Beyond the Border: International pressures and state-building

Abstract

States vary tremendously in their ability to effectively implement decisions. Moreover, such differences in “state capacity” exist not only between countries, but also within the territories that states claim to govern. For this reason, social scientists have sought to understand the causes of state-building. While many scholars agree that external threats in previous centuries were an important factor in explaining why Western Europe came to be dominated by strong territorial states, there is significant disagreement concerning whether and how international threats lead to state-building in the world created after World War II. Given the often contradictory findings of previous research – where external threats are sometimes positively associated with state-building, while the opposite appears true in other cases – this dissertation, through three individual articles, seeks to understand under which conditions international threats lead to investments in state capacity.

Utilizing both subnational and country-level data, and employing a variety of regression techniques, I demonstrate (1) that states still allocate significant resources to their border regions, especially those bordering hostile or rival states; (2) that in dictatorships, the association between threats from neighboring states and state capacity is moderated by the degree of power-sharing; and (3) that areas inhabited by transnational ethnic groups – i.e., those with ethnic kin in adjacent countries – display higher levels of “hard” state presence, such as military or police forces, while this is not the case for regions inhabited by domestic minorities.

In summary, this dissertation demonstrates that international threats of various kinds remain important for explaining the development of state capacity (or the lack thereof), even in contemporary times. However, it also shows that the effect of different types of cross-border threats on state-building is heterogeneous: They affect state capacity in different parts of a country’s territory in varying ways and interact with domestic political institutions. In some cases, external threats are associated with successful state-building, while in others, their effect is negligible.