Introduction

To take state-building as a focus within the large subject of justice and democracy-building after conflict suggests an obsession with the state, whose legitimacy and future relevance are under challenge. State-building can be seen as a particular policy and strategy to create stability and control; its benefit is the quelling and channelling of conflict into its (ideally) democratic governance and justice systems. Its handicap is the potential rigidity, formalism, institutional stagnation, and the suppression of genuine contestation within its structures, which ultimately brews further conflict-drivers, violence or repression. This chapter discusses the uses and the usefulness of the state – as a global legal commodity – in forging a social contract for a given community and/or in providing a sustainable and empowering basis for social development of a people.

Since the passing of the bipolar world order, state-building has acquired the aura of a right-and-duty; the duty is a remodelled version of the colonial civilising mission comprising also elements of the humanitarian intervention doctrine, which, in turn, derives its legitimacy from the people's right to democratic governance, human rights, and the jus cogens doctrine. The discourse on the duty or responsibility to protect is akin to these latter normative frameworks. State-building has, however, begun to seem more of a right than a duty since, in practice, it is trusted to the privileged and ‘interested parties’ – to states and organisations that have an interest in building another entity into a state and the not negligible capacity that it requires.