Past stateness, present strength: How (the lack of) state experience shapes today’s fragile states
研究发现，过去一个世纪中缺乏暴力垄断和职业官僚制度这两项核心国家性特征，会显著增加国家长期脆弱的可能性，其中暴力垄断经验比官僚制度经验更为关键。这对国际社会设计国家建设干预措施具有指导意义。
• Deeper historical experience of core state institutions reduces the likelihood of a country being chronically fragile today. • Experience of monopoly of violence is more critical than experience of professional bureaucracy for preventing current fragility. • Statebuilding interventions should be guided by what has worked in countries with similar stateness legacies. Supporting state capacity is a priority for the international community, yet the record of internationally supported statebuilding to date has been mixed. A key question for continuing research concerns the factors influencing more versus less successful interventions. We show that experience of past ‘stateness’ is crucial in understanding contemporary state fragility and statebuilding. Extending beyond previous work, we introduce the concept of past stateness, consider theoretically its relationship to contemporary fragility, and explore this relationship empirically, drawing on cross-national data and newly developed indicators. In line with our expectations, descriptive and inferential analysis shows that lack of experience in the past century with two core features of stateness—monopoly of violence and existence of a professional bureaucracy—predicts chronic fragility today. This association is mainly driven by monopoly of violence rather than existence of a professional bureaucracy. Our analysis sheds new light on the underlying heterogeneity among states today labelled as ‘fragile’. From a policy perspective, a key implication is that, in designing interventions, the most relevant experiences are likely to be from other countries with similar stateness legacies, rather than from ‘fragile states’ more generally. Our analysis does not imply that statebuilding is impossible in contexts with weak stateness legacies, but it does underscore the challenges of this and the importance of setting expectations appropriately.