STATE BUILDING OR STATE TRANSFORMATION?
R
ISK MANAGEMENT AT THE FRINGES OF THE GLOBAL ORDER
S
HAHAR HAMEIRI
BA

(H
ONOURS
)
class="bi xf y50 w2 h5"
v
Abstract
This thesis develops a new framework for explaining the effects and possible

political rule, both within and between states.

vi
Table of Contents
Abstract v

Table of Contents vi

Abbreviations viii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

Case study selection and approach
8

Chapter One

Contemporary Approaches to State Building and Their Limitations:
Towards a New Framework 13

Introduction
13

Evaluating the effects of state building interventions: Current debates and their
limitations
15

The capacity building debate

Conclusion
74

Chapter Three

The Emergence of State Building: State Transformation and the
Globalisation of Risk 77

Introduction
77

The failure of the humanitarian interventions of the early 1990s
81

The return to the state in development theory and policy
88

Neoliberalism and the transformation of Western states
96

The globalisation of risk and the localisation of risk management
104

Conclusion
110

Chapter Four

Who Intervenes and Why? State Transformation and Meta-
Governance 113

in the Australian State’s New Regional Frontier 143

Introduction
143

The Australian state and the Australian Federal Police
146

The neoliberalisation of the Australian state: disaggregation and new modes of
coordination
147

Whole of government and the Australian national security apparatus
151

The AFP’s new policy role and accountability requirements
153

The International Deployment Group and the Australian state’s new frontiers

159

The contours of the Australian state’s regionalisation
160

The AFP and Australian regionalisation
168

IDG operations and the limits to regulatory regionalisation in practice
171

Introduction
219

Cambodia’s regime of ‘transformed’ patronage
223

International intervention and political liberalisation in Cambodia
232

State building in Cambodia: good governance, coordination and the
consolidation of Hun Sen’s rule
239

Conclusion
253

Conclusion 255

Bibliography 261

viii
Abbreviations
ADB Asian Development Bank
ADF Australian Defence Force
AFP Australian Federal Police
ANU Australian National University
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations

GDP Gross domestic product
GEMAP Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program
GTZ German Technical Cooperation
ICC International consultancy company
ICIS S International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
IDC Interdepartmental committee
IDG International Deployment Group
IFI International financial institution
IFM Isatabu Freedom Movement
IMF International Monetary Fund
INGO International nongovernmental organisation
INTOS AI International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions
JMI Joint monitoring indicators
KPNLF Khmer People’s National Liberation Front
LICU S Low-income countries under stress
MEF Malaita Eagle Force
MINUSTAH United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti
MoFT Ministry of Finance and Treasury
NAA National Audit Authority
NIE New Institutional Economics
NGO Nongovernmental organisation
NPM New public management
NSC National Security Committee of Cabinet
NSS National Security Strategy
NT Northern Territory
OAG Office of the Auditor-General
ODA Official development assistance
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
PAC Public Accounts Committee

UNSC United Nations Security Council
UNTAC United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia
US United States
USAID United States Agency for International Development
WofG Whole of government

xi
Acknowledgements
When I submit this thesis only one name will be printed under the (admittedly long)
title. However, it would not have come about without the support, knowledge and
energy of the people mentioned below. It is often said that writing a thesis is a lonely
task, but I am glad to say that my experience has been a different one. The past three
years have been exceptionally eventful. In February 2007 my wife, Meggan, and I
celebrated the birth of our firstborn son, Joshua, while in July 2008, we were overjoyed
at the arrival of his brother, Theo. Somehow, between dirty nappies and sleepless nights
I managed to write a thesis and a few articles, and have some fun in the process too!
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of academic supervisors to thesis-
writing. I feel that I have been particularly fortunate to have on my side two fantastic
supervisors, Professor Garry Rodan and Dr Kanishka Jayasuriya. For Garry and
Kanishka academic work is not a job, but a vocation. Their genuine intellectual
curiosity and rigour have been truly inspirational to this young(ish) would-be academic.
Garry and Kanishka did more then help me write a thesis – they welcomed me into an
intellectual community and made me feel part of the team from day one. I cannot count
the number of times we chatted casually in the corridor about work-related and other
issues. Few postgraduates have had a similar relationship with their academic
supervisors. For all they have done to make this thesis happen and make me the
researcher I am today, I am deeply grateful.
There are numerous colleagues that I would like to thank for their help in
preparing the thesis and, perhaps more importantly, for their friendship. At the Asia
Research Centre, my intellectual home for the past four years (I also wrote my honours

contrary is true…), but for enriching my life and making me happier way beyond any
scholarly achievement.
The last person I would like to thank on these pages deserves my deepest
gratitude. My wife, Meggan, is the one that started me on the path to this PhD years
ago, and even though she might have come to regret it a couple of times (or more…) I
hope she is proud now. Meggan has always reminded me what life is all about and has
filled my days with love and joy. For that I am eternally grateful.

