibly commit to the peace, international statebuilding is more fruitfully modeled as imposition, in which terms are imposed on recalcitrant domestic actors. The imposition model allows the preferences of external actors over the post-war order to diverge from the preferences of domestic actors. Divergence arises because statebuilding interventions have distributional consequences that threaten the interests of domestic elites. To unpack why this is the case, I turn to the literature on the domestic politics of statebuilding, which shows that “weak statehood” can help manage violence by facilitating the distribution of sovereignty rents. Insights from these literatures suggest exciting new avenues for future scholarship.

The Domestic Politics of International Statebuilding: Evidence from Postwar Japan (with Masanori Kikuchi and Will Nomikos).

The conventional wisdom in the study of international statebuilding holds that such interventions trigger a backlash among the population in the host state that causes statebuilding efforts to fail. While scholars differ on the nature of the backlash, with some attributing it to nationalism and others focusing on the misalignment of policy preferences between statebuilders, domestic leaders, and the local population, they share the view that the backlash is inescapable. We argue that this is not always the case. When the political preferences of the statebuilder and the incumbent government diverge less than the preferences of the government and a credible domestic political opposition, the statebuilder can avoid triggering a backlash that undermines statebuilding efforts. We examine this proposition in the context of the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945-1952) through an analysis of legislative speeches in the Japanese Diet. Our study contributes to the scholarship on international intervention and international statebuilding by highlighting how domestic political competition in the host state can facilitate rather than impede statebuilding.