Aljohara
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Hello,
I am wondering if this Security Studies article revew is structured properly? As I have started with a summary rather than a thesis.
I would appreciate your opinion on the essay below.
Charles Tilly’s famous conception of European state-making, ‘War made the state and
the state made war’, has been challenged numerous times by scholars who seek to
demonstrate the difficulty of applying such a thesis to the non-European world. Brian
Taylor and Roxana Botea’s (2008) article seeks to highlight how, when applied to two
different Third World nations that have experienced major conflicts, Tilly’s theory is not
completely applicable. This concludes that in the absence of two specific conditions:
ethnic homogeneity and an ideological revolution of which they suggest ethnic
homogeneity is the most important. War is more likely to break than make states in the
Third World. Taylor and Botea’s contribution to the debate can be seen as part of the
array of literature that seeks to reject, challenge or at least caveat the bellicist approach
to state formation, especially with regard to its application to the Third World.
Taylor and Botea summaries Tilly’s (Tilly, 1992) argument to be: war creates a process of
resource extract and oppression. This he contends leads to state formation as resources
are crucial to fight wars and the process of extracting them via taxation in order to
oppress and eliminate rivals creates a system of effective control over people and
territory (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 29).
Vietnam and Afghanistan are the two Third World states used by Taylor and Botea
(2008) to test the strength of the war-making/state-making thesis. The scholars analyse
three of Tilly’s causal mechanisms for how war impacts state formation, including the
extraction of financial resources to pay for conflict through taxation, the organisation of
militaries and coercive forces, and finally the impact of these processes on the creation
of national identities (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 28). The conclusion reached in the
article is that under the conditions of war, some states respond better to these causal
mechanisms than others, e.g. some states are more successful in raising money, building
armies and shaping a national identity than others. They underline two factors in this
regard: ethnic homogeneity and existence of a revolutionary movement. Strong
historical ethnic consciousness and homogeneity help sustain the state’s war-making
enterprise for longer and reduce the likelihood of disunity and internal conflict. (Taylor
and Botea, 2008, P. 34).
Indeed, the cultural homogeneity of Vietnam, according to Taylor and Botea, has played
an important role in facilitating the causal mechanisms that Tilly describes being
effective in shaping the Vietnamese nation throughout the conflict with the US. In
Afghanistan, however, conflict did much to shatter the already weak cultural ties that
existed, this disturbs the process of state making as leaders were not able to oppress
their rivals (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 48). War, it would seem, can provide the external
enemy around which a state can rally around and for apparatus of a modern state to
build around. But this is only possible when a strong cultural and ethnic homogeneity
exists to provide the foundations upon which a conflict with an external enemy can be
utilised, extract financial resources through taxation, build armies and provide a united
national identity.
Taylor and Botea’s article is part of a wider academic trend that seeks to challenge and
identify the limitations of the bellicist literature by showing the limitations of the thesis
when applied to the Third World. Even within the bellicist literature, as Taylor and Botea
acknowledge in their study (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 30), variation among European
states has been identified, indicating that Tilly’s original conception of state formation
cannot be applied across all European states in the same way. The bellicist approach has
gained more scholarly attention given the number of failed states and state collapses
throughout the Third World. Scholars have sought to demonstrate the very distinct
experience of Third World nations, arguing that conditions such as geography, dense or
sparse populations, and the experience of ‘limited’ wars, all have contributed to limiting
the creation of state apparatus. Jeffrey Herbst’s analysis of African state formation in
particular is a contributes to this literature. Similar to Taylor and Botea, he argues that
the fragmentation of African societies along with the lack of trained manpower and the
lack of institutionalisation in regard to state leadership rules have all resulted in the
creation of ‘permanently weak states’ or ‘lame leviathans’ over which authoritarian
leaders have failed to exert authority or protect from exogenous threats (Herbst, 1990,
P. 125). It is important to note that Herbst’s analysis of bellicist state formation in Africa
is based on the conditions that existed in African polities before the formation of states.
