Quotes About State-building

More than generating mere accounting, these state-building practices sought eventually to replace traditional local relationships of power with new loyalties that tied individuals to the central state. To do so, however, meant breaking the traditional political dominance exercised by regional powerbrokers, the local nobility.

State-building can not be imposed. Its foundation must be a shared understanding between those who govern, and those who give their consent to be governed - the 'deal' between citizen and state.

Peacemaking and democratic state-building require blood and magic.

At the heart of each of these mass atrocities, he argues, was a state-building project in which traitorous inconvenient minorities were perceived as a threat and ultimately were destroyed.