Introduction

This chapter develops a critical history of the contemporary uses of state-building and ‘democracy-building’ as frameworks governing increasingly intensive interventions in the politics of post-colonial societies (so called ‘post-conflict peace-building’). It builds this history by situating the emergence of these concepts and programmes within the history of American political science, and within geopolitical history of the last twenty years. The chapter points to an analogy between imperial liberal reform and contemporary notions of state-building, which have in common a notion of ‘politics as technology’.

Politics as technology and imperial liberal reform

In The Social Contract, Rousseau ponders the problem of creating new political orders – new states. The pressing question is: who is capable of devising rules and institutions for another people? The task of the legislator (lawgiver) is to design a new order suited to the needs of the population based on sound principles of political theory, in order to be both stable and reasonably just. To answer this question, Rousseau retreats to an Archimedean point outside society, from which a ‘superior intelligence’ could behold ‘all the passions of men without experiencing any of them’. It would take gods to give men laws. For Rousseau this proposition is not a statement of absurdity. Rather, in a metaphorical transposition the lawgiver is equated with an engineer who ‘invents the machine’. Politics is a mechanism that first had to be invented and designed, and then engineered, calibrated and measured.