ABSTRACT
The idea of state-building gained popularity in the United States and other Western countries in the 1990s, in the moment of triumphalism that followed the fall of socialist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The international community by and large simply slid into a post-state-building mode without theorizing about it or trying to codify what the alternatives to state-building might be. The term nation-building is sometimes used to refer to the reconstruction efforts undertaken by the international community. State-building came to be seen as a technical task outsiders could perform, a feat of social and political engineering devoid of the violence and the power struggles that accompanied the process of state formation through the ages. Post state-building has few advocates, because it is an admission of the defeat of the earlier state-building projects and has so far produced little writing.
