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"Presenting case studies and comparisons across seven countries, this book addresses key questions as to the nature of state fragility, policies used to mitigate it, assessment of outcomes and prospects. It offers a novel empirical contribution in examining a range of distinct but interdependent dimensions of state fragility, not only focusing on questions of state legitimacy, capacity and authority, but also involving the economy and resilience to political and economic shocks, as well as at vital questions of context and diversity. Examining Afghanistan, Lebanon, Burundi, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea and Rwanda within the context of their different local circumstances, and within broader questions of global security, the book identifies unique factors that have played a part in their specific context and explores key drivers and dominant features. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of state fragility and more broadly to students of politics, public policy, development studies, state-society relations, political economy, state building, peace and conflict studies, international studies, security studies regional studies., as well as NGOs and international organizations"--

Aid and state building -- Why are state revenue sources relevant? -- Tax states -- Aid-dependent states -- The effects of oil revenue -- Distinction between aid and oil-revenue rentier effects -- Conclusion -- Reliance on external revenue : Afghanistan from 1747 to 2000 -- The society : an inheritance of history -- Relying on tribute for state building : the importance of external revenue to the Durrani empire (1747-1824) -- The Durrani empire ineffective tax system -- Subsidies and state building : the loss of tribute and search for alternative revenue (1824-1879) -- Institution building -- Consolidation of a modern buffer state (1880-1919) : the significance of subsidies and external military support -- And military administration -- State-society relations -- Amanullah Khan's reforms : the loss of subsidies, budget surplus and fiscal decline (1919-1929) -- Foreign aid and state building : reshaping the state building process (1929-1978) -- The rise of a weak aid-based rentier state -- Decline in foreign aid -- The state and the Mujahidin Tanzims (organizations) and sources of revenue : conflict in state-society relations (1978-2000) -- The Mujahidin government financial crises and Pakistani aid to the Taliban -- Conclusion -- Rebuilding an aid-based rentier state -- Establishing a new political order -- Building the state institutions -- Responding to the flow of aid -- Chaotic aid coordination : a challenge for state building -- Access to foreign aid : a prime focus -- Improving fiscal management -- Aid modality : undermining institution building -- Government preoccupation with foreign donors -- Relations at the administration level -- Relations in regard to senior appointments -- Conclusion -- Reforms and setbacks : rebuilding the revenue system -- State revenue sources -- Aiding the revenue reforms -- Reforming revenue policy and laws -- Reforming revenue administration -- Improving revenue infrastructure -- Confrontation and consultation -- Failing to enforce tax compliance -- Failing to prevent illegal taxation and extortion -- Ambiguity to end aid-dependency -- Fragmenting the tax system -- Conclusion -- Budget spending : fiscal fragmentation and patronage -- Some improvements in government budget transparency -- The citizen's role -- Underreported on-budget items -- Poor off-budget transparency -- Secret cash payments -- Conclusion -- Interactions between the state and society -- Reinforcing the state-society inherited gap -- Commanders -- Traditional actors -- Urban intelligentsia -- Reshaping the state-society relations -- Building and undermining the state -- Conclusion -- Conclusion : findings and implications -- Path dependency : Afghan state reliance on external revenue -- Building and undermining the state : Afghanistan after 9/11 -- Upward accountability to donors -- Creating a parallel public sector -- Paradoxical tax outcomes -- Divergence in state-society fiscal relations -- The future -- Implications fo externally aided state building.

Foreign aid plays a crucial role in the process of building fragile states, so it is vital to understand its effects. Afghanistan provides a prime case study. Following the removal of the Taliban regime by the US-led military intervention in late 2001, it has received unprecedented amounts in aid donations, with the US alone, after adjusting for inflation, appropriating $109 billion to reconstruct the country. This book examines how foreign aid has affected Afghanistan's weak state since the US intervention in late 2001 until the end of President Karzai's first term in 2009. It argues that the relationship between aid and state building is highly complex and that the effects of aid on weak states depends on donors' interests, aid modality and the recipient's pre-existing institutional and socio-political conditions. In the case of Afghanistan, the book claims that it inherited conditions that were not favourable for effective state building. Although some of the problems that emerged in the post-2001 state building process were predictable, the types of intervention that occurred--including the aid architecture which largely bypassed the state, the subordination of state building to the war on terror, and donors and domestic policy choices--decreased the effectiveness of the use of aid and thus contributed to maintaining a weak state. The book also explores how aid dependency and aid distribution outside the government budget affected the interactions between the state and society. Unprecedented attempts of state building and the massive flow of aid in post-9/11 Afghanistan makes an in-depth study of this country crucial for understanding the effects of aid on building fragile states.

This article examines post-2001 state-building in Afghanistan. In so doing, it explores how interactions among aid, politics, and state capacity shaped the characteristics of the state by looking at the existing conditions, sources of state income, the development planning process, aid coordination and alignment, and interventions in building state capacity.

What drives improvements in the budget transparency of fragile states? By investigating the dynamics of budget transparency in post 9/11 Afghanistan, this paper demonstrates that factors such as budget reforms, aid conditionality, legislature and civil society (and media) demands for information partially explain the improvements in budget transparency, as measured by Open Budget Index. It is important how these factors interact. Government ownership, continuity and stakeholders' interests thus matter. Budget transparency tends to improve when the government leads the budget reforms, continuity in the reforms exists and multiple actors' interests - government, legislature, donors and civil society - are aligned and reinforce the transparency efforts. This paper may offer two main lessons for fragile states. Firstly, the implementation of governance reforms, though complex, is possible in fragile states. When stakeholders easily understand a set of reforms, ownership is clearly defined and actors have consensus about the expected outcomes, the likelihood of success tends to be high. Secondly, as spending through the recipient budget tend to be more transparent than donors direct spending, as far as concern about transparency, it is more efficient for donors to channel a greater portion of their aid through the recipient budget.

Under what conditions does foreign aid in a post-conflict environment foster state building and consolidation? This paper argues that in the aftermath of war for an aid regime to reinforce state building it needs to ensure continuity in strength of the state and to use recipient mechanisms and finance policies that generate a greater state capacity. The existence and continuity of a Weberian state increases the likelihood of effective state building, regardless of the aid regime. If the state is a relatively strong state with a Weberian bureaucracy, aid can further reinforce it when aid is spent through national systems, with efforts to ensure that the recipient leaders reinforce state effectiveness by implementing policies that require greater state capacity. However, even under more adverse initial conditions - a neo-patrimonial state - the aid regime and state building strategy matter. Under these conditions aid undermines state building if it induces discontinuity in the existing state capacity and creates parallel institutions to those of the state. With these policies, leaders will be preoccupied with the politics of patronage that maintain a weak state. Evidence for this argument is provided through pairwise comparison of state building patterns between South Korea and Taiwan, on the one hand, and Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other. These countries received significant amounts of aid in different periods; their situations differed on the key variables of my theory; and they achieved diverse results.