In February 1924, Mamie Hodges of San Antonio, Texas, addressed a letter to the US Children’s Bureau. In the letter, she described an all too typical set of circumstances. Hodges was a young mother teetering on the brink of poverty. At the time she wrote to the Bureau, she and her husband had nearly paid off their home. However, a new discovery made Hodges fear for her family’s future: she was pregnant. Again.1

For the first time in its modern history, the post-2003 state faced a severe legitimation crisis, which was compounded by its inability to establish the authority to dominate. Chapter 4 argues that the fragmentation of the state’s authority resulted from the undoing of its domination capacity by the US-led invasion during the first three months of the occupation. The extent of the fragmentation was plain to see in 2003 when militia-backed political groups moved into the space where the state used to be – by the end of the 2006 civil war, those groups had firmly consolidated their demarcated domains of authority over Iraq’s economy and politics. The chapter investigates the Coalition Provisional Authority’s biggest civil project: repairing the national electrical grid. Technical and material elements of that project became sites of physical and political contestation over the state’s consolidation at a moment when its domination had disappeared. The chapter also traces the trajectory of “state-building” as an influential and ultimately dangerous framework, from its roots in 1980s US academia and 1990s UN peace-keeping practices to its arrival in Iraq with the US-led invasion.

The book’s introduction draws the reader to the unique case study of the Iraqi diaspora and its involvement in state-building following military intervention in 2003. The chapter introduces the book’s puzzle, which questions why diasporas have thus far been ignored in analyses of state formation and state-building. Contextualising the book within the diaspora and state-building literature will also delineate the book’s unique contribution to both fields and its wider appeal to policymakers, the media, and thinktanks. The chapter then underlines the book’s original conceptual and empirical contribution to the study and understanding of the role of diasporas in state formation and state-building processes, which also includes the role of civil society in weak, postcolonial, post-conflict states. This is then followed by an outline and breakdown of the book to guide the reader.

Chapter 1 discusses the main concepts of the book, including diaspora and transnationalism, providing an understanding of the cross-border connections that link people and nations across time and space under modern processes of globalisation, facilitating diasporic political engagement. This is then followed by introducing the conceptual framework of diasporic state-building, which is drawn from three theoretical discussions related to the state, state-building, and civil society literature. The framework captures how diasporas are engaged in this process through an original conceptual and typological framework that operationally captures the two categories associated with building a state: firstly, diasporic mobilisation towards building the apparatus of the state and, secondly, supporting and challenging the state through civil society. This original conceptual approach to state-building captures the plethora of activity that is shaping the evolution of conflict, post-conflict, and post-colonial states. The framework guides the reader as well as demonstrating the multiple domains in which diasporas are influencing state formation under modern processes of globalisation.

The final and concluding chapter reflects on diasporic state-building, drawing out the implications for how this transforms our understanding of state-building under military intervention. It critiques the limitations of diasporic state-building when approached through Western military and developmental interventions and their Euro-centric positionality. The chapter discusses how the optic of diasporic state-building allows us to witness transformations in how we conceive the nation-state and transnational civil society, since diasporas are constitutive actors transforming homelands states and societies in significant and contradictory ways, which can simultaneously bolster and undermine the state. Diasporic state-building also sheds light on transformations in our understanding of concepts such as citizenship, belonging, and nationhood in a globalised world when the nation-state is unshackled from state boundaries and occupies a transnational space. Finally, the chapter ends with the significance of diasporic state-building, when we consider the persistence of conflicts and migrations and the emergence of new diasporas. It offers probing questions for future research for exploring diasporic state-building of other global diasporas in other non-Western contexts.

This chapter examines the political economy of the hub-and-spokes alliance system in Asia during the Cold War. Focusing on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communists, it argues that state-building and development were major features of the United States’ efforts to maintain the security of its allies and partners. Because US officials exhibited a heightened concern about the risk of subversion, which could not be contained through military alliances alone, US strategy focused on addressing the perceived causes of its allies’ and partners’ vulnerability. In Northeast Asia, the United States played a significant role in the creation of the developmental state. In Southeast Asia, the United States proved to be less capable or willing to support state-led industrialization, choosing not to do so in the Philippines and failing to do so in South Vietnam. Throughout Asia, containment was as much about economics as it was about military strategy.

