Editors' foreword.

States have long been a central unit of analysis for political scientists and a focal point for policy making. But recent trends in world politics have affected our appreciation of the role of the state. What purposes do states serve for us today and what does this imply for "state building"? This issue of the Journal approaches state building as a multidimensional problem. One dimension is international, in which transitional or nascent governments work to assert their sovereignty within international society. Another is domestic, and concerns the development and extension of capable institutions that can govern within a given territory. There is no set sequence to these processes, as each state building project faces a unique array of international and domestic challenges.

This collection of articles attempts to inform and, at times, challenge the current thinking on the topic. We present a broad array of cases from different regions, different time periods, and with differing results. Cases include Afghanistan, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Israel and Palestine among others.

Lisa Anderson's essay frames the issue by asking why states have emerged as a dominant form of human organization. She reveals how ethnic and religious communities often provide alternative forms of civic identity, but also how the transition from a state-based system to one more accommodating to such alternatives could prove costly and complicated. Joel Migdal also discusses the challenge to convincing citizens of the primacy of national identity over other forms of political or social organization. But in reviewing the history of older states, namely the US and Israel, he discovers that these problems are nothing new. While Anderson and Migdal explain why states have outpaced competing forms of organization, Rosemary Shinko uses the example of Palestine to examine how international society may actively deny aspirations toward statehood.

Societal cleavages pose major challenges to the state building process. Samuel Issacharoff shows how constitutional reform may be used to protect group rights in deeply divided societies and argues that these strategies have important implications for a government's ability to withstand political shocks. He is skeptical about the resilience of the ethnic power-sharing model in Bosnia, but is more hopeful about the South African constitutional system because of its restrictions on majority rule. Similarly...

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