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This article engages with the latest (post-Cold War) debate about the theory and practice of nation building (state building). This is linked to a discussion of the shift in US foreign policy towards Afghanistan relative to Iraq between late 2008 and late 2009. Afghanistan is currently a major focus of nation building efforts and counter-insurgency programs led by the United States of America. Meanwhile, the discussion here ranges from South Vietnam to Colombia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and explores some of the ghosts that now haunt the US presence in Afghanistan 9 years on from the start Operation Enduring Freedom at the end of 2001. We argue that the possibility of successful nation building in Afghanistan is both far-fetched and far-off. In fact, what is required is the reorientation and reduction (even termination) of Washington and its allies’ direct commitment to Kabul. Washington and its allies should focus on a grand strategy for the Middle East and Asia that attaches far less importance to Afghanistan. This should occur in the context of understanding the history of the emergence, universalization and contemporary crisis of the nation-state system. Nowhere are the limits of the nation-state system and the failure of nation building more apparent today than in Afghanistan. In this context a whole new approach to questions of war, peace and progress is in order. The comprehensive elaboration of a new security-development framework is beyond the scope of this article, but we conclude by elaborating some of the main elements of a new framework: this will include a point of departure for research and policy to move beyond the current crisis of the nation-state system and nation building.

In this contribution we focus on the political merits as well as limitations of the project of Third Worldism. Through critical historical analysis we identify the difference that Third Worldism made to world politics. At the same time it was without a doubt beset with contradictions from its inception. By foregrounding the contexts of development struggles, we hope to illustrate—at least minimally—these contradictions. From our perspective these are to be found in the politics of emancipatory nationalism. On the one hand, this facilitated a freedom of a kind: recognition and formal equality in world politics. On the other, the institutional form this took was premised on the assumption that national development (especially of the postcolonial states) was somehow independent of wider historical as well as ‘transnational’ social and political relations. A more relational understanding of the history of development would reveal the extent to which wealth and poverty, order, violence and conflict ar...

The theory and practice of development has a complicated relationship to the history of war and peace in the 20th century. Efforts to realise the promise of progress have been played out against the backdrop of the crisis of colonialism, national liberation, decolonisation and the rise and fall of Third Worldism. Third Worldism, conceptualised as a specific project to realise the promises of progress, was also affected by the transformation and onset of the crisis of the nation-state system and the re-calibration of the development–security nexus in the post-Cold War era. The short history of the ‘three worlds of development' appears now to have been overlaid by global development; that is, a process which entails intensified social and political network-relations, with accompanying regulatory efforts becoming more global in scope and reach. Yet, the most influential drivers and proponents of ‘progress' continue to focus on the nation-state as the natural mechanism for the realisation of developm...

This article examines contemporary concerns about citizenship, security, and development against the backdrop of an emergent "MexAmerica." It. seeks to de-routinize the idea of the nation-state and de-naturalize the history of North America in order to move beyond the influential technocratic and quantitative approach to border security and development, and thus to define the current crisis manifested in practices of border security, citizenship, and economic integration. KEYWORDS: "MexAmerica," citizenship, security, borders, development ********** If you start at the south end of Avenida Revolucion (which begins just below the ridge over which a huge Mexican flag flaps in the coastal breeze) and walk more or less due north toward the US border you move from the more sophisticated clubs and massage parlors, as well as a seemingly unending number of stores selling the usual collection of souvenirs, toward the increasingly cheap and straightforward bars and brothels. There is a double irony here. First, one of the most famous streets in Tijuana, which is named after the Mexican revolution of the early twentieth century, runs through (and at its north end feeds directly into) the city's main red light district. Second, the closer you move toward the US-Mexican border the more down-market the city's thriving sex industry becomes. Meanwhile, if you turn eastward at the bottom of Avenida Revolucion, and follow the fence that runs from the ocean, and move inland along the border, and depending on the time of day eventually make it through the traffic jam that regularly snakes back from the border crossing at San Ysidro/San Diego, into downtown Tijuana, the air quickly becomes more and more polluted. Every breath you take confirms that the greater Tijuana area is now the single most industrialized area of North America, accounting for about 25 percent of industrial output for Canada, the United States, and Mexico, combined. The border here is only really a border in one direction. If you enter Mexico on foot, it is unlikely that anyone will ever check your passport or identity papers. However, the process of crossing to the United States (el otro lado as the Mexicans call it) requires that you possess a passport (if you are from Canada or the United States: Americans have until the end of 2009 for this to become mandatory). If you come from Mexico or somewhere else you will require an entry visa of some sort ahead of time as well as your passport. Despite the formal border, however, Tijuana is arguably a key nexus of the phenomenon of MexAmerica and a central node of the new regionalism and regionalization that has, in some respects made the border between two sovereign nation-states increasingly antiquated if not ridiculous. If there is one point on which scholars who study the "new regionalism" agree it is that one of its main characteristics is the participation of a range of actors other than the nation-state in the regionalization processes that are currently taking shape across the globe. In this context, we identify regionalization, following Frederick Soderbaum, as "the process of regional interaction creating a regional space," that needs to be recognized as a political project that is not necessarily state-led. (1) Thus, we can distinguish between state-centered regionalisms and non-state-led processes of regionalization that actors other than the governments of nation-states are bringing about, either consciously or unconsciously. Just as the new regionalism embraces a variety of actors, it is also possible for a distinct geographic region (such as the United States-Mexico border zone) to include different regionalization processes that complement and collide with each other. These processes, which can be formal or informal in character, generate and follow dynamics of their own and create new modes of social, political, and economic interaction. The US-Mexican border region, which has been increasingly characterized as MexAmerica, provides a particularly marked example of the rapid and dynamic character of regionalization. …

