This article explores the League of Nations' role in state formation in Third World or peripheral states and its legacy for contemporary understandings of Third World sovereignty. It examines Iraq under British Mandate, and UN and Coalition of the Willing interventions. This research was prompted by the international-law community's outrage when the Coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. While the invasion was seen by many as an affront to international law, there was also something faintly familiar about the Coalition's reasoning for the invasion. This feeling of déjà vu escalated once regime change was followed by lengthy nation-building. The idea of recreating Iraq was not a new one. The British were tasked with something similar under the League of Nations Mandate System. UN interventions into failed states also attempt comparable transformations. Indeed, the more one contemplates international law's interventions in Iraq, the less shocking the Coalition's invasion becomes. It starts seeming foreseeable and even inevitable.

The famous dictum that ‘war makes states’ has received renewed interest with the experience of state failure and state collapse in many parts of the Developing World. Historical studies have shown that the activity of war-making was an essential ingredient of the process of state-making in early modern Europe. The history of state-making in the Arab Middle East shows that rentier states defy the ‘war makes states’ theory. This article compares four states from the Arab world, two having been exposed to the experience of war-making (Iraq and Jordan) and two not (the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia). The comparison of these four states shows that rentierism serves as an obstacle to the formation of legitimate and institutionalized states. However, the availability of external rents also allows state institutions and patronage channels to continue providing general welfare. Thus, rentierism produces a twin phenomenon of state weakness and life support for potentially failed states. It is only when war-making is employed in rentier states as a strategy of state-making that states fail and break.