Rethinking Weberian Approaches to Statebuilding

Nicolas Lemay-Hébert1

Abstract: Political sociology is key to understanding current debates on statebuilding. One’s

conception of what to rebuild – the state – will necessarily impact the actual process of
statebuilding, whether consciously or unconsciously. Drawing upon the vast contemporary
literature on state collapse and statebuilding that has emerged since Helman and Ratner’s
pioneer article in 1992-1993, this chapter analyses the rise of the ‘institutional approach’ to
statebuilding, strongly influenced by the Weberian sociology of the state and legitimacy, and
focusing on the capabilities of the state institutions to secure its grip on the society. Three
practical implications of the institutional approach will be considered in this chapter: 1) the claim
of forecasting state collapse and the underlying equation between fragile states and
‘underdevelopment’; 2) the hermetic distinction between state and society, which allows the
differentiation between statebuilding activities and ‘nation-building’ ones; and 3) the ‘more is
better’ approach that comes as a natural policy prescription – legitimizing intrusive interventions
on the ground that they are more efficient for institutional reconstruction. Finally, this chapter
will highlight an alternative approach to the state and statebuilding, dubbed here the ‘legitimacy
approach’, more concerned with socio-political cohesion of the state than institutional
reconstruction per se.

Introduction

Every scholarly or policy-oriented contribution on statebuilding adopts, whether consciously or

unconsciously, a definition of what it intends to reconstruct – that is a definition of the state. In
that regard, one striking aspect of current statebuilding debates is how little debate there is
about what type of state major actors want to promote (Marquette and Beswick 2011: 1706;
Marquette and Scott: 9). As this chapter claims, the Weberian approach to statehood is the
starting point for a number of analyses, having attained the status of orthodoxy in the

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mainstream literature. Following this ‘institutional approach’, the state is equated with its
institutions, state collapse is understood in terms of the collapse of state institutions, and
statebuilding implies their reconstruction. While being portrayed implicitly as consensual and a-
political, the institutional approach to statebuilding carries specific consequences for scholarly
and policy debates. First, this chapter looks at the Weberian influence on statehood and
legitimacy, and the rise of the ‘institutional approach’ to statebuilding based on the Weberian
approach. Three implications of the institutional approach are debated. First, by equating the
strength of state with its institutional reach, the institutional approach amounts to equating
state fragility with ‘underdevelopment’. Second, the Weberian sociological approach of state
autonomy leads researchers to conveniently distinguish statebuilding activities – understood in
a-political and technical terms – from ‘nation-building’ activities – linked to socio-political
cohesion. This leads to the final implication of the institutional approach, related this time to
policy prescriptions that stem from this discussion: if statebuilding is the reconstruction of state
institutions, and if it is possible to isolate statebuilding from nation-building, then ‘more is
better’ in terms of institutional reconstruction. The ‘more is better’ approach has already
provided the normative foundations for international administration projects in Kosovo, Timor-
Leste and Iraq more recently (Lemay-Hébert 2011b). However, there are alternatives to this
specific reading of Weberian lecture of statehood and statebuilding. In its last section, this
chapter suggests a ‘legitimacy’ approach, more concerned with socio-political cohesion and the
legitimacy central authorities can generate, and built around Emile Durkheim’s sociology.

Weber, statehood, and statebuilding: the rise of the ‘institutional’ approach

Weber famously defines the state ‘as a human community that successfully claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber 1948: 78). For
Weber, the formation of modern Western states relied on the constant progression of their
bureaucratic foundations over time. Hence, Weber saw administration and the provision of
security as benchmarks according to which each state can be judged (Badie and Birnbaum
1983). Besides security, which is certainly the central criterion of state strength, other criteria
are also taken into account by various authors, all related to the capabilities of the state to

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secure its grip on the society. From this perspective, a weak state is a political entity that lacks
the institutional capacity to implement and enforce policies; statebuilding is the creation of new
government institutions and the strengthening of existing ones. Scholars adopting this
‘institutional’ approach tend to focus on the administrative capability of the state and the ability
of the state apparatus to affirm its authority over the society.