This paper focuses on the theory and practice of nation-building. This is done primarily in an effort to explicate how area studies (AS), development studies (DS), and international studies (IS) have been, and continue to be, embedded in international security and economic/development policy processes and questions of national sovereignty, international relations, and global governance. The central argument is that at this world-historical juncture the nation-state system (and the pursuit of modernity via the nation-state) is one of the key obstacles to the achievement of a genuinely emancipatory modernity in an era of global oligopolistic capitalism centered on US hegemony. The analysis followed here challenges the way in which the nation-state, and the nation-state system, remain central to and continue to be routinized and naturalized by the dominant discourses within AS, DS, and IS. Furthermore, with the end of the Cold War, the boundaries between AS, DS, and IS, and their relationship to int...

This article is an effort to advance the political and intellectual debate on the theory and practice of nation building in an era of collapsing states. I assume at the outset that we are in the midst of a crisis of the nation-state system as a whole and, thus of the vast majority of its constituent polities. This is not a problem that can be addressed by technocratic prescriptions for the creation or stabilisation of particular collapsing or failing nation-states or the rehabilitation of the nation-state system as a whole. In this context the debate about nation building needs to be carried well beyond its current terms of reference. Only by dramatically deepening and broadening the current level of both commitment and understanding of what is at stake can we begin to come to grips with the fate of nations, the collapse of states and the future of the world.

This concluding article returns to some of the key themes of this volume in relation to insurgency, counter-insurgency and collapsing states. In particular it attempts to characterise the relationship between the Long War and the Cold War, in relation to the transformation of the nation-state system. More broadly it emphasises that the Cold War was an often misdirected, militarised struggle between ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism and ‘genuinely existing’ state socialism (the First World and the Second World) against each other and for influence and power in the erstwhile Third World. The Long War, meanwhile, reflects both the triumph of ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism as the dominant form of secular modernity over an equally, if not more virulently secular ‘genuinely existing’ state-socialism, and the emergence of an anti-secular neo-traditionalism (often, but not exclusively, Islamic) at both the nation-state and the transnational level. At the same time the binary that drove the...

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10,1080/01436590601153572 This introductory article provides the context for the contemporary debate about insurgency, counterinsurgency and collapsing states taking place against the backdrop of what originated as the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) and is now increasingly being characterised as ‘the Long War’. The Long War and the GWOT are often represented as a ‘new’ era in warfare and US geopolitics, despite the fact that, rhetorically, George W Bush and other administration officials have on occasion invoked the Second World War as analogous to the Long War. This article argues that the Long War is new in important respects, but it also bears many similarities to the Cold War. A key similarity between the Cold War and the Long War is the way in which insurgency and counterinsurgency are seen primarily in the context of inter- state rivalry in which the critical local or regional dynamics of revolution and counter-revolution are neglected. In this context US policy makers and their allies have again erroneously applied a ‘grand strategy’ that suits the imperatives of conventional military and geopolitical thinking rather than engaging with what is a much more variegated array of problems facing the changing global order. The Long War is ostensibly a war against various non- state movements, networks and actors, and is even represented as such by the Pentagon and the White House. However, the overall approach to the Long War has continued to fall back on the conventional ‘American Way of War’ that produces more problems than it solves.

