| Since the end of the Cold War, the terms "failed" and "collapsed state" have captured the imagination of many scholars. Scholars have interpreted state disintegration in Africa and beyond leading to the rise of warlords as international security threats, especially in the post-9/11 context. Accordingly, the reconstruction of crisis-states based on the concept of conflict transformation has become a priority for global governance agents. Promoted by IGOs, NGOs, and Western powers, the blueprint, a multidimensional approach to state reconstruction, underscores conflict transformation in terms of democracy and economic liberalism through power-sharing mechanisms around the negotiating table. This blueprint, however, challenges statehood as most reconstruction programs focus on consensus building and not on statehood. Some local actors adopt the democratizing discourse of the global governance blueprint to advance their agenda at the expense of viable statehood, putting in peril the emergence of a central state with empirical statehood.;This dissertation examines the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone within this context and assesses the likelihood of the emergence of effective statehood in these reconstruction efforts. I argue that the conflict transformation blueprint, focused on liberal values and power-sharing models, only empowered the challengers of the state at the expense of the state: promoting warlords' political interests. Meanwhile, the state suffered a legitimacy deficit due to its low capacity to deliver public goods.;Forceful British intervention in Sierra Leone provided important lessons about the insufficiencies of the neo-liberal blueprint and the importance of timely intervention. With relatively low military mobilization, British forces successfully neutralized the RUF, the main challenger of the state in Sierra Leone. The UN and the US replicated that lesson in Liberia to break the status quo that favored the rebels. Early reconstruction attempts led to centrifugal tendencies, fragmented power between legitimate and illegitimate actors, and crowded the governance space and the authority space.;Alternatively, I propose a centripetal state reconstruction model to resolve the statehood paradoxes of the centrifugal approach to peace. The centripetal model promotes the state's exclusive control over the critical governance functions while sharing the political space with other global governance agents in non-critical functions. |