The term ‘failed state’2 came to prominence in the contemporary academic and policy discourse
with the publication of Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner’s article, defining ‘failed state’ as ‘a
situation where governmental structures are overwhelmed by circumstances’ (1992-1993: 5).
Helman and Ratner’s article constituted one of the first attempts to cope with the phenomenon
in a post-cold war world, an effort that coincided with the actual collapse of Somalia and the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Helman and Ratner’s article is also one of the first major
post-cold war works exemplifying the institutional approach, as their definition emphatically
revolves around governmental institutions. Not only was Helman and Ratner’s work pioneering,
it is still considered by many as authoritative (for example, Wilde 2002-2003: 425).
Unfortunately, Helman and Ratner do not go much deeper in their analysis of the collapsed
state phenomenon and they do not provide any subsequent clarification, apart from a
distinction between the degrees of collapse (Helman and Ratner 1992-1993: 5). Helman and
Ratner’s institutional focus has been developed by subsequent scholars who in the purest
functionalist tradition, assert that ‘nation-states exist to provide a decentralized method of
delivering political (public) goods to persons living within designated parameters’. For example,
for influential US policy academic Robert Rotberg: ‘it is according to their performances—
according to the levels of their effective delivery of the most crucial political goods—that strong
states may be distinguished from weak ones, and weak states from failed or collapsed’ (Rotberg
2004: 2). Here, public goods encompass a list of state institutions and functions, including the
supply of security, a transparent and equitable political process, medical and health care,
schools and education, railways, harbours, and even a beneficent fiscal and institutional
context, within which citizens can pursue personal entrepreneurial goals, thus framing his
approach explicitly within the liberal peace paradigm (Chandler 2004 and 2010; Mac Ginty and
Richmond 2009; Paris 1997). The institutional approach has had a profound impact on scholarly

3
debates regarding state collapse and statebuilding. Interestingly enough, the institutional
approach is so pervasive that even some authors who claim not to take a stance end up
adopting it. For example, in Making States Work, Sebastian von Einsiedel asserts that:

…for present purposes, no attempt will be made at a final definition of the term ‘failed
state’. Much ink has been spilled on developing typologies of the forms of state failure,
using either the degree of failure or its cause as a criterion. Instead, this volume treats
state failure as a continuum of circumstances that afflict states with weak institutions’.
(italics added, von Einsiedel 2005: 16)

As one would expect, the Weberian approach to statehood and statebuilding has also found a
large echo in the policy literature. Boutros Boutros-Ghali defines state collapse as ‘the collapse
of state institutions’ (United Nations 1995: 9), whereas the United Kingdom’s Department for
International Development (DFID) defines ‘fragile states’ as countries where ‘governments
cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people’ (DFID 2005). Similarly, the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) indicates that: ‘states are
fragile when state structures lack political will and/or capacity to provide the basic functions
needed for poverty reduction, development and to safeguard the security and human rights of
their populations’ (italics added, OECD 2007: para. 3). These assumptions constitute the
framework within which to understand the incorporation of legitimacy aspects, as constitutive
of state strength, in the analysis provided by recent OECD reports (OECD 2008).

Weber and legitimacy: a one-way process of legitimizing authority

If the (neo)Weberian approach to statehood has profoundly influenced the statebuilding

literature, the same could be said of the Weberian legacy regarding legitimacy (Lemay-Hébert
2013). If Weber is rightly regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in social science, his
contribution regarding the concept of legitimacy has been deemed highly controversial. For
David Beetham, for example, ‘on the subject of legitimacy, his influence has been an almost
unqualified disaster’ (1991: 8). Weber defines legitimacy as ‘the prestige of being considered

4
exemplary or binding’ (Weber 1962: 72). Hence, for Weber, the claim of legitimacy is a bid for a
justification of support and its success consists not in fulfilling normative conditions but rather
in being believed. Weber conceives legitimacy as a necessary condition and a means for a
government to exercise authority over society. This could be done either by charismatic,
traditional or rational-legal principles (to take up the three well-known ideal types, presented in
Weber 1947: 130). In this sense, legitimacy principles are in fact principles of legitimization of
the central authority. However, according to Beetham and others, the main mistake is not
Weber’s but that of those social scientists - the neo-Weberians - who have reduced the
explanation of beliefs to the processes and agencies of their dissemination and internalization
(1991: 10; Hobson and Seabrooke 2001).