The conclusion to this special issue reiterates some of the wider themes sketched out at the beginning and in the various contributions. At the same time it also foreshadows ways to move beyond nat...

This introductory article emphasises the need to put the contemporary nation-building (state-building) effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in historical perspective. With the resurgence of a powerful international discourse on nation-building that draws very selectively on the ostensible lessons of earlier nation-building successes and failures since 1945 (in fact the term nation-building is increasingly being substituted for the less problematic concept of state-building), it is more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in the context of decolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, the geopolitics of the rise and fall of the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economy between the 1950s and the 1990s. In contrast to a growing number of quantitative and technocratic studies of nation-building and political instability, the article emphasises the profound need for broad qualitative analysis that historicises and de-routinis...

Despite its importance and timeliness Peter Gowan's article “Triumphing toward International Disaster” falls short insofar as it fails to locate “American Grand Strategy” in the context of the global social relations of the capitalist order; particularly problematic is the way that he takes for granted the constitution of “global politics” as a system of nation-states. In our response we try to draw out some of the inconsistencies in Gowan's analysis by engaging the state-centeredness of his argument and discussing some of the implications of this for critical engagement with the changing world order and the current global crisis.

Hard interests, soft illusions: Southeast Asia and American power By NATASHA HAMILTON-HART Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. Pp. 243. Appendix, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000386 Natasha Hamilton-Hart explores the relationship between 'interests' and 'illusions' in shaping the foreign policies (towards the United States) of the governments of Southeast Asia. In a book that is both concise and thorough, she focuses on the period from the Cold War to the present and includes Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in her analysis. She emphasises that in all of these cases 'beliefs about American power' flow from specific 'illusions' and 'interests' that are not necessarily explained by what she describes as 'common understandings of the sources of foreign policy'. In the case of 'interests' that shape different approaches to the United States on the part of politically divergent governments in the region, she emphasises the interests of particular regimes, an established ruling elite or the governing political party of the nation-states concerned. More specifically, she draws attention to the 'interests' of political leaders 'in securing power' and 'rewarding supporters'. She also draws attention to the 'career interests' of those who are involved in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy towards the United States and the fact that professional or personal considerations may become tied up in various ways with the conduct of diplomacy. Hamilton Hart emphasises that, despite their differences, the region's 'non-communist political elites' have by and large regarded America 'as a benign power over the last sixty years' (pp. 9-10). However, if there is a continued relative decline in the 'economic capacity' of the United States (a trend that has been at the centre of the Great Recession that began in December 2007 and may or may not have ended, depending on your point of view) its image as a 'benign hegemon' could 'fade' (p. 191). But, for the moment, despite its changing role since the end of the Cold War until the bombings of September 11 and since, Hamilton-Hart emphasises that there remains a strongly grounded and generally positive view of American power that informs the thinking and actions of the foreign policy elites in Southeast Asia. Following a short Introduction, which maps out her overall approach, the second chapter focuses on how the various 'beliefs' of the political actors and diplomats concerned have interacted with the 'hard interests' and 'soft illusions' to which she refers in the book's title. Chapter 3 examines in more detail the political economy of 'interests', while chapter 4 examines the question of beliefs (assumptions) that feed into the 'soft illusions' via an examination of the writing and rewriting of the various national histories in Southeast Asia and of the history of the United States in the region. She makes clear that in all cases there is a mainstream and widely accepted version of history, which has been debated to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the nation-state concerned. At the same, these 'mainstream national histories' remain selective and uncritical: they all involve a 'sanitisation of history' producing 'one-sided and confident narratives' that celebrate the overall historical trajectory of particular polities in Southeast Asia in a fashion that is to a lesser or greater degree inclusive depending on the contemporary character of the regime concerned. In this regard, as with 'interests', the foreign policy elites in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia articulate a less overtly contested version of their histories, while Thailand and the Philippines have been characterised by greater debate since the end of the Cold War (if not well before). Not surprisingly, the foreign-policymakers and the political elite in Vietnam hold to a celebratory account of the country's long struggle from nationalist-communist insurgency to national unification and Communist Party rule. …

