Nation-building as necessary effort in fragile states / René Grotenhuis

Includes bibliographical references and index

Struggling in the world of nation-states -- Nation and state -- Fragility: a donor's concept but not far from reality -- Nation-building: sovereignty and citizenship -- Nation-building and state-building and the challenge of fragility -- Peacemaking as the preliminary step towards nation-building and state-building -- The Scylla and Charybdis of nation-building -- Nation-building: identity and identification, process and content -- National identity: a model and its content -- A program for nation-building in fragile states -- Epilogue: the challenges of fragility -- and the beginning of an answer

Policies intended to bring stability to fragile states tend to focus almost exclusively on building institutions and systems to get governance right. Simply building the state is often seen as sufficient for making it stable and legitimate. But policies like these, René Grotenhuis shows in this book, ignore the question of what makes people belong to a nation-state, arguing that issues of identity, culture, and religion are crucial to creating the sense of belonging and social cohesion that a stable nation-state requires