Nevertheless, Weber’s definition of legitimacy has not been exempt from criticisms in political
sociology. It led Hanna Pitkin to argue that it was: ‘essentially equivalent to defining “legitimate”
as “the condition of being considered legitimate”, and the corresponding “normative” definition
comes out as “deserving to be considered legitimate” (1972: 281). It is also on these grounds
that Peter Blau states that Weber ‘takes the existence of legitimate authority for granted and
never systematically examines the structural conditions under which it emerges out of other
forms of power’, while Carl Friedrich posits that Weber’s analysis ‘assumes that any system of
government is necessarily legitimate’ (Blau 1970: 149; Friedrich 1963: 186). Friedrich argues
that Weber actually confuses the concepts of legitimacy and authority (1963: 216-246), a
distinction made by Jürgen Habermas in his debate with Niklas Luhmann for instance (Habermas
and Luhmann 1973: 243).

Weber’s conception of legitimacy has been quite influential, leading many social scientists in the
twentieth century to follow the Weberian definition of legitimacy as belief in legitimacy. For
instance, Seymour Lipset defines the legitimacy of a political system as its capacity ‘to engender
and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for
the society’ (1959: 86), while Richard Merelman considers legitimacy as: ‘a quality attributed to
a regime by a population. That quality is the outcome of the government’s capacity to engender
legitimacy.’ (1966: 548) Charles Tilly is also resolutely neo-Weberian when he states that
‘legitimacy depends rather little on abstract principle or assent of the governed. (…) Legitimacy

5
is the probability that other authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a given authority.’
(1985: 171) Accordingly, scholars following the institutional approach to statebuilding, under
the influence of Weber’s pioneering work, tend to treat legitimacy either as a mere
consequence of functioning institutions or as a process of legitimization. This naturally stems
from the Weberian approach to legitimacy. As Robert Grafstein states: ‘Weber virtually
identifies legitimacy with stable and effective political power, reducing it to a routine
submission to authority.’ (Grafstein 1981: 456)

This approach to legitimacy has had a remarkably enduring impact on the statebuilding
literature. Rotberg’s work is certainly a good example of the tendency to reduce legitimacy to a
consequence of ‘stable and effective political power’. Mentioning legitimacy only as
consequence of good delivery of public goods, he argues that public goods ‘give content to the
social contract between ruler and ruled’ (Rotberg 2004: 2-3). The author notes that ‘there is no
failed state without disharmonies between communities’, but considers these ‘disharmonies’ as
consequences of the failure of state institutions (Rotberg 2003: 4). Hence, legitimacy is treated
as a natural by-product of successful state institutions. Institutional failure thereby produces a
loss of legitimacy: ‘a nation-state also fails when it loses legitimacy, that is, when its nominal
borders become irrelevant and autonomous control passes to groups within the national
territory of the state, or sometimes even across its international borders’ (Rotberg 2003: 9). The
Weberian conception of the state could not be more crudely emphasized than in this framing.

Institutionalizing poverty, forecasting state failure

Conceiving state collapse as a breakdown of government institutions, as institutionalists
contend, allows one to identify failed or failing states according to institutional strength. It
therefore leads Francis Fukuyama to suggest a matrix that helps differentiate the degrees of
stateness in a variety of countries around the world (2004: 7), and Robert Rotberg to propose a
performance indicator comprising the functions that states perform (2004: 2). The Political
Instability Task Force, formerly the State Failure Task Force, looks at state structures and claims
to forecast state failure with a degree of exactitude of 80 per cent (Goldstone et al 2010). Other

6
indexes provide different lists of failing states, according to their own criteria for measurement
of state performance (Fund for Peace 2011; Rice and Patrick 2008; World Bank 2006).

It is also no coincidence that some use a diagnostic medical analogy to exemplify how we should
be able to forecast state failure. For instance, after defining state failure in institutional terms -
inability to control its territory and guarantee the security of its citizens, incapacity to enforce
the rule of law and deliver public goods to its population – the former UK Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw stated in a speech that ‘in medicine, doctors look at a wide range of indicators to spot
patients who are at high risk of certain medical conditions – high cholesterol, bad diet, heavy
smoking for example (...) this approach does enable the medical profession to narrow down the
field and focus their effort accordingly. We should do the same with countries’ (Straw 2002).
Thus, it is a positivist approach that mixes a certain fascination for hard sciences with
governmentality – some would see parallels here with the Foucauldian analysis of biopolitical
social regulation (Foucault 2008; Chandler 2010). Others scholars have already unveiled the
concealed assumptions that underlie the medical analogy and the failed state discourse,
especially from a gender perspective (Manjikian 2008).