The idea of the Third World, which is usually traced to the late 1940s or early 1950s, was increasingly used to try and generate unity and support among an emergent group of nation-states whose governments were reluctant to take sides in the Cold War. These leaders and governments sought to displace the ‘East–West’ conflict with the ‘North–South’ conflict. The rise of Third Worldism in the 1950s and 1960s was closely connected to a range of national liberation projects and specific forms of regionalism in the erstwhile colonies of Asia and Africa, as well as the former mandates and new nation-states of the Middle East, and the ‘older’ nation-states of Latin America. Exponents of Third Worldism in this period linked it to national liberation and various forms of Pan-Asianism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Americanism. The weakening or demise of the first generation of Third Worldist regimes in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with or was followed by the emergence of a second generation of Third Worldist...

The US plays a pivotal role in the contemporary international system and is able to shape that system to reflect its own interests. At a time when the contemporary international order is in a period of flux, and when the position of the US itself is subject to a range of internal pressures and external challenges, it is useful to try and gauge both the character of, and limits to, US hegemony. We shall examine the dynamics of US power in the context of East Asia, the region most likely to generate a challenge to US hegemony in the coming century. The first part of the paper considers the concept of hegemony. Following this, we place America's relationship with East Asia in historical context, before considering its current relationships with China, Japan and the region as a whole. The central argument we advance is that the character of US hegemony is changing and this is closely connected to the wider transformation of the nation-state system.

In early December 1992, in a brief address to the Annual Conference on Trade, Investment and Development in the Caribbean Basin held in Miami, U.S. President-Elect Bill Clinton, proclaimed that ‘to...

With the end of the Cold War, economic policies (grounded in romantic conceptions of laissez-faire and validated by neoclassical economics) and political prescriptions (based on the idealisation of representative democracy and legitimated by liberal political science) have emerged as crucial elements in a powerful global discourse on development and modernity. This introductory article argues that a central weakness of the dominant development discourse that emerged after 1945 was the way in which (in the context of decolonisation and the consolidation of the nation-state system), the nation-state was enshrined as the key unit of analysis and praxis. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s the dominant development discourse was grounded in the assumption that nation-states were homogenous and natural units of a wider international politico-economic order and that state-mediated national development could, should and would lead to economic, and eventually even political, outcomes beneficial to, or at least...

Neil Harvey The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Karen L. O'Brien Sacrificing the Forest: Environmental and Social Struggles in Chiapas. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998. Neil Harvey's The Chiapas Rebellion is the most thorough English-language study of the rise of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci6n Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army-EZLN) to date. Based on research begun well before the launching of the rebellion in 1994, the book focuses on peasant activism and the changing contours of popular mobilization in Chiapas over the past three decades. In particular Harvey seeks to determine how indigenous peasants in southern Mexico have "contested the terms under which the political system has constituted them as subordinate." He argues that a type of "corporatist citizenship" (in which the Mexican state "sought to determine and regulate acceptable forms of political behavior") has been predominant throughout much of the twentieth century. This type of citizenship has been substantially eroded by, among other things, electoral reform since the 1980s and the shift to a national political discourse grounded in liberal constitutionalism. The Zapatistas not only embody a "clear break" with the Mexican state's earlier notion of corporatist citizenship but also represent a critique of the "narrow versions of democratic citizenship" that gained purchase in the 1980s, opening up "the possibility for a more radical understanding of citizenship and democracy" (1998: 11-12). Harvey emphasizes that the Zapatista struggle is a complex amalgam of "indigenous, democratic, agrarian, and gender struggles" and "a novel attempt to articulate a new radical democratic imaginary" (1998: 200, 210). Having outlined the historical background, Harvey quickly turns to the campesino organizing that accelerated dramatically in the 1970s. He draws attention to the organizational and ideological mix provided by the involvement of a range of activists including liberation theologians and Mexican Maoists, promoting various forms of ostensibly legal political struggle. Although these developments paved the way for the emergence of the Zapatistas, Harvey emphasizes that the immediate origins of the EZLN are to be found in the arrival in Chiapas in late 1983 of a new group of activists that advocated armed struggle. By the time these new activists (among them the future Subcomandante Marcos) appeared on the scene, a significant number of the communities in the Lacand6n jungle and elsewhere were "tired of living in the same poverty

(1999). Feature review Up from neoliberalism: Free-market mythologies and the coming crisis of global capitalism. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 453-463.