Shahar Hameiri
Perth, Western Australia, January 2009. I
NTRODUCTION1
Introduction
In the post-Cold War years, but particularly since the September 11 2001 terrorist
attacks in the United States (US), the postcolonial state and the functioning of its
institutions have become primary security concerns for policymakers in the world’s
major states and multilateral organisations. Initially, failed and fragile states were
viewed mainly in relation to humanitarian crises, economic development prospects and
human rights violations. However, in the course of the 1990s they have come to be seen
as constituting considerable risk to states and societies many kilometres away, due to
the perception that the absence or poor functioning of governance structures of a
particular kind increases the likelihood of transnational risks, such as terrorism,

White House, ‘National Security Strategy of the United States’, Washington DC: White House,
September 2002, p. 1.
2
Annan, Kofi, ‘Transcript of Press Conference by Secretary-General Kofi Annan at United Nations
Headquarters’, United Nations, 21 March 2005, available at
< accessed 31 October 2008.
3
Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992).
4
Fukuyama, Francis, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century
(London: Profile Books, 2005), p. xvii.
5
Rotberg, Robert I., ‘The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention and Repair’, in
When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, edited by Robert I. Rotberg (N e w Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004), pp. 1-45, p. 42.
I
NTRODUCTION2
sentiment in claiming: ‘A consensus is now emerging that only sovereign states—b y
which we mean states that actually perform the functions that make them sovereign—
will allow human progress to continue.’
6

As such, there has been a massive influx of practitioner and scholarly interest in
developing suitable and successful approaches to international state building. State
building has to a considerable extent come to replace or greatly transform the earlier
concern in the post-Cold War era with ‘building’ the ‘peace’ in post-conflict states and
societies.

7
Bendaña, Alejandro, ‘From Peace-Building to State-Building: One Step Forward and Two Backwards?’,
paper presented at the Nation-Building, State-Building and International Intervention: Between
'Liberation' and Symptom Relief, Paris, 15 October 2004.
8
See Barnett, Michael, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O’Donnell and Laura Sitea, ‘Peacebuilding: What is in a
Name?’, Global Governance 13, no. 1 (2007), pp. 35-58.
9
As Oliver Richmond notes, peace has recently become synonymous with governance and the existence
of governance structures of a particular kind. In this sense, the meaning of peacebuilding and state
building has largely merged. Richmond, Oliver, The Transformation of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), p. 69.
10
Bickerton, Christopher J., ‘State-Building: Exporting State Failure’, in Politics without Sovereignty: A
Critique of Contemporary International Relations, edited by Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe
and Alexander Gourevitch (London: University College Press, 2007), pp. 93-111, p. 93.
I
NTRODUCTION3
institutional, legal and procedural conceptions of statehood and thus tend to mask the
inherently political and ideological underpinnings of all projects of state construction
and reconstruction, whether internally or externally driven, as well as the conflict-ridden
and dynamic nature of such processes. They also reify rigid dichotomies, such as
domestic-external, state-society, formal-informal and public-private, that are drawn
along formal institutional and jurisdictional lines. By focusing on the links between
state building and capacity building, state building and sovereignty, or indeed capacity
and sovereignty, the literature on state building misses the crucial political nature of
contemporary SBIs – the ways in which they affect the distribution, production and

1990).
I
NTRODUCTION4
governance opened up within or near the domestic governance apparatus of intervened
states and into the hands of experts and managers who are not politically or popularly
accountable. While such emerging governance arrangements are inherently hierarchical,
in that they are structured to preference particular political outcomes and interests over
others, SBIs almost without exception preserve the formal-legal sovereignty and
territorial integrity of intervened states. Indeed, SBIs are also found outside the state, in
the shape of more traditional forms of diplomatic-international interactions between
sovereign governments or multilateral organisations. This unique ‘multilevel’ character
of SBIs – simultaneously within and without the state – is important to understand and
theorise in order to make sense of the potential trajectories of particular interventions
and the broader implications of this mode of governance for the emerging global order.
Crucially, rather than manifestations of an already consolidated post-Cold War
global order – defined by either Westphalian pluralism or new imperialism – SBIs are
part of the very process by which this global order is being defined, resisted, extended
and modified. Because this process is very much contested, learning about the nature,
scope, trajectories, and most importantly, the limitations of interventions in the world’s
‘fringes’
12
is a particularly useful way of understanding the dynamics of the emerging
post-Cold War global order and its implications for states, societies and political agency
more broadly. Indeed, this study demonstrates that SBIs are dynamic and often
innovative forms of rule that can produce political outcomes that greatly diverge from
those anticipated by their planners and implementers. This ‘inside-out’ approach stands
in contrast to more prevalent ‘outside-in’ approaches, that seek to understand