What appears crucial here is that in the forecasting process, ‘developed countries’ of the West
set the standard against which other states are measured. It reifies the ‘Western state’, failing
to see divergences between different OECD state models, while ignoring other means of
provision of public goods, such as those provided by informal or traditional systems. In this
regard, one can draw parallels with Edward Said’s study of Orientalism, showing how the
specific understanding of ‘failed states’ can be illuminating insofar as our understandings of
those who use it are concerned (Wilde 2002-2003: 428). ‘Failed states’ are thus understood as
falling short of specific standards of social, political and economic performance. In this context,
the expressions ‘failed’ or ‘failing state’ seem to be a convenient neologism describing nothing
more than a state with low-standards of living, a country that has not attained the same level of
development – measured as the public goods provision of state institutions – as the ‘developed
world’.

Autonomizing the state from society and its impacts on statebuilding

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A second implication of the institutional approach for statebuilding practices is related to the
separation of the state from societal forces, known as the ‘state autonomy’ theory. Since in this
conception the ‘state’ is synonymous with its institutions, the statebuilding process is defined as
strengthening process of government institutions. This division between state structures and
societal forces leads to a distinction between state- and nation-building, on the premise that it
is possible to conduct statebuilding operations from the outside without entering into the
contested sphere of nation-building (Lemay-Hébert 2009). In other words, that it is possible to
target the institutions of a given state, to reconstruct the state capabilities, without engaging in
the realm of socio-political cohesion of ‘society’ in general.

Many prominent authors have promoted the ‘state autonomy’ theory on various levels (Stepan
1978; Migdal 1988). For Joel Migdal, ‘the progress of statebuilding can be measured by the
degree of development of certain instrumentalities whose purpose is to make the action of the
state effective: bureaucracy, courts, military’ (Migdal 1988: 35). State capabilities include the
capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate
or use resources in determined ways. Non-Western states are weak in relation to the strong
societies they try to control.3 Similarly, for Evenly Davidheiser, the relative strength and
autonomy of the state can be evaluated by looking at how the state influences and penetrates
society and an evaluation of the forces countering autonomy through the influence and
penetration of the state by society (1992: 463).

This conception of the ‘autonomous state’ has long been equated with Weber’s work, as
publicized by such neo-Weberians as Theda Skocpol, Randall Collins, Michael Mann or Charles
Tilly (Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1990; Collins 1986; Mann 1988), and by historical realists in the IR
literature (Morgenthau 1964). However, two caveats have to be kept in mind here. First, certain
scholars argue that the ‘autonomous state’ theory is an inaccurate interpretation of Weber’s
work. For example, John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke have emphasized that one of the
reasons why this ‘conception is equated with Weber is because it is deemed to be one of the
leitmotifs of neo-Weberian scholarship’ (Hobson and Seabrooke 2001: 256-257). Other authors
have rightly asserted that we should understand Weber’s political theory in conjunction with his
other sociological works (Beetham 1985: 151; Hobson 1998: 288; Palumbo and Scott 2008: 387;

8
Weber 1958). The second caveat stems from the necessity to understand the Weberian
conception of the state in conjunction with the historical context in which Weber published his
major works, especially his relation with the Marxist literature on the state. Weber’s work is
explicitly anti-Marxist on just this issue of the autonomy of the state, rejecting Marx’s
determinism in that regard (Nash 2000: 10; Palumbo and Scott 2008).

This distinction between the state, on the one hand, and the society on the other,
fundamentally impacts upon the conception and application of appropriate statebuilding
measures, implying that it is possible to promote statebuilding without engaging in contested
nation-building activities. It implies that it is possible to engage in technical statebuilding
activities without getting involved in ‘politics’. At the heart of this framework is the
understanding of the state adopted. As Anthony Giddens observes: ‘the “state” sometimes
means an apparatus of government or power, sometimes the overall social system subject to
that government or power.’ (1985: 17) Adopting a restrictive definition of the state - as state
apparatus - will lead scholars to perceive statebuilding as a scientific, technical and
administrative process. It is not surprising then that the statebuilding literature strikingly
neglects the question of politics; what is, in fact, a highly political process becomes depoliticised
through a focus on state capacity-building, where concerns of stability and regulation are
discussed in a narrow technical and functionalist framework (Chandler 2006: 5-6).

