State-Building, Democratization and Politics as Technology
28 Pages Posted: 5 Jun 2010
Date Written: December 2008
Abstract
The paper attempts to develop a critical history of the contemporary uses of state-building and “democracy-building” as frameworks governing increasingly intensive interventions in the politics of post colonial societies (so called "post conflict peace-building"). It develops this critical history in part by situating the emergence of these concepts and programs within the history of American political science, and within geopolitical history of the last 20 years. The paper also points to an analogy between imperial liberal reform and contemporary notions of state-building, which have in common a notion of “politics as technology”
Keywords: state-building, democratization, international law, politics as technology
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