Description
Book SynopsisFrancis Fukuyama famously predicted "the end of history" with the ascendancy of liberal democracy and global capitalism. The topic of his latest book is, therefore, surprising: the building of new nation-states.
Trade ReviewFukuyama asserts that the lack of 'organizational tradition' in 'failed or weak' nations such as Afghanistan and Haiti represents the greatest threat to an orderly world. He argues that the United States, and the West in general, after rightly intervening in such states either militarily or economically (most often through the IMF or World Bank), have failed to transfer institutional and public- and private-sector know-how to needy countries.... Since he sees the 'international community' represented by the United Nations as a myth because it lacks a military, the mantle of leadership must be worn by the U.S., at great risk to itself.... Fukuyama's ideas will no doubt be much discussed.
* Publishers Weekly *
Fukuyama is a wonderful synthesizer of grand subjects, an adventurer who doesn't mind summing up the history of development theory in one chapter and the history of organizational theory in the next. He pulls this off with minimal resort to jargon, and he pulls the reader along with him.
* Washington Post Book World *
Fukuyama persuasively argues that the great problems of our day—'from poverty to AIDS to drugs to terrorism'—result not from excesses of the state but from its persistent weakness or utter failure in many countries....' State collapse or weakness had already created major humanitarian and human rights disasters during the 1990s in Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor.' Americans once could believe that such disasters would affect us only to the degree that we chose to help out by sending cash or peacekeepers. But 9/11, of course, showed that even a rich and powerful country remains vulnerable to catastrophes brewed in distant, troubled lands.
* Baltimore Sun *
This is a very useful, intelligent, and short book by Francis Fukuyama, a leading political thinker. It examines a central issue in the age of terrorism: the perils (and sometimes necessities) of 'state-building' in weakened failed states. One hopes it will become a must-read for State Department policymakers.
* National Review *
Table of Contents1. The Missing Dimensions of Stateness
The Contested Role of the State
Scope versus Strength
Scope, Strength, and Economic Development
The New Conventional Wisdom
The Supply of Institutions
The Demand for Institutions
Making Things Worse2. Weak States and the Black Hole of Public Administration
Institutional Economics and the Theory of Organizations
The Ambiguity of Goals
Principals, Agents, and Incentives
Decentralization and Discretion
Losing, and Reinventing, the Wheel
Capacity-Building under Conditions of Organizational Ambiguity: Policy Implications3. Weak States and International Legitimacy
The New Empire
The Erosion of Sovereignty
Nation-Building
Democratic Legitimacy at an International Level
Beyond the Nation-State4. Smaller but StrongerBibliography
Index