More is better? Laying the theoretical foundations for international statebuilding

A third implication of the institutional approach’s extensive influence over the statebuilding
literature is the implicit prescription that ‘more is better’ in terms of statebuilding, where ‘the
more intrusive the intervention is, the more successful the outcome would be’ (Zuercher 2006:
2; Lemay-Hébert 2011a). For Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, whose work has had a
influential impact on the statebuilding literature, ‘the deeper the hostility, the more the
destruction of local capacities, the more one needs international assistance to succeed in
establishing a stable peace’ (2006: 4). Another example of this approach is the widely-quoted
RAND study on US-led statebuilding operations and their conclusion that a high level of
economic assistance and high numbers of troops deployed for a long time were crucial for the

9
success of the operations in Japan and Germany and can explain why recent operations showed
little success (Dobbins et al 2003). While the authors recognize, in another report on UN
statebuilding, that the international organization has shown, mutatis mutandis, better results
with a ‘light-footprint’ approach, they assert that ‘the United States would be well advised to
leave the small footprint, low profile approach to the United Nations, and resume supersizing its
nation-building missions’ (Dobbins et al 2005: 245). This, perhaps counterintuitive, prescription
echoes Steven Ratner’s remarks that ‘interveners ought to err on the side of more rather than
less even though the empirical evidence to date does not obviously support a more is better
perspective’ (Krasner 2008: 23).

In this perspective, the term ‘collapsed state’ is not only a descriptive term but becomes ‘a
prescriptive term that is employed in connection with the contemplation and execution of
international involvement’ (Jackson 2004: 22). Hence, for Fukuyama, ‘the underlying problems
caused by failed states or weak governance could only be solved through long-term efforts by
outside powers to rebuild indigenous state institutions’ (2006: 2), while for Rotberg, ‘there is a
great need for conscientious, well-crafted nation building – for a systematic refurbishing of the
political, economic, and social fabric of countries that have crumbled’ (2004: 31). Emblematic of
the ‘more is better’ prescription, Helman and Ratner plead the case for a ‘more systematic and
intrusive approach’ to statebuilding (1992-1993: 7). For them, the usual methods of
strengthening governance in the developing world, such as providing aid and foreign support,
will meet with scant success in failing states and will prove wholly inadequate in those that have
collapsed. Thus, the conceptual basis for the international effort should lie in the idea of
‘conservatorship’. The parallel with medicine, described earlier, is once again salient here,
portraying the ‘failed state’ either as a homogenous entity affected by a serious illness or as a
helpless person who suffered a bad turn of fate: ‘forms of guardianship or trusteeship are a
common response to broken families, serious mental or physical illness, or economic
destitution. (...) It is time that the United Nations considers such a response to the plight of
failed states’ (Helman and Ratner 1992-1993: 12). Helman and Ratner’s plea for conservatorship
has directly influenced the statebuilding debate in the 1990s, legitimizing the concept of

10
international administration as the best solution to respond to ‘institutional collapse’ (Lemay-
Hébert 2011b).

The legitimacy approach: an alternative to the institutional approach

While accepting the institutional approach’s focus on the security apparatus and state
institutions, especially as a critical first step in statebuilding processes, the ‘legitimacy approach’
adds a layer of complexity in drawing attention to the state’s underlying legitimacy. Hence, the
strength of the state has to be defined in terms of ‘the capacity of state to command loyalty—
the right to rule’ (Holsti 1996: 82). One good example of this approach is Barry Buzan’s work on
the state, putting emphasis on the ‘idea of the state’, assuming integration between the
territorial, societal and political aspects of the state. For Buzan, the state exists primarily on the
socio-political rather than on the physical plane: ‘the state is more an idea held in common by a
group of people, than it is a physical organism’ (Buzan 1991: 63). In this approach, the state is
composed of three different elements, each crucial to understand the strength of states: the
physical base of the state (effective sovereignty, international consensus on territorial limits);
the institutional expression of the state (consensus on political ‘rules of the game’ but also
scope of state institutions); and the idea of the state (implicit social contract and ideological
consensus pertaining to a given society) (Buzan 1991: 64; Holsti 1996: 98). The first two
elements are subsumed within the institutional approach. But attention to the ‘idea of the
state’ is the unique element of the legitimacy approach, and one with far-reaching implications.
If a state cannot exist without a physical base, as the institutionalists stress, the reverse is also
true: ‘without a widespread and quite deeply rooted idea of the state among the population,
the state institutions themselves have difficulty functioning and surviving’ (Buzan 1991: 64).

