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And on Rwanda, I totally recommend the seminal peice by Regine Anderson entitled 'How Multilateral Development Assistance Triggered The Conflict In Rwanda'. I can't find it free to download anywhere but for anyone who has access to JSTOR type electronic libraries, the article was published in...

Tempted! I will post something substantial soon but to start: Interesting peice by Paul Collier on the dangers of implementing (quasi)democratic elections in conflict or post-conflict environments. And for those with a bit of time - this shortish journal article by Timothy Raeymaekers provides...

Anyone see The 11th Hour shown on Channel 4 recently? One of the experts on it said that 99.9999% of all species which have inhabited planet earth in the past are today extinct. Extinction is a natural process. Planet Earth will live on and support life of some kind regardless of global...

Don't suppose this will come as much surprise to a lot of you but still interesting and totally relevant to the discussion.

Well Vim still interested to know what you make of the neo-gramscian perspective - as a fusion of realist and liberal schools of thought on IR? Yes this is critical theory building on some aspects of historical materialism but nevertheless very useful IMO.

This thread seems to have become a private conversation between me and you Vim. Not sure why though as the material is highly topical - the formation of the state, state breakdown, society-state relations, socio-economic development etc. I appreciate that sometimes it can be highly theoretical...

Ha! Brilliantly put....

Good stuff man - a really interesting synthesis of ideas - i like! So this: the right to monopolize control of the instruments of violence; the sole right to tax citizens; the prerogative of ordering the political allegiances of citizens and of enlisting their support in war; the sovereign...

I think the Williams peice is worth quoting at length because he puts the whole debate surrounding the idea of statehood (and thus state collapse) into its historical context: Understood in these two senses, state failure on the African continent is a widespread phenomenon but the failure to...

Paul Williams states this argument well: When analysing state failure in Africa in this first sense, analysts and practitioners would thus do well to reject a statecentric ontology in favour of a neo-Gramscian frame of reference, wherein the world is not simply made up of clashing states in an...

IMAGINING FRESH STARTS What, then, could lie beyond collapse, and what lessons can be drawn from past experiences? Historically speaking, one would expect a new political order to surface from amidst the ruins of the old, possibly building on elements that had been suppressed or ignored. As...

It seems popular to refer to internal/intra-state war in Africa as a 'new barbarism' or the 'end of civilization' in that region. Always framed in terms of a backwards movement along the linear trajectory of human development. But i think this is bullshit. One institutionalised order...

I think perhaps North overstates the case a bit in terms of this binary between the natural state and 'bloody chaos'. In the absence of coercive force a new actor wielding coercive force will emerge IMHO. In a situation where multiple parties seeking to use coercive force exist, then...

No I totally appreciate that. Clearly in terms of stimulating economic growth and substantial and sustainable improvements in terms of living standards, a consolidated 'Westphalian' state represents the most desirable form of political organisation. But in much of the post-colonial world where...

Nice dichotomy: repression -- chaos? Like I said in an earlier post: If there is no state then there is anarchy :slanted:

I can't remember if that has come up at all although it certainly feeds into the whole debate. Just had my options fair - choosing my modules for next year - and my two IR modules will be: Globalization and Contemporary Conflict, and Capitalism and Geopolitics, with the latter looking at the...

Is it an imperative of the liberal world order that these states remain as states? The economic interests of Western firms in Africa for example rather depends on the preservation of some kind of legitimate order. Or does it.....? (I am thinking of mineral extracting MNC's who perhaps profit...

Interesting Vim. Your questions get to the heart of the matter. By 'we' I assume you mean 'Western' policy makers and multilateral orgnaizations (which if we are honest represent, at least to large part, the interests of the dominant powers). So can the 'West' allow the state-system that it...

This kinda plays into something Gavin said in the Islamaphobia thread: Contrary to this, I reckon that there are 3 broad factors that motivate violence: 1. power and status (political) 2. control of resources and opportunities for accumulation (economic) 3. identity/ideational (religous...

....and in the process radically altered exisiting power structures in the developing world. I think aid and security or development and violence have been highly interwoven historically and are becoming increasingly so in the contemporary era. What is legitimate use of violence? In a modern...