It is structured to address these
issues by developing a theoretical and conceptual framework for examining
contemporary SBIs, as well as providing three case studies that each examine a different
dimension of the ways in which these interventions transform the state.
After critically evaluating the existing literature on state building and outlining
the theoretical premises of the thesis in Chapter One, I proceed in Chapter Two to
provide a conceptual framework for understanding the complex governance terrain
opened up by SBIs and its relationships with other levels of governance, above and
below the state. SBIs are conceptualised as multilevel regimes – sets of social and
political relationships, institutions and ideas – that exist simultaneously inside and
outside intervened states. However, SBIs never operate in a social and political vacuum
– intervention regimes tend to coexist and come into conflict with other regimes within
the state, which have different support-bases and ideational underpinnings. Such
conflicts may have transformative effects on all regimes within the state and hence on
the nature of emergent forms of political rule.
In Chapter Three I examine the historical conjuncture within which this form of
intervention has emerged. Four interrelated historical developments are identified as
particularly pertinent – the perceived failure of the UN-led humanitarian interventions
of the 1990s; the evolution in market-led approaches to development towards greater
focus on the state and the quality of institutions as determinants of successful
development outcomes; the ongoing transformation of the Western state after three
decades of neoliberalisation, and the associated shift away from government and the
politics of interest-representation to governance and the politics of values; and finally,
the supposed emergence of existential global-transnational risks and the reorientation of
policymaking towards managing and containing risks of various kinds. By relating SBIs 13
The development of this set of questions has been influenced by Snyder’s critique of the
democratisation literature’s obsession with examining and evaluating the institutional outputs of

its implications for intervention objectives and organisation. The chapter focuses on the
recent transformation and expansion of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) as a way of
understanding the emergence of a new partly (and strategically) deterritorialised,
‘regional’, frontier of the Australian state, located within Australia’s neighbouring states
of the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. Within this new frontier, whose
fluctuating outlines the AFP not only polices but also to a considerable extent defines,
Australian security is portrayed as contingent on the quality of the domestic governance
of neighbouring states, thereby creating linkages between the hitherto domestic
governing apparatus of the Australian state and those of other countries. This allows for
the rearticulation of the problems affecting intervened states and societies – indeed,
their very social and political structures – in the depoliticised terms of the breakdown of
‘law and order’ and the absence of ‘good governance’, which not only rationalises
emergency interventions to stabilise volatile situations, but also delegitimises and
I
NTRODUCTION7
potentially criminalises oppositional forms of politics. The AFP’s transnational policing
activities also open up a field of multilevel governance within the apparatus of
intervened states that exists in separation from international and domestic law, thereby
leaving intact the legal distinction between the domestic and international spheres and
circumventing the difficult issue of sovereignty. As a result, police obtain discretionary
ordering powers, without dislodging the sovereign governments of those countries.
Chapter Six focuses on intervention regimes. It examines the limits of the
interveners’ efforts to routinise political outcomes by constraining the political choices
of domestic leaders through the example of the Regional Assistance Mission to
Solomon Islands (RAMSI) – an extensive and expensive Australian-led state building
exercise, under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). RAMSI has often been
lauded a great success and a model for good practice for other state builders to follow,

also provided new opportunities for regime consolidation. Indeed, the two seemingly
conflicting regimes of patronage and intervention are highly compatible in their
disempowering effect on the emergence of meaningful political and civil oppositions.
This is because both regimes, implicitly or explicitly, advance anti-competitive and
hierarchical visions of social and political organisation as essential for Cambodia’s
stability and future development, as well as act, in different ways, to curb unregulated
political mobilisation. I conclude the chapter by arguing that since the conditions
supportive of ‘effective’ governance, as it is understood by interveners, do not exist in
Cambodia and are unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future, international state
building, by attempting to depoliticise policymaking, has ironically ended up
strengthening a radically different and repressive political order.
In sum, this thesis presents and develops an analytical framework that enables us
to critically evaluate and explain the trajectories of contemporary SBIs. These
interventions are examined as dynamic, new forms of political rule in the global
political economy that are transformative of the state. By deploying the analytical and
conceptual tools elaborated herein, we are able to determine how these interventions
affect key issues relating to the exercise and distribution of power in today’s world:
Who exercises it and how? Who supports it? And who resists it, how and why?
Ultimately, my investigation establishes that contemporary state building – whether
successful or otherwise in achieving its stated objectives – is associated with the
emergence of increasingly authoritarian, hierarchical and anti-competitive forms of
political rule, both within and between states.

