ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the formulation of contemporary nation-building strategies to a critical examination of the history of earlier nation-building efforts. It focuses on the history of the idea and practice of nation-building in an effort to explicate the roles of development studies (DS) and area studies (AS) in the constitution and transformation of the field of international studies (IS). The emergence of DS programs after the Second World War was grounded in wider processes of decolonization, the universalization of the nation-state system, and the onset of the Cold War. The influence of development economics as a dominant set of ideas about economic development and nation-building, and the overall character of DS, shifted in the 1970s and 1980s with the growing ascendancy of neo-classical economics against the backdrop of the rise of neo-liberalism and the US-led globalization project. The chapter concludes that the future of DS and AS lies in their implicit or explicit convergence on IS.