Taylor and Botea’s reasoning is similar to the strand of scholarship that highlights that
during the Cold War era, the US and the Soviet Union made foreign aid available to
Third World states. This meant that such states no longer needed to extract resources
from domestic sources; and that this is a process fundamentally different from the
experience of European states for whom internal elites extracted resources in
preparation for war, and thus needed to expand the state bureaucracy to achieve this
(Fan, 2009, P. 350).
A limitation to many of these studies is the arbitrary case selection when Tilly’s bellicist
approach is assessed in the context of the developing world. In other words, much of
the literature that has been produced in response to the bellicist approach has been
applied to selected Third World nations and/or regions. When choosing the wars as
evidence for or against the bellicist theory, they fail to recognise that not all wars are
the same. In analysing the applicability of Tilly’s thesis to the non-European world, some
scholars assess widely different ‘conditions’ of war and types of ‘war’, which are not the
same as in Tilly’s conception. As Arthur A. Stein has argued, some conflicts are not
existential fights for survival to the nations fighting them, and yet this detail is a crucial
aspect of the bellicist approach postulating war-making as a cause of state-making
(Stein, 1981). It seems clear that the conflict with the US for Vietnam would provide the
external threat necessary for national identity to revolve around, and for governmental
elites to utilise in order to justify extracting resources and raising armies because the US
invasion was a threat to the nation which was already moving to shake off French
colonial rule. This indicates that a differentiation between threatening and nonthreatening war is a necessary and useful caveat in applying the bellicist theory to the
Third World (Tae-Ryong, 2008, P. 19). Similar to Taylor and Botea, Herbst argues that
unlike pre-modern Europe, Third World states are mostly not facing threatening wars of
conquest as they have been made illegal in the modern international system. This lead
to the preservation of weak states (Herbst, 1990, P. 123).
Furthermore, a differentiation between intra-state and inter-state war needs to be
made in applying Tilly’s theory to other contexts. Taylor and Botea analyse inter-state
war (US vs. Vietnam and USSR vs. Afghanistan), while Tilly’s theory was for non-state
polities in pre-modern Europe, where conflicts were between non-state polities over
contested territory (Delatolla, 2016, P. 284) – and they are not the same thing. Interstate war may well unravel states rather than form them in the contemporary world,
but that is an entirely separate object of analysis. Analyses of Third World intra-state
conflicts however, such as Andrew Delatolla’s examination of Lebanon, shows that
Tilly’s theory is more applicable because the conditions of the conflict are closer to
those Tilly describes as existing in pre-modern Europe: state-less factions developing
methods of capital extraction in order to support their efforts and maintain a soft
consent from the population (Delatolla, 2016, P. 293). This however, contradicts Taylor
and Botea’s notion that social fragmentation is one of the factors that would stand in
the way of state formation as they rank Lebanon extremely fragmented (Taylor and
Botea, 2008, P. 36).
As Karl Hampel has argued, greater clarification needs to be made by scholars of both
the ‘war-makes states’ thesis and the ‘state failure’ thesis in order to come to a more
accurate theorisation of states and their formation that acknowledges the socio-political
variations between states and the differing definitions of a state, which impacts how we
conceive certain states as having been formed (Hampel, 2015, P. 1637). Indeed, in their
discussion of Afghanistan, Taylor and Botea appear to be analysing how an already weak
state simply got weaker throughout the duration of a conflict with an external enemy.
Therefore, while Taylor and Botea’s article is another useful contribution to the debate
surrounding state formation in the Third World, it is somewhat limited by theoretical
and conceptual problems which when applied arbitrarily to selected states and their
experience of war and state formation does not necessarily show that Tilly’s bellicist
approach is not applicable to the Third World. As can be seen by other studies in the
literature, the cases of Third World states where the experiences of war have been
closer to the original conditions described by Tilly, provide a more accurate
measurement of to what extent the bellicist approach to state formation is a useful
framework for any analysis of the Third World.
