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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For details of this argument and the data on which it is based, see Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
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As Seyom Brown has pointed out, the intellectual position that’ servicing... basic human rights is the principal task of human polities, and that the worth of any polity is a function of how well it performs this task, has put the legitimacy of all extant polities up for grabs, so to speak. Whether particular nation-states, and the prevailing territorial demarcations, do indeed merit the badge of political legitimacy is, according to this view, subject to continuing assessment; accordingly, neither today’s governments nor today’s borders are sacrosanct.’ Seyom Brown, International Relations in a Changing Global System: Toward a Theory of the World Polity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), p. 126.
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For example, Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1988).
For an insightful analysis of the nexus between international migration on the one hand and security and stability on the other, see Myron Weiner, ‘Security, Stability, and International Migration’, International Security, vol. 17, no. 3, winter 1992–93, pp. 91–126
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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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