One, hundred, thousand shapes of limited statehood
The domestic dimension of sovereignty, or statehood, can take a number of shapes within a continuum punctuated by different degrees of stateâs capacities. Stephen Krasner and Thomas Risse conceptualize statehood as the effective domestic dimension of sovereignty,1 thereby referring to the organization of public authority within a state and its level of effective control.2 At one end of the continuum lies consolidated statehood, which refers to the institutional structure of authority possessing the monopoly of force and the capacity to implement decisions. At the opposite of consolidated statehood lies âlimitedâ statehood, which can manifest itself within a wide range of degrees of intensity and modalities.3 In areas of limited statehood (ALS), the capacity to implement and enforce central decisions is lacking and there is no monopoly of the use of force.4 The restriction of statehood can occur on a sectoral level (only in some policy areas); a territorial level (only on some parts of the territory); a temporal level (only for a certain amount of time); and a social level (only with regard to specific parts of the population).
Given its functionalist but refined understanding of different varieties of statehood, limited statehood represents a potentially useful but under-exploited analytical category which, while not subsuming similar existing approaches such as hybrid governance, hybrid political order, ungoverned spaces and heterarchy, can relate to all of them and provide fruitful cross-fertilizations. Taken together, the articles contained in this Special Issue are an attempt to assess the degree to which such nuanced notions of statehood shed light on the evolving nature of conflict-torn political orders, such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Mali and other polities such as Lebanon and Tunisia, where the role of external actors remains crucial. All articles of the SI engage, in some form or another, with problematizing and questioning conceptualizations of post-Westphalian sovereignty.
We believe ALS could, and should, be further enriched as an analytical approach by an even more systematic dialogue with the above-mentioned approaches. For one thing, âthe limited statehoodâ approach allows to sidestep widely used5 albeit discredited6 notions such as failed or fragile7 state. Thinking in terms of âfailed or failingâ states brings attention to the fact that things are not going âthe way they shouldâ. Initially, the notion challenged the normative idea that a malfunctioning of a state is likely to be a temporary situation â that will soon revert and bring the state back, and questioned the very idea that a state is a monolithic, or even the monolithic, starting point in the study of governance. However, it implicitly created a sort of box where all forms of non-performing states can be stored, regardless of their internal features, history and evolution.8 Particularistic views on the failed state, mostly based on case studies, have challenged the idea that states do not always function, and therefore âfailâ, in the same, or in a similar way.9 Still, despite both empirically based criticisms and those pointing at the Eurocentric and normative bias implicit in this concept, no matter in which way a state âfailsâ to act as a state, it is a âfailed stateâ. And yet, precisely, studies on informal forms of governance and security governance in particular bring our attention to the persistence of informality as a defining feature of many hybrid political orders.10
Our starting assumption for this special issue has been the need to overcome state assessments based on variables linked to strength and weakness, against an ideal-typical, Western-modelled performing state.11 In this respect, several studies on the Arab state have problematized the state as a contested arena for power struggle among a plurality of social forces. The emphasis has been on endogenous factors and Arab agency, even vis-Ă -vis processes of negotiated statehood with external powers. Without delving into a review of the debate over the state and theories of state12 or of the Arab state in particular,13 we are concerned here with how the notion of statehood, especially in the MENA region, despite its continuing salience, remains both elusive and contested and the implications in terms of security dynamics.14
The focus on Arab statehood ties well not just with thinking about statehood in a continuum of more or less consolidated polities in terms of stateâs capacity, but it also allows to link the ALS literature with the critical accounts of analyses of the post-Westphalian international system, supposedly based on equally sovereign states,15 whose sovereignty however is often fragile and where the territorial dimension of it can be spatially or temporally limited.16
As aptly argued by Wendy Brown, namely, âPost-Westphalianâ does not indicate the obsolescence of the nation-state, or the end of the Westphalian state system per se, but rather stands for a âformation that is temporally after but not over that to which it is affixedâ.17 What therefore deserves attention, and further empirical and theoretical reflections, is that states may persist as non-sovereign actors, something which ALS neatly encapsulates. One of the most intriguing aspects to be investigated in this respect is where sovereignty migrates to, which substate or transnational actors exert functions typically pertaining to the sovereign, for instance the exercise and threat of violence. This limited domestic sovereignty, or statehood, can notably manifest itself in hybrid sovereign relations, be it between the state and foreign powers, intervening and interfering to various extent in its domestic affairs, or internally if and when competing actors mobilize and contest the central authority legitimacy or power. In contrast to more classical security governance approaches, referring to ALS â and focusing on the coercive nature of the central authority and its ability to impose and implement decisions, stresses the power dimension over more standard governance-related functions intended as âintentional action towards providing public services for a given communityâ.18
Over the past two decades, the field of governance studies has boomed19 and key adjectives defining specific features of security governance settings have emerged, depicting political phenomena that originate beyond the state level and use institutions other than the official ones, also applied to most of the developing world.20 While, traditionally, a focus on governance is inspired by a functional logic whereby relevant actors are those providing for public goods, no matter what these actorsâ nature is, be they public or private, state or non-state,21 we aim to accommodate this shortcoming by leaving more space to analyses of power relations among security actors, by historically tracing their evolution as their capacity to influence security dynamics changes. What often also lacks in security governance readings are conceptualizations of causal logics explaining under which conditions legitimate governance can be achieved in states with limited sovereignty.22
Interestingly enough, a number of relevant observations have been drawn from literature on rebel, insurgent and real governance.23 As Tilly noticed âeven in zones of civil war and widespread brawling, most people most of the time are interacting in nonviolent waysâ.24 This approach has paved the way to the study of what is now called âreal governanceâ that, in an attempt to go beyond a normative understanding of power to identify, it is intended to explore the actors that participate in the construction of the policy processes on a given territory.25 In order to survive, even insurgent organizations, or governments, need to transform the power of violence into legitimate domination,26 provide a series of services and support to the citizens they intend to attract and ultimately gain legitimacy by the same people they are trying to hijack into a new administrative unit.27 Rebel organizations might want to, as a major strategy, try and win the support of local populations and thus adapt to local beliefs, educate them or at least convince them to take the rebelâs side.28 This is also, in many respects, what any young or new state would have to do to secure support so that already Olson in 1993 had noticed that rebel organizationsâ goals have a tendency to overlap with the ones of embryonic states. In fact, insurgent and rebel governance, it has been argued, has a tendency to replicate the phases and approaches that led to the formation of a state.29
Despite these attempts to provide more politicized accounts of governance, taking into account how the provision of goods can change according to the nature of actors involved, especially in conflict and war-torn contexts,30 notions of governance in more peaceful political orders have struggled to effectively capture the dimension of power politics implicit in many â supposedly empirical â configurations of order. The vertical dimension of power and the provision of public goods, in particular, can be regarded as pertaining to two different conceptual spheres, statehood and governance. This is what we a...