In sociological terms, one could say that this approach is more influenced by a Durkheimian
conception of the state than a strictly Weberian one. For Durkheim, the state ‘is the very organ
of social thought’; it comprises ‘the sentiments, ideals, beliefs that the society has worked out
collectively and with time’ (Durkheim 1957: 79-80; Durkheim 1964: 79; Durkheim 1986: 54). In
Durkheimian terms, the collective conscience is distinct from individual consciences and,

11
although it is diffuse in every society, the collective conscience has specific characteristics which
make it a distinct reality: ‘it is, in effect, independent of the particular conditions in which
individuals are placed: they pass on and it remains’ (Durkheim 1964: 80). For him, the division of
labour and the development of organic solidarity paralleled the development of contract and
the state. However, and contrary to Weber’s conception of the state, Durkheim states that the
coercive powers of the state could vary independently of the level of social development
(Durkheim 1973). The political society is neither primarily determined by possession of a fixed
territorial area nor by density of population, but by the act of ‘coming together’ to use
Durkheim’s own words (1957: 45).

The purpose here is certainly not to portray Durkheim’s sociology of the state on an uncritical
light – it is well-known that Durkheim indulged in an organicist thinking prevalent in the
nineteenth century and his determinism in depicting an evolutionary conception of social
transformation has already been criticised many times – but rather to demonstrate the wealth
of sociological approaches existing on the state and to explore an alternative approach to the
institutional approach dominant in the current thinking on statebuilding. One of the main
differences between the two schools of thought identified in this chapter – the institutional and
legitimacy approaches – stems basically from the conceptualization of the state. As mentioned
above, the ‘state’ sometimes means an apparatus of government or power and sometimes the
overall social system subject to that government or power. This difference in definitions is at the
root of the distinction between the two approaches. In turn, this leads academics in both
approaches to adopt different conceptions of state collapse and reconstruction. Hence, one can
argue that insisting on the political concept of legitimacy allows us to concentrate our attention
on the state and society as distinct in terms of ‘actors’, though not necessarily hermetic
institutions and activities. As Alexander Wendt states, ‘it seems impossible to define the state
apart from “society”. States and societies seem to be conceptually interdependent in the same
way that masters and slaves are, or teachers and students; the nature of each is a function of its
relation to the other.’ (Wendt 1999: 199) In this regard, it appears crucial to understand state
and society in their mutually constitutive relationship, where legitimacy conditions state

12
strength and is, at the same time, an element of state strength. As Beetham argues, ‘a given
power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can
be justified in terms of their beliefs’ (1991: 11).

The legitimacy approach has a number of implications for how we should regard state collapse.
First of all, state collapse is not only driven by institutional collapse, but also by the collapse of
the legitimacy of the central authority. The collapse of legitimate governance – a process
parallel to but not a by-product of institutional collapse – opens the door to ‘political
entrepreneurs’, allowing them to mobilize the population on the basis of allegiances that
displace national ones (Badie 2000). Consequently, the strength of the state is defined as the
‘capacity to command loyalty’ (Holsti 1996: 82-83) in a political marketplace defined by political
bargaining for loyalty (de Wall 2009). In general, the legitimacy approach is more sociologically
or anthropologically-oriented, relativizing generalizing assumptions and emphasizing the
particularities of each state and its societal context. This approach has been summarized by
Edward Newman under the term ‘transformatory peacebuilding’ (2009: 47-48). The challenge of
building and consolidating state institutions aside, one the most important issues is for the
indigenous institutions to define, create, and solidify a viable collective identity in order to
provide the social bond necessary for them to be recognized as legitimate by the citizens and,
by extension, for the external actors to find efficient and unobtrusive ways to support this
process. Rejoining the Durkheimian sociological tradition, this approach puts the emphasis on
logics of social integration and solidarity and, a contrario, on logics of anomie,4 not only upon
the Weberian logics of state capacity; imposing a salutary contribution to debate in the field of
statebuilding.