I am wondering if this Security Studies article revew is structured properly? As I have started with a summary rather than a thesis.
I would appreciate your opinion on the essay below.
Charles Tilly’s famous conception of European state-making, ‘War made the state and
the state made war’, has been challenged numerous times by scholars who seek to
demonstrate the difficulty of applying such a thesis to the non-European world. Brian
Taylor and Roxana Botea’s (2008) article seeks to highlight how, when applied to two
different Third World nations that have experienced major conflicts, Tilly’s theory is not
completely applicable. This concludes that in the absence of two specific conditions:
ethnic homogeneity and an ideological revolution of which they suggest ethnic
homogeneity is the most important. War is more likely to break than make states in the
Third World. Taylor and Botea’s contribution to the debate can be seen as part of the
array of literature that seeks to reject, challenge or at least caveat the bellicist approach
to state formation, especially with regard to its application to the Third World.
Taylor and Botea summaries Tilly’s (Tilly, 1992) argument to be: war creates a process of
resource extract and oppression. This he contends leads to state formation as resources
are crucial to fight wars and the process of extracting them via taxation in order to
oppress and eliminate rivals creates a system of effective control over people and
territory (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 29).
Vietnam and Afghanistan are the two Third World states used by Taylor and Botea
(2008) to test the strength of the war-making/state-making thesis. The scholars analyse
three of Tilly’s causal mechanisms for how war impacts state formation, including the
extraction of financial resources to pay for conflict through taxation, the organisation of
militaries and coercive forces, and finally the impact of these processes on the creation
of national identities (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 28). The conclusion reached in the
article is that under the conditions of war, some states respond better to these causal
mechanisms than others, e.g. some states are more successful in raising money, building
armies and shaping a national identity than others. They underline two factors in this
regard: ethnic homogeneity and existence of a revolutionary movement. Strong
historical ethnic consciousness and homogeneity help sustain the state’s war-making
enterprise for longer and reduce the likelihood of disunity and internal conflict. (Taylor
and Botea, 2008, P. 34).
Indeed, the cultural homogeneity of Vietnam, according to Taylor and Botea, has played
an important role in facilitating the causal mechanisms that Tilly describes being
effective in shaping the Vietnamese nation throughout the conflict with the US. In
Afghanistan, however, conflict did much to shatter the already weak cultural ties that
existed, this disturbs the process of state making as leaders were not able to oppress
their rivals (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 48). War, it would seem, can provide the external
enemy around which a state can rally around and for apparatus of a modern state to
build around. But this is only possible when a strong cultural and ethnic homogeneity
exists to provide the foundations upon which a conflict with an external enemy can be
utilised, extract financial resources through taxation, build armies and provide a united
national identity.
Taylor and Botea’s article is part of a wider academic trend that seeks to challenge and
identify the limitations of the bellicist literature by showing the limitations of the thesis
when applied to the Third World. Even within the bellicist literature, as Taylor and Botea
acknowledge in their study (Taylor and Botea, 2008, P. 30), variation among European
states has been identified, indicating that Tilly’s original conception of state formation
cannot be applied across all European states in the same way. The bellicist approach has
gained more scholarly attention given the number of failed states and state collapses
throughout the Third World. Scholars have sought to demonstrate the very distinct
experience of Third World nations, arguing that conditions such as geography, dense or
sparse populations, and the experience of ‘limited’ wars, all have contributed to limiting
the creation of state apparatus. Jeffrey Herbst’s analysis of African state formation in
particular is a contributes to this literature. Similar to Taylor and Botea, he argues that
the fragmentation of African societies along with the lack of trained manpower and the
lack of institutionalisation in regard to state leadership rules have all resulted in the
creation of ‘permanently weak states’ or ‘lame leviathans’ over which authoritarian
leaders have failed to exert authority or protect from exogenous threats (Herbst, 1990,
P. 125). It is important to note that Herbst’s analysis of bellicist state formation in Africa
is based on the conditions that existed in African polities before the formation of states.