The so-called collapse of communism has reinforced powerful North American- and Western-European-centred visions which continue to see 'Western' models of development as the key to modernization world-wide. The end of the Cold War has also drawn renewed attention to the rise of an increasingly dynamic capitalist East Asia, which has brought with it triumphant East Asian-centred discourses which celebrate East Asianstyle development models distinct from and superior to 'Western' models of development. At the same time, challenges to the dominant discourses and the emergent post-Cold War capitalist order continue to emerge from numerous angles and at multiple sites. Two recent books represent important efforts at critically examining global inequality and articulating alternative perspectives to the dominant international narratives on development and social change. In After the Revolution , Arif Dirlik attempts to recast and recuperate Marxism so that it can play a role in progressive politics at the end o...

The end of the Cold War has contributed to the dramatic globalisation of market economics and electoral democracy. But the significance of global capitalism and the substance of the democratic transitions of the past few years are subjects of considerable debate. Some observers continue to emphasise that the end of the Cold War represents the triumph of liberalism and it is only a matter of time before the former Soviet Bloc along with the rest of the world (led by the 'newly industrialised countries' (NICS) of East Asia) arrives at the capitalist prosperity and democratic stability currently seen to prevail in North America, Western Europe and Japan.' Certainly the end of 'state socialism' in Eastern Europe and the former USSR has made an important contribution in symbolic and substantive terms to the demise of socialist development models generally and 'state socialism' in the 'Third World' more particularly.2 Nevertheless, although the so-called Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) are at the centre of a major economic boom which is lifting them out of their 'Third World' status and shifting the axis of global political economy to the Pacific Rim, the 'neoliberal' governments of the rest of Asia, the former Soviet Bloc, Latin America, Africa and Oceania are not necessarily guiding their people to consumer capitalism and parliamentary democracy. Democratic transitions, where they have taken place at all, have often remained superficial, while neoliberal economic policies have stimulated economic growth without necessarily improving the quality of life for the majority of the population. The acceleration of economic and political globalisation which attended the end of the Cold War has contributed more to the resurgence of ethnic and national conflicts than it has to international peace and stability.3 The social formations which are emerging out of the ferment of Soviet collapse are not characterised by democratic order and dynamic economic 'development', but by unstable parliamentary-authoritarian governments, considerable dependence on the IMF and World Bank and transnational capital, and growing 'ideological' and even 'cultural' subordination to the United States and Western Europe. While East Asia may be leaving the 'Third World' much of the former Soviet Bloc can be said to have (re)joined it.4 At the same time, the rise of East Asia, the demise of the 'Second World' and the onset of a new era of global capitalism, throws the problems associated with the continued use of the term 'Third World' into sharp relief. The term (along

Contrary to the view of some observers who insist that the Cold War was of limited or no relevance to the transition from colonies to nation-states after 1945 we argue that the geopolitics of the Cold War played a crucial role in shaping the character and direction of the trajectories of nation-states in Asia, if not the erstwhile Third World as a whole. More particularly, the geopolitics of the Cold War provided the crucial backdrop for the rise and fall of developmental nationalism, while the post-Cold War era has set the scene for an array of cultural nationalisms. These issues are explored with a particular focus on India. The case of India makes clear that it is impossible to separate the emergence of new nation-states and their success or failure after 1945 from the geopolitics of the Cold War. It will also make clear that the shifting geopolitics of the end of the Cold War reinforced the demise of developmental nationalism. Since the late 1980s, the problems facing the nation-states of the former Third World, are being played out in a geo-political context, which includes an important shift from developmental nationalisms to cultural nationalisms, while the nation-state system itself is sliding deeper into crisis against the backdrop of the global framework of 'genuinely existing' liberal capitalism and the changing geopolitics of the early twenty-first century. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Modernisation theory and political development theory played a key role in the formalisation of the study of Southeast Asia, while the dramatic transitions from colonies to nation-states in the region and the deepening war in Vietnam were also pivotal to the rise and transformation of modernisation theory. This article provides a critical historical overview of the rise and elaboration of theories of political development and nation-building between 1945 and 1975.