Prometheus Bound ?

The Promethean Dilemma claims to challenge the current wisdom on third-party statebuilding. It contends that contemporary policy-makers and scholars mistakenly identify the early transfer of coercive capacity to local forces as the key to successful state-building. In doing so, they risk not just creating armed forces that may turn against them, but undermining long-term stability in those states—this is the crux of the Promethean dilemma. Without first building loyalty to the nation, the authors argue, the building of local coercive capabilities is more likely to prolong insurgencies and to foster future civil war than to produce stability. Successful third-party state-building requires nationbuilding before the creation of coercive capabilities, yet nation-building is a long-term process that requires at least one generation to be successful. State-building is therefore almost always likely to fail in ‘contemporary settings’. For this reason, the article’s main lesson arguably concerns the benefits of keeping Prometheus bound. Darden’s and Mylonas’s warning about the possible dangers associated with raising local forces is timely and valuable. Their analysis, however, leaves important scope conditions and policy implications unaddressed. In particular, it remains unclear what influences the severity of the dilemma and what lessons those already engaged in statebuilding efforts under fire should draw from their analysis. In our comment, we raise two related issues for further discussion. The first concerns the authors’ characterization of the current wisdom and literature on third-party state-building. We believe that the authors’ arguments about nation-building are at the core of the very ‘current wisdom’ they seek to challenge. The main difference is that the authors place less emphasis on the extreme conditions under which contemporary state-building efforts are being conducted. Our second point focuses on the causal argument, which emphasizes the appropriate sequencing of nationand state-building efforts. Our reading of the empirical record suggests that the evidence in favor of sequential nation–state-building is less dispositive than the authors acknowledge. Contrary to Ethnopolitics, Vol. 00, No. 0, 1–4, Month 2011