War and State-Making

1 Charles Tilly, `War Making and State Making as Organized Crime', in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer & Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169-191, on p. 170.

2 For a recent example, see Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994).

3 As an armed conflict involving 1,000 or more battle deaths per year, where an armed conflict is `a contested incompatibility which concerns government and/or territory [with] the use of armed force between two parties'. Peter Wallensteen & Margareta Sollenberg,' Armed Conflict, 1989-98', Journal of Peace Research, vol. 36, no. 5, September 1999, pp. 593-606, on p. 605.

4 Ibid.

5 My primary focus is on the weak states in Sub-Saharan Africa.

6 See Walter C. Opello, Jr & Stephen J. Rosow, The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

7 M. F. Lindley, quoted from Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 71.

8 Tilly (note 1 above), p. 169.

9 Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 29.

10 Charles Tilly, `War Making and State Making', in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 1-89, on p. 71.

11 Ayoob (note 9 above), p. 29.

12 Wallensteen & Sollenberg (note 3 above).

13 Ayoob (note 9 above), p. 35.

14 Ibid., p. 36.

15 Ibid., p. 37.

16 Tilly (note 1 above), p. 184.

17 Georg Sørensen, Democracy and Democratization: Processes and Prospects in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998).

18 Robert Jackson & Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1982); Robert Jackson & Carl G. Rosberg, `Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood', World Politics, vol. 35, no. 1, October 1982, pp. 1-24.

19 `European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations. The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services, and expertise. To a larger degree, states that have come into being recently through decolonization... have acquired their military organization from outside, without the same internal forging of mutual constraints between rulers and ruled.' Tilly (note 1 above), pp. 185-186.

20 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

21 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 96.

22 Tilly sets forth the connection between `external' and `internal' as follows: `we might schematize the history of European state making as three stages: (a) The differential success of some power holders in “external” struggles establishes the difference between an “internal” and an “external” arena for the deployment of force; (b) “external” competition generates “internal” state making; (c) “external” compacts among states influence the form and locus of particular states ever more powerfully.' Tilly (note 1 above), p. 183.

23 For example, Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

24 There have sometimes been real interstate wars in Africa, and in those cases spinoffs in terms of state-making appear to have been higher. Christopher Clapham has made that argument in the context of the Ethiopia/Eritrea conflict. But there is no firm basis for generally expecting that a logic of war pushing state-making will now begin to apply in Sub-Saharan Africa.

25 As emphasized by Robert Jackson, this practice of respecting existing borders 'is a fundamental normative change from the basis of state jurisdiction historically, which could be determined by military force, by Machiavellian diplomacy, by commercial transaction, by dynastic marriage, and by other such means'. Robert Jackson, `International Community Beyond the Cold War', in Gene M. Lyons & Michael Mastanduno, eds, Beyond Westphalia: State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 59-87, on p. 66.

26 Arnold Wolfers, quoted from Robert Jackson, `The Security Dilemma in Africa', in Brian L. Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), pp. 81-93, on p. 88.

27 Sean Kelly, America's Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993).

28 Naomi Chazan, Robert Mortimer, John Ravenhill & Donald Rothchild, Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 362-383.

29 Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 293.

30 Ibid., p. 333.

31 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

32 In order to further evaluate the relative importance of population density for statemaking, it would be helpful to make systematic comparisons between Africa and areas with a similar level of population density. The best candidate in this respect is South America, but there are also, of course, systematic differences between the two regions. In particular, the Americas are a special case in the sense that pre-colonial populations were more or less exterminated.

33 The following remarks on Taiwan rely on my earlier work: Georg Sørensen, Democracy, Dictatorship and Development: Economic Development in Selected Regimes of the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1991).

34 Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), p. 35.

35 Ibid., p. 36.

36 Ibid., p. 43.

37 There were other elements too, including the quest for imperial power and control. In 1937, the Japanese butchered in Nanking (China), by conventional means, a number of men, women and children comparable to the human cost of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki eight years later.

38 William Reno, `War, Debt and the Role of Pretending in Uganda's International Relations', Occasional Paper (Copenhagen: Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, 2000), p. 29.

39 Ibid., p. 25.