State Formation
Authors: Bliesemann de Guevara Berit , Lottholz Philipp 
Published: September 2015

The term state formation is most commonly used to describe the long-term processes that led to the genesis of modern political domination in the form of the territorial sovereign state. In a few works, the terms state-building, nation-building, or institution-building are used synonymously with state formation. In the social sciences mainstream literature, modern state formation is understood to have originated in Europe and expanded to other world regions through European colonialism and the later integration of postcolonial states into the international state system. This literature has reconstructed modern state formation in Europe and the parallel formation of the international system of states as a complex directional but non-steered historical process, which comprises different central elements. These include, most importantly, the monopolization and institutionalization of the legitimate means of violence and various functions carried out on this basis, such as taxation, social ordering and policing, and maintenance and use of military capacities; the successive democratization of these monopolies; the bureaucratization, rationalization, and depersonalization of rule; the idea of territorial boundaries of state rule coupled with the idea of state sovereignty; symbolic practices meant to ensure the legitimacy of state domination; the embedding of these processes into the expansion of capitalism as a dominant form of economic reproduction; and the emergence of classes and nations. The predominant consensus in this literature is that, in other world regions, modern state institutions were mostly first introduced by European colonial rule, but coalesced with local forms of political organization in a number of ways. The trajectories of colonial and postcolonial state formation have therefore differed from the European experience and brought about different types of modern states, such as the developmental state, the neopatrimonial state, or the socialist-bureaucratic state. As part of these developments, informal states, which show a de facto character of statehood but lack formal international recognition, represent another form of modern state formation. Critics of the Eurocentric view on modern state formation have argued that the state has a much longer trajectory than the focus on modernity would suggest and that it can be understood only through a long-term historical perspective (Braudel’s longue durée). Others have pointed to the often-neglected oriental influences on occidental state formation. These critical perspectives, which come from diverse fields in history and the humanities and within critical and decolonial approaches in social and political inquiry, are entangled with wider debates on concepts such as modernity, capitalism, empires, and civilizations. Since the mid-1990s, state formation has also been discussed as a concept describing the effects of the politics of state-building, a central aim and instrument of many contemporary international military and civilian interventions, on the recipient states. Here, state formation is used to differentiate the multiple intended and unintended effects of international military and civilian interventions on the de-/institutionalization dynamics of states from their stated goals.