This chapter introduces the book’s main argument that American economic hierarchy has enhanced property rights and state capacity in partner states over the past forty years, challenging the conventional view that United States’ involvement undermines state-building. It outlines the conceptual framework, focusing on extractive capacity and hierarchy as key concepts. The chapter previews the argument, highlights the book’s contributions to system-level theories, state-building research, and international development literature, and outlines the plan for the book.

The concluding chapter reflects on the future of American hierarchy and state development in light of the book’s findings. It discusses potential changes in American economic priorities and the rise of new hierarchies in the international system. The chapter explores the implications for partner states and highlights the need for further research on the role of nonstate actors, such as firms and international organizations. It also considers the normative implications of the book’s findings and underscores the importance of understanding the complex effects of hierarchy on state-building.

Following NATO’s military intervention and a very wide-ranging UN peacekeeping mission, Kosovo is today the site of the largest civilian mission of the European Union. In the aftermath of the armed conflict of 1998–9 which was fought along ethnic lines and led to mass atrocities and to the destruction of more than half of the available housing stock, the UN set up a quasi-judicial, administrative mechanism to “resolve” property issues, which was called the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). Staffed predominantly by Kosovo Albanian national legal professionals and a few international jurists, the KPA was entrusted to deal with war-related property claims submitted overwhelmingly by Kosovo Serbs. Relatively powerless and underfunded, the KPA is a paradigmatic example of a contemporary transitional justice mechanism that is understood as a short-term, bridging, technical-legal project rather than a national process of righting past wrongs. Under the increasing neoliberal managerialism of rule of law as a tool of good governance, the KPA was organized as a mass claims procedure. To “streamline” the process and allow for the “quick” and “efficient” resolution of claims, it used data-processing technologies, and decisions were issued in batches of claims of similar legal scenarios. This chapter conceptualizes the work of the KPA as “law-washing” within the post-cold war juristocratic phase of international intervention and international law more generally. The chapter understands juristocracy in a broad sense, as a diffuse and transhistorical moment in which law is used in often fetishistic, instrumental ways to tackle a range of social and political issues previously not conceived as legal issues. Engaging with law’s “dialectics of reckoning” means analytically making sense of moments (that we may choose to call “juristocratic”) of simultaneous hope in law’s potential to propel the currents of social justice and cynicism and disenchantment about law’s incapacity to “solve” issues beyond law (if at all).

For almost three millennia the pastoral nomads of the Eurasian steppe formed a great reserve of mounted cavalry, threatening their settled neighbours while offering them goods and services of great value – in particular horses and skilled soldiers for their armies. The Eurasian nomads were also empire-builders, creators of imperial ideology and administrative structures that were passed down through generations of successor states. Their imperial centre in Mongolia was home to two related peoples – the Turks and the Mongols – each defined by the powerful empires they erected. The Türk Empire, which flourished from the mid-sixth to mid-eighth centuries, was the first of these and it controlled the steppe from Mongolia to the Volga river, fighting and trading with China, the empires of the Middle East, and Byzantium. The second great state was the Mongol Empire, founded by Chinggis Khan in 1206. The Mongols extended their power yet further than the Turks, conquering much of Eurasia.

In this chapter the medieval history of political participation is summarised both in more general terms (such as the emergence of the concept of ‘representation’) and in the form of some of the most important individual examples, from Spain, Sicily and Hungary to Scandinavia and England.

The development of institutionalised political participation is shown for nine of the most important early modern European states – or else those, such as Switzerland, that figure prominently in the history of democracy. The focus is on not only the ‘long’ seventeenth century and the ruptures it created but also the general continuities in essentially all early modern states: they all featured some mode of institutionalised central political participation, but it was always geared towards the participation of the top social elites only.