The Beginner S Guide To Nation Building

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States, NATO, the United Nations, and a range of other states and nongovernmental organizations have become increasingly involved in nation-building operations. This volume presents a comprehensive history of best practices in nation-building and serves as an indispensable reference for planning future interventions.

This guidebook presents a doctrine for conducting effective nation-building operations. It is designed to be an accessible handbook that describes effective policies for rebuilding a nation after -- and, in some cases, during -- a conflict. It is based on historical research into the conduct of such operations by the United States, Europe, the United Nations, and other states and organizations over the past 60 years. The doctrine identifies the most important components of nation-building operations; describes how these components are interrelated; establishes the best practices, size, and costs associated with each component; and draws upon national, international, and nongovernmental sources of expertise and capacity in each of these fields. The doctrine is prescriptive enough to guide specific operations, but adaptable enough to cover diverse and varied situations worldwide. The guidebook is designed to assist the aspiring nation-builder. It also is intended to assist legislators, journalists, and academics in evaluating current or prospective operations of this sort. It brings together the best practices from the 16 case studies presented in the RAND Corporation's history of nation building, which includes the 2003 "America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq," and the 2005 "The UN's Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq." An additional eight case studies, currently under preparation, also are included in this guidebook.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States, NATO, the United Nations, and a range of other states and nongovernmental organizations have become increasingly involved in nation-building operations. Nation-building involves the use of armed force as part of a broader effort to promote political and economic reforms, with the objective of transforming a society emerging from conflict into one at peace with itself and its neighbors. This guidebook is a practical ?how-to? manual on the conduct of effective nation-building. It is organized around the constituent elements that make up any nation-building mission: military, police, rule of law, humanitarian relief, governance, economic stabilization, democratization, and development. The chapters describe how each of these components should be organized and employed, how much of each is likely to be needed, and the likely cost. The lessons are drawn principally from 16 U.S.- and UN-led nation-building operations since World War II and from a forthcoming study on European-led missions. In short, this guidebook presents a comprehensive history of best practices in nation-building and serves as an indispensable reference for the preplanning of future interventions and for contingency planning on the ground.

Why has the US so dramatically failed in Afghanistan since 2001? Dominant explanations have ignored the bureaucratic divisions and personality conflicts inside the US state. This book rectifies this weakness in commentary on Afghanistan by exploring the significant role of these divisions in the US’s difficulties in the country that meant the battle was virtually lost before it even began. The main objective of the book is to deepen readers understanding of the impact of bureaucratic politics on nation-building in Afghanistan, focusing primarily on the Bush Administration. It rejects the ’rational actor’ model, according to which the US functions as a coherent, monolithic agent. Instead, internal divisions within the foreign policy bureaucracy are explored, to build up a picture of the internal tensions and contradictions that bedevilled US nation-building efforts. The book also contributes to the vexed issue of whether or not the US should engage in nation-building at all, and if so under what conditions.

Nation-building efforts by the United States and the international community have led to both success and failure, overwhelming support and debilitating controversy. Some are motivated by national security interests; others by humanitarian concerns. They seem to have exploded since the end of the Cold War but in fact have long been used as a foreign policy tool. What they all have in common is a substantial investment of troops, treasure and time. There is no formula--each operation is unique, with lessons to be learned and trends noted. Examining the history of America's experience, this book describes the mechanisms behind what often appears to be a haphazard enterprise.

What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this innovative work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups - individuals perceived as an ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state - are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that how a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism.

After two decades of War on Terror, it is particularly important, for both academic and policy purposes, to clearly understand why the US formidable mobilization of means and might has transformed into a such a blatant geostrategic defeat of the US and its allies in the broad Middle East. This is all the more paradoxical that the WOT achieved a series of tactical victories – such as the toppling of hostile regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; the crippling of the national economies of enemy states by sanctions; the successful targeted killing of lead terrorist Usama Bin Laden, ISIS cult leaders Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his successor, etc. So, why have these tactical victories not led to what was supposed to become, according to the US government, a ‘Greater Middle East’? With most authors being from or living in the Middle East, this book is unique as it brings perspectives and answers from the region. This is crucially important as we are entering, we argue, the era of a Post-American Middle East. Chapters 1 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

Based on a case study of the RAND Corporation, this shows how the uncertainties of US defense policies since the fall of the USSR can be understood and illustrated through an analysis of the evolution of the think tank community, and more particularly through a sociological study of the so-called defense intellectuals such as the RAND Corporation.