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State-Making, State-Breaking and State Failure: Explaining the Roots of ‘Third World’ Insecurity

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Between Development and Destruction

Abstract

There are two significant realities of the current international scene which form the backdrop to any discussion of the formation and disintegration of states in the last decade of the twentieth century. The first is the incontrovertible fact that the overwhelming majority of conflicts since the end of the Second World War have been located in the ‘Third World’. The second is the equally unassailable fact that most conflicts in the ‘Third World’ have been, and are, either primarily intranstate in character or possess a substantial intra-state dimension even if they appear to the outside observer to be inter-state conflicts.

This paper draws heavily upon the analysis in my book The Third World Security Predicament: State-Making, Regional Conflict and the International System (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994). Written under the auspices of the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, the book forms a part of the Institute’s series ‘Emerging global Issues’.

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Notes

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© 1996 The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS)/The Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael

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Ayoob, M. (1996). State-Making, State-Breaking and State Failure: Explaining the Roots of ‘Third World’ Insecurity. In: van de Goor, L., Rupesinghe, K., Sciarone, P. (eds) Between Development and Destruction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24794-3_4

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