ABSTRACT
Part of the thesis which will be tested in this study suggests that the ethnic violence observed in places sharing a post-colonial past is actually part of the empirical process of state-building reminiscent in certain important respects of the earliest stages of state formation in Western Europe. According to this thesis, the eruption of internal conflicts throughout much of the post-colonial world, especially in the period following the end of the Cold War, represents an effort by would-be state makers to reverse those aspects of juridical statehood which resulted in the creation and preservation of artificial states containing unstable political communities. It is suggested that there is a direct relationship between the unstable nature of these political communities and the arbitrary way in which post-colonial state boundaries were drawn.
