Bringing War Back In (BWBI) is a tour de force in state-building scholarship, a model of multi-methods research, and a love letter to Max Weber.
We are all familiar with Charles Tilly (Reference Tilly and Tilly1975) famous dictum: “War makes the state, and the state makes war.” Faced with technological changes that made war more challenging and costly, early modern European elites were compelled to build institutions, organizations, and infrastructure that enabled the recruitment, financing, and deployment of armies, setting in motion the developments that would give rise to the modern state. States that adapted to become the most efficient war machine prevailed; those that did not disappeared. When the dust settled, the modern state emerged as the victor of this Darwinian competition. For many years, this war-centric theory has been central to academic understandings of state-building in Europe.
For scholars of Latin America, it had long been conventional wisdom—since Miguel Centeno (Reference Centeno2002) seminal work—that war did not produce strong states in the region, only “blood and debt.” The kind of “total wars” that compelled European elites to engage in state-building was supposedly absent in Latin America. As a result, the sources of variation in state strength within the region were presumed to lie elsewhere. However, as Schenoni demonstrates, a closer look at the nineteenth century reveals a different picture: total wars did occur, and, according to his book, they did lead to state-building.
In his book, Schenoni successfully brings war back into the Latin American state-building equation, albeit with a twist on Tilly’s original aphorism. If the book could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be: “The state makes war, and war makes—or breaks—the state.”
The book’s contribution to the war-centered state-building literature is deceptively simple: winning or losing wars matters. That losers in war tend to fare worse at state-building might seem trivial at first. After all, European history shows that for many states, losing a war meant ceasing to exist. However, in Latin America, those defeated in war did not disappear, so the Darwinian selection mechanism did not apply. Why, then, did losing wars still matter?
Here, Schenoni introduces a novel theoretical construct. Losing wars matters not because of institutional Darwinism but because of historical institutionalism. He argues that wars functioned as either makers or breakers of states through their impact on domestic pro-state political coalitions and those coalitions’ post-war ability to build institutions. Such coalitions—composed of politicians, bureaucrats, and the military—all favored centralizing state power and deploying it across society. Their pro-state agendas included raising professional armies, collecting taxes, and investing in railroads. War outcomes influenced state-building by either legitimizing or discrediting these coalitions. After winning a war, pro-state forces consolidated a political party and embarked on a project that both outlived and surpassed the narrower efforts of wartime state-building. But if these coalitions lost, groups opposed to centralization and a stronger state remained dominant, condemning their countries to endemic state weakness.
For war outcomes to be decisive for state-building, they need not be predetermined. To demonstrate this, Schenoni draws on the concept of critical junctures. Drawing from conflict literature, BWBI treats war as a series of uncertain events whose final outcome cannot be explained by pre-war state capacity. Schenoni convincingly supports this argument by showing, for example, that apparent power asymmetries between countries before war (e.g., Chile vs. Peru prior to the War of the Pacific) are often exaggerated in postwar narratives. Moreover, pivotal battles in these conflicts were heavily influenced by fortuitous events that provided winners with advantages they would not otherwise have enjoyed.
How does Schenoni’s theoretical contribution fit into recent scholarship on Latin American state-building? Much of the existing literature emphasizes the role of elite cooperation, alongside factors such as free labor, a single urban center, or natural resource booms. BWBI argues not only that war must be reintroduced into these analyses but it suggests war pushes aside rival explanations (p. 12). Its theory, the book claims, applies more broadly and requires fewer variables to account for a wider range of state-capacity outcomes. Crucially, Schenoni contends that some of the alternative explanatory variables highlighted in previous research are themselves products of or are affected by war.
Schenoni’s theory is indeed more parsimonious than existing ones. It involves fewer variables and simpler interactions to explain state-building across a broader range of cases. However, it may be an overreach to claim that previous explanations are fully endogenous to a war-based model. For example, Schenoni argues that victories in key battles made anti-state (or peripheral) elites more likely to cooperate with pro-state (or central) elites on a state-building project. Yet I am convinced that this likelihood is also independently influenced by the nature of labor relations—whether free or unfree—in each country’s periphery. Although Schenoni demonstrates that his theory outperforms others in terms of stronger correlations with state capacity (p. 131) and higher consistency in qualitative comparative analyses (p. 129), alternative explanations still serve at least as complementary factors.
This leads us to the book’s methodological approach. Schenoni lays out concrete quantitative and qualitative expectations derived from his theory, then employs an impressive methodological arsenal to test them.
The book tests the theory’s observable implications during both the preparation-for-war and postwar phases. In the preparation phase, anti-bellicist theories predict that Latin American states would respond by raising tariffs or acquiring new loans, rather than increasing domestic extraction efforts. BWBI employs a panel regression analysis to measure the effect of militarized interstate disputes (events that could have escalated into wars) on variables such as foreign debt—a focal point in the “Blood and Debt” theory. The results show no significant effect in this regard. Conversely, the analysis does reveal an impact on the likelihood of domestic unrest, ranging from coups to civil wars, driven by attempts to increase extraction.
As for the postwar phase, BWBI employs two strategies to estimate the effect of war outcomes on state capacity. First, it uses a difference-in-differences model to measure the average treatment effect of war outcomes on railroad mileage and per capita national government revenue in the years and decades following a war. In this model, defeat has a significant negative impact on these indicators that persists well after the conflict ends. Second, to estimate the causal effect of losing on future state capacity in specific cases, Schenoni uses synthetic control methods. By creating “synthetic Peru” and “synthetic Paraguay,” he captures the impact of defeat in the War of the Pacific and the Paraguayan War, respectively.
The qualitative portion of the book employs fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and comparative historical analysis. Drawing on Mahoney’s (Reference Mahoney2003) work on postcolonial development in Latin America, Schenoni uses fsQCA to argue that war outcomes offer a stronger (more necessary and/or more sufficient) explanation for state capacity and social development than alternative theories. Finally, the War of the Pacific, the Paraguayan War, the Mexican-American War, and the Second Franco-Mexican War are examined in comparative historical perspective to identify the theory’s causal mechanisms in action. These wars—being the deadliest and requiring the highest levels of mobilization—constitute the most likely cases in which to observe those mechanisms. The evidence presented, drawn from both primary and secondary sources, is compelling.
Overall, BWBI successfully combines the depth and attention to detail characteristic of the Comparative Historical Analysis tradition with the breadth and precise measurement offered by advanced econometrics. The book’s achievement in this regard is truly impressive.
Having covered theory and methods, I want to finish with the book’s passions. I mentioned at the beginning of this review that BWBI is a love letter to Weber. Readers will quickly notice Weberian influences throughout, from presenting Weber as a “classic bellicist theorist” to highlighting how central his ideas on legitimacy are to Schenoni’s theory. Yet the Weberian spirit may be most evident in one of the book’s key implications: those who wielded violence successfully in the past secured state capacity and prosperity in the future. Paraphrasing Weber, in politics it is not true that institutional strength only ever follows from good, or institutional weakness solely from evil. And anyone who fails to see this is a “political infant.”