Taylor and Botea’s reasoning is similar to the strand of scholarship that highlights that
during the Cold War era, the US and the Soviet Union made foreign aid available to
Third World states. This meant that such states no longer needed to extract resources
from domestic sources; and that this is a process fundamentally different from the
experience of European states for whom internal elites extracted resources in
preparation for war, and thus needed to expand the state bureaucracy to achieve this
(Fan, 2009, P. 350).
A limitation to many of these studies is the arbitrary case selection when Tilly’s bellicist
approach is assessed in the context of the developing world. In other words, much of
the literature that has been produced in response to the bellicist approach has been
applied to selected Third World nations and/or regions. When choosing the wars as
evidence for or against the bellicist theory, they fail to recognise that not all wars are
the same. In analysing the applicability of Tilly’s thesis to the non-European world, some
scholars assess widely different ‘conditions’ of war and types of ‘war’, which are not the
same as in Tilly’s conception. As Arthur A. Stein has argued, some conflicts are not
existential fights for survival to the nations fighting them, and yet this detail is a crucial
aspect of the bellicist approach postulating war-making as a cause of state-making
(Stein, 1981). It seems clear that the conflict with the US for Vietnam would provide the
external threat necessary for national identity to revolve around, and for governmental
elites to utilise in order to justify extracting resources and raising armies because the US
invasion was a threat to the nation which was already moving to shake off French
colonial rule. This indicates that a differentiation between threatening and nonthreatening war is a necessary and useful caveat in applying the bellicist theory to the
Third World (Tae-Ryong, 2008, P. 19). Similar to Taylor and Botea, Herbst argues that
unlike pre-modern Europe, Third World states are mostly not facing threatening wars of
conquest as they have been made illegal in the modern international system. This lead
to the preservation of weak states (Herbst, 1990, P. 123).
Furthermore, a differentiation between intra-state and inter-state war needs to be
made in applying Tilly’s theory to other contexts. Taylor and Botea analyse inter-state
war (US vs. Vietnam and USSR vs. Afghanistan), while Tilly’s theory was for non-state
polities in pre-modern Europe, where conflicts were between non-state polities over
contested territory (Delatolla, 2016, P. 284) – and they are not the same thing. Interstate war may well unravel states rather than form them in the contemporary world,
but that is an entirely separate object of analysis. Analyses of Third World intra-state
conflicts however, such as Andrew Delatolla’s examination of Lebanon, shows that
Tilly’s theory is more applicable because the conditions of the conflict are closer to
those Tilly describes as existing in pre-modern Europe: state-less factions developing
methods of capital extraction in order to support their efforts and maintain a soft
consent from the population (Delatolla, 2016, P. 293). This however, contradicts Taylor
and Botea’s notion that social fragmentation is one of the factors that would stand in
the way of state formation as they rank Lebanon extremely fragmented (Taylor and
Botea, 2008, P. 36).
As Karl Hampel has argued, greater clarification needs to be made by scholars of both
the ‘war-makes states’ thesis and the ‘state failure’ thesis in order to come to a more
accurate theorisation of states and their formation that acknowledges the socio-political
variations between states and the differing definitions of a state, which impacts how we
conceive certain states as having been formed (Hampel, 2015, P. 1637). Indeed, in their
discussion of Afghanistan, Taylor and Botea appear to be analysing how an already weak
state simply got weaker throughout the duration of a conflict with an external enemy.
Therefore, while Taylor and Botea’s article is another useful contribution to the debate
surrounding state formation in the Third World, it is somewhat limited by theoretical
and conceptual problems which when applied arbitrarily to selected states and their
experience of war and state formation does not necessarily show that Tilly’s bellicist
approach is not applicable to the Third World. As can be seen by other studies in the
literature, the cases of Third World states where the experiences of war have been
closer to the original conditions described by Tilly, provide a more accurate
measurement of to what extent the bellicist approach to state formation is a useful
framework for any analysis of the Third World.
