The Future of State-Building: Beyond the Crisis of Liberal Peacebuilding.

It has recently become commonplace to argue that the liberal peacebuilding paradigm is in crisis. The ideological decline of the liberal peace thesis has prompted some observers to argue that we are perhaps also witnessing a decline in the willingness of the world?s major governments and international organisations to intervene beyond borders in crisis situations. In this paper it is argued that such arguments are misconceived because they locate contemporary state-building in the narrow context of developments within the peacekeeping/peacebuilding sphere and the normative and policy debates related to these. In actual fact, the particular nature of contemporary state-building interventions is only explicable when viewed against the backdrop of broader historical processes involving shifts in the structure of the global political economy, state transformation and the associated development of new modes of transnational governance and regulation. The future of state-building is therefore the future of statehood. The idea of the state as a territorially bound „power container? is even more of a myth today than it has ever been, yet the state continues to be seen as the most important site for the regulation of liberal markets and, more importantly, for the containment of conflict and various security risks. It is thus likely that though its particular content will conceivably change the international/transnational regulation of the domestic governance of states will persist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]