Case study selection and approach
The examination of contemporary SBIs in this thesis employs a qualitative methodology
that draws upon primary and secondary research materials and is disciplined towards
answering the research questions outlined above. Secondary research materials, full
citations for which are provided in the bibliography section, include a wide array of
academic, governmental, organisational, and media sources. Primary research material
was derived from interviews conducted in Solomon Islands, the Australian capital city,

travel. Nevertheless, as I argue in the respective chapters, these examples are
particularly pertinent to sustaining the broader theoretical argument in that all were at
different times held up by important observers as examples for good international
practice to be emulated by state builders elsewhere.
The AFP was selected as a way of examining the transformation of the
intervening state and its relationship with the emergence of non-traditional intervention
actors, which operate in new transnationalised spaces of governance. The AFP’s rapid
expansion from a relatively small domestic law enforcement agency to now include the
well-funded International Deployment Group (IDG) – a quasi-gendarmerie force that
operates transnationally – serves to illustrate SBIs’ nature, not as a new kind of peace
I
NTRODUCTION10
operation, but as a new mode of governance which confounds traditional notions of
statehood. While the AFP’s new structure and capacities are currently unique, the
agency’s transformation has attracted considerable positive international attention, as
the unusually high number of international visitors to the IDG’s training compound
outside Canberra attests. For this chapter I interviewed AFP federal agents at
management and policy levels, as well as police officers on the ground in Solomon
Islands and Cambodia. These interviews were essential for gaining a sense of how
people within the AFP understand their new roles, as well as their organisation’s
relationship with other state building agencies, the Australian government and the
governments of the states in which they operate. I also spoke to people from other
agencies who work with AFP personnel at various levels, such as the Australian Agency
for International Development and the Australian Defence Force.
RAMSI was selected as an example of an intervention regime since it represents
one of the most ambitious attempts to-date at developing a coordinated response to state
fragility. RAMSI was lauded on a number of occasions by the Organisation of

Finally, Cambodia was selected as an example for the kind of state emerging
under conditions of heightened transnationalisation because of its long and extensive
history of international intervention from the early 1990s. In fact, few other countries
have had similar levels of sustained intervention over the past two decades.
15
This
allows for a historical examination of the emergence of different regimes within the
state, including the state building regime, the interrelations between these regimes, and
the consequences for the distribution and production of political power. In Cambodia I
interviewed numerous officials from donor agencies, as well as contractors working on
specific projects and their Cambodian counterparts. I also spoke to NGO workers,
academics and journalists. Interviewing Cambodian government ministers or high level
politicians proved very difficult, but relevant quotes from them were sufficiently
available through secondary sources to substantiate my arguments.


traditional ‘non-intervention’ variant. The sovereignty debate is intrinsically linked to
the debate on capacity building, since the main point of contention is whether
independent political agency should be contingent upon an empirically observable
capacity for acceptable standards of governance.
1
This is not to suggest that the effects
of interventions on more immediate issues, such as violent conflict and humanitarian
crises, have been entirely ignored. However, while violent conflict has concerned some
observers, this is usually within a framework that sees a hierarchical relationship
between capacity building and conflict management or resolution;
2
or as Oliver
Richmond puts it, ‘[d]ealing with conflict [is] now [seen to] depend upon the reform of
governance by an alliance of actors which become custodians of the liberal peace.’
3

In contrast, I argue that while there are important divergences within the
literature, both debates are misplaced. The emphasis, rather, has to shift from capacity
and sovereignty – concepts which essentially represent institutional and legal
benchmarks – to the ways in which interventions affect the distribution and
production/reproduction of political power in intervened states. Hence, the key thematic 1
Clapham, for example, argues for capacity to become the only parameter for sovereignty; Clapham,
Christopher, ‘Degrees of Statehood’, Review of International Studies 24, no. 2 (1998), pp. 143-57.
2
See for example, Arnson, Cynthia J., ‘The Political Economy of War: Situating the Debate’, in
Rethinking the Economics of War: The Intersection of Need, Creed, and Greed, edited by Cynthia J.
Arnson and I. William Zartman (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005), pp. 1-22, p.