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Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective: Social Foundations of Institutional Order . By Marcus J. Kurtz . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013. 282p. $90.00 cloth, 29.99 paper.
Book Reviews: Comparative Politics
Weak states--in which corruption supplants the rule of law, state agencies have limited regulatory capacity, the state cannot fund itself through its own taxation efforts, and public officials provide few public goods--are associated with poor economic growth, a higher propensity for internal violence, and, in democracies, institutions that neither represent the public interest nor hold powerful officeholders accountable. Many political scientists and policymakers draw on a superficial understanding of the postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan to urge external intervention to build weak states and install the rule of law, either indirectly, via expert assistance and foreign aid conditionality, or directly, via large-scale intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scholars working on the seemingly obscure topic of "state building" have not been public participants in this policy debate. Yet their findings are crucial, for despite their many methodological and theoretical differences, their scholarship has established that state building is an inordinately long and arduous process marked by bloody conflicts and frequent failures. Most scholars agree that European state building was rooted in nonreplicable initial conditions, that conditions prevalent in the developing world are fall less conducive to successful state building, and that external intervention is a risky venture with little prospect of success.
Marcus J. Kurtz's Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective echoes these findings, but with an innovative approach that differs from existing theories in three important ways. First, rather than focusing on the contrast between strong European states and weak states in the postcolonial world, Kurtz analyzes the determinants of relative degrees of state strength within Latin America. Second, he vigorously rejects reigning approaches based on the catalytic role of warfare or the institutionally infirming role of...