The Problem of the African State: The Missing Genealogy of International Statebuilding WORK IN PROGRESS, NOT TO BE CITED WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION

It would seem that international statebuilding has arrived practically de nouvo, fully formed at the end of the Cold War, with commentators trying to extract lessons from the new practices of international administration in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Iraq. The more historical approaches which seek to guide international statebuilding draw on institutionally similar circumstances under the League of Nations and the United Nations. The more conceptually minded analysts suggest that the field is a new one and that it is still too early to rush to judgement on techniques and practices. This paper seeks to draw out some pointers to a missing genealogy of international approaches to statebuilding in policy discussions about ‘transitional states’, particularly in relation to sub-Saharan Africa. It suggests that two areas which can be usefully drawn upon are the discussions of colonial ‘transition’ in the 1920s and discussions of post-colonial ‘transition’ in the 1960s. Both sets of policy-orientated discussions of transitional states implicitly focussed on the problem of the relationship between subject or post-colonial states and their societies. These discussions posed the problem in terms which set them apart from discussions of domestic political forms of administration and political management. This paper suggests that it is in these debates, on the specific distinctions between the management of non-Western state-society relations and domestic statesociety relations, that the missing genealogy of international statebuilding can be found.