As rapid military victories over Saddam Hussein and the Taliban became protracted counterinsurgencies, statebuilding emerged as the central objective of US policy, and 2.7 million American service members have since been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Reliable estimates place the direct and indirect costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at nearly $5 trillion, with costs continuing to mount. Over 6,800 US troops have died in these conflicts, as have approximately 7,000 contractors. The Costs of War project estimated in 2015 that 31,000 Afghan and 104,000 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths. Yet in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan has anything resembling stable statehood emerged.
This lucidly argued book by David Lake seeks to make sense of these disasters. Proceeding from the observation that statebuilding “fails more often than it succeeds,” Lake seeks to explain why and to impress upon scholars and policymakers the irresolvable difficulties that foreign interveners face in building states through coercive force (p. 3). The Statebuilder’s Dilemma should be read by all international relations scholars for the clear logic of its microfoundations and for the innovative ways in which the author applies the insights of relational contracting to a major problem in contemporary international relations.
Lake situates the problem of statebuilding in the wider historical perspective of building order in an international system of territorially sovereign states. Contemporary statebuilding, in this view, is “an essentially conservative response that aims to sustain the decentralized system of violence control embedded in sovereign states” (p. 3). Statebuilding is thus the “process of consolidating the monopoly of legitimate force in all corners of a country’s territorially defined realm,” where “successful” statebuilding results in the “sustained ability of the state to deter challengers to its authority or to cope with those challengers that do arise over time” (p. 9). Consistent with the relational contracting framework developed in Lake’s previous works (Entangling Relations 1999, and Hierarchy in International Relations 2011), he regards state failure in terms of deep social factionalization. As the vested interests that once legitimated a predatory and incapacitated state withdraw from it, private authorities and political entrepreneurs mobilize against the beleaguered order supported by the state. Correspondingly, the challenge of statebuilding is to pick and guarantee new social orders consistent with the ideological interests of a majority of citizens around which interests become vested. If statebuilders are stronger than potential challengers and commit to defending the new state indefinitely, they can promote self-enforcing institutions and the deep legitimacy that turns into sustainable authority.
The reason foreign-led statebuilding seldom succeeds, according to Lake, is inherent in a basic trade-off between legitimacy and loyalty. While outsiders seek to build legitimate states in the eyes of the local population, they also seek to install leaders who protect their interests: “The statebuilder’s dilemma is that the goals of legitimacy and loyalty are always in conflict with one another, at least at the margin” (p. 71). While this dilemma can be more or less acute, it is always present. In the cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, for instance, the policy preferences of the occupiers and occupied were relatively close; in failing states today, however, the US interests tend to be far from the preferences of local societies.
To explore this argument, Lake analyzes statebuilding interventions in Iraq (where the US interests led loyalty to trump legitimacy) and Somalia (where outsiders in the early 1990s emphasized legitimacy over loyalty but lacked the strategic interests to sustain efforts, and where the US-backed Ethiopian intervention after 2006 emphasized loyalty over legitimacy). Within Iraq and Somalia, detours into Kurdistan and Somaliland demonstrate how autonomous statebuilding can succeed without significant international involvement—even if outsiders have still been involved to a degree seldom appreciated outside these de facto states. The successive failures of various statebuilding strategies in Iraq and Somalia, namely, “liberal” statebuilding and “counterinsurgency as statebuilding,” further bolster the author’s contention that failure is not the result of specific strategies employed but due to the intractable dilemmas he identifies. In sum, either self-interested outsiders install regimes that are loyal, eroding regime legitimacy in the eyes of locals, or disinterested outsiders push for legitimate regimes and lack the self-interest to sustain them over the longer term.
In the case of Iraq, Lake attributes the fiasco to Washington’s intense interests in ensuring that loyal leaders did their bidding by supporting the regional status quo, hosting military bases, and allying with the United States in the war on terror. This created a widening gap between American insistence on loyalty and Iraqi visions of legitimacy. With the preferences of Iraq’s three main social groups far from the United States (and from one another), America had remarkably few potentially loyal leaders to work with after the invasion: “This limited choice allowed the eventual leader, Nouri al-Maliki, to turn the tables on the United States, construct a mostly Shiite coalition rather than the broad power-sharing regime desired by Washington, divert aid to his political purposes, and eventually force the United States out” (p. 102). Al-Maliki’s lack of a strong constituency within even his own Shiite community ensured that his rule would become increasingly authoritarian as he sought to consolidate his base. Even as the Americans realized that the legitimacy of the Iraqi government was waning, the absence of loyal alternatives forced them into supporting al-Maliki: “Had the United States not cared about loyalty, a leader with broader public support might have emerged. But here is the dilemma. If the United States had not cared about who ruled Iraq, it would not have invaded in the first place” (p. 152).
The Statebuilder’s Dilemma concludes with pessimistic lessons. While policymakers would do well to heed the dangers of intervention, existential fears of the transnational threats emanating from weak states—however exaggerated—will continue to propel them into ill-fated statebuilding efforts. Lake advises paying attention to incentives for domestic statebuilding, particularly through the promise of integration into the global political and economic order, and reluctantly endorses Stephen Krasner’s notion of “good enough governance” when meddling in foreign states.
If there are shortcomings in the book, they largely concern its limited empirical focus. Lake examines militarized, US-led statebuilding efforts in the inauspicious context of state breakdown and entrenched insurgency. Iraq, Kurdistan, Somalia, and Somaliland provide vivid and various illustrations of the dilemma at the core of the argument. Much contemporary statebuilding, however, frames the objectives in the more minimal terms of good-enough governance that Lake advises and abjures military occupation for the more modest means of military training, foreign aid, and peace operations. I suspect that most readers would like to know more about the prospects for this less ambitious statebuilding agenda. The book might also have benefited from closer examination of (relatively) successful cases of statebuilding, in particular multilateral efforts in the Balkans that benefited precisely from the promise of integration into the European political and economic order. Similarly, the “shadow cases” of the US interventions in Central America and the occupation of Germany and Japan following World War II are too much in the shadows. That said, none of these critiques detract from the tour de force that this book represents.
