Abstract

Development is not thinkable without a functioning state. Many postcolonial societies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, experience processes of a disintegrating state that fails to deliver development and security. In its most extreme case, such state failure can lead to complete state collapse, coupled with civil war and protracted violent conflict. In the Western discourses of development, state collapse is often seen as exemplified in so-called new wars that are based on warlordism and bush economies. In this sense, state collapse is an imagined geographical space of the [`]other' of development, progress, and security, a failure of modernity. However, state failure and collapse are integrated in processes of economic globalization. Explanations of state failure and state collapse therefore emphasize internal and external factors. Functionalist arguments focus on the social, economic, and political functions of a state and explain the failure to deliver these with the crumbling authoritarianism, neopatrimonialism of postcolonial elites, and the emergence of global nonformal economic networks of resource appropriation. In response to these new challenges, donor discourses focus on how humanitarian aid and development assistance can be delivered in such complex emergencies. With the advent of 11 September 2001 and the global terrorism discourse, development and security have become intertwined in the doctrine of rebuilding the state in war-torn societies.