War Making and State Making in Pakistan

Abstract

Since Charles Tilly’s (1985) articulation of stage-wise development of modern European state through war making, a large body of scholarship has attempted to elaborate on a similar process in developing world (Rasler and Thompson 1985, 1989; Mann 1988; Kirby and Ward 1991; Jagger 1992; Stubbs 1999; Bates, 2001). This scholarship demonstrates affirmative positive connections between war making and state building in developing countries. Another offshoot of this scholarship goes to the extent of claiming that the absence (of threat) of war or inter-national rivalry might lead to a relatively weak state (Desch 1996; Herbst 2000; Lustick 1997). The primary argument of this approach—the bellicist approach—is that warfare stimulates state building: the centralization of state power, the building of institutional capacity, and the generation of resources. However, a number of scholars have also critiqued the approach, especially in the context of Latin America that is rife with wars and internal revolts, that Tilly’s model does not re-produce itself in developing countries (Lopez-Alves 2000, Centeno 2002). In this theoretical and empirical context, we study the case of Pakistan, which we believe exhibits obvious connection between war making and state-building. We argue the conventional wars did produce stimulus for state building, but that the unconventional wars did not. The latter put the state astride a vicious cycle of only war making, which it is feared might end up in state failure