Conclusion
The argument, then, is to show how academic and policy-making conceptions of the state
impact upon their understandings of state collapse or weakness, and therefore the policies and
practices of statebuilding. This contribution has highlighted how a specific reading of Max
Weber’s sociology has come to dominate the statebuilding literature under what has been
dubbed here the ‘institutional approach’. Defining the state by its physical and institutional

13
basis and its strength by its institutional grasp over the society, the institutional approach
equates state collapse with the collapse of state institutions, and statebuilding with institutional
reconstruction. This approach has very tangible repercussions on major statebuilding debates.
First, state institutions can be easily quantified, de facto opening the door to forecasting state
failure and consciously or unconsciously equating state failure with ‘underdevelopment’.
Second, following a very specific reading of Weber, state institutions are autonomized from
their societal moorings, allowing scholars to differentiate statebuilding from nation-building
activities. Thus, statebuilding comes to be defined as the technical and a-political reconstruction
of state institutions while nation-building is linked to the forging of a sense of common
nationhood. From this stems the third repercussion of the institutional approach to
statebuilding. If it is possible to avoid entering into much-debated socio-political debates, linked
to the concept of nation-building, statebuilding operations ought to be ‘stepped up’, following a
Clausewitzian logic (Lemay-Hébert 2011a: 1825). ‘More is better’ then becomes the natural
policy prescription for international interventions in this context. In this regard, the mental
conception interveners have of the concept of ‘state collapse’ will impact the actual
intervention and the means deemed necessary by the international community to address
statebuilding challenges (Lemay-Hébert 2011b).

Showing that this orthodoxy can be contested, this chapter has sketched an alternative
approach to the institutional approach, based on Durkheimian sociology. While recognizing the
importance of the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force and state institutions in any
given statebuilding process, the ‘legitimacy approach’ adds a layer of complexity by looking at
the nation-state as a constitutive whole, while focusing on socio-political processes of
constitution – and collapse – of legitimate governance. Whether one decides to adopt the
institutional or the legitimacy approach to statebuilding, it seems crucial to recognize the
sociological corpus underlying each approach. For, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, with
regard to the need to be aware of the underpinnings of policy by problematic economic
theories: ‘practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual
influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct sociologist’.

14
Contact info: Nicolas Lemay-Hébert
Marie Curie Experienced Researcher
International Development Department
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK
B15 2TT
ph. +44 (0)121 414 2693
email n.lemayhebert@bham.ac.uk

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1
This chapter is based on a paper presented at the Political Science Association Annual Conference in Edinburgh, 30
March 2010, under the title ‘Trying to Make Sense of the Contemporary Debate on Statebuilding: The Legitimacy
and the Institutional Approaches on State, State Collapse and Statebuilding.’ The author would like to thank Bertrand
Badie, Richard Batley, Danielle Beswick, David Chandler, Kalevi Holsti, Paul Jackson and Heather Marquette for
comments on earlier drafts.
2
The term ‘failed state’ is certainly not value-neutral. Endorsed originally by authoritative figures such as the
previous UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and the former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright
and widely used after September 11, the term can mislead if it is understood ‘to imply a value judgment that there are
specific standards of social, political and economic performance and success to which all states should aspire (…).
Moreover, the picture portrayed when ‘failed state’ is used is one of societal failure. This automatically attributes the
entire political responsibility and moral liability for state collapse to local communities – generating a moral
justification for outside intervention to assist those who have failed’ (Yannis 2003, 64).
3
However, Joel Migdal later came up with a different concept, the ‘state-in-society’ model, where he proposed to
abandon the Weberian inspired analysis of the state due its disconnection of theory from practice (2001).
4
I refer here to Durkheim’s second conception of anomie, elaborated in Suicide. His first conception in The Division
of Labor in Society refers to anomie as an inadequate procedural rules to regulate complementary relationship among
the specialized and interdependent parts of a complex social system, while the second conception refers to a
breakdown in moral norms, which ‘springs from the lack of collective forces at certain points in society’ (Durkheim
1997: 382).

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