Summary
The donor and international-agency project of building state institutions — and, in Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, the project into which the Palestinian struggle for Self-determination was confined after Oslo, and whose neo-Weberian theory Adam Hanieh criticizes (Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, PDF p.25-26, p.49-51).
Details
- After Oslo the Palestinian official narrative shifted from decolonization to state-building: the Palestinian Authority focused on behaving as a state in order to be recognized as one, and the Fayyad government (2007) confined self-determination to a neoliberal state defined by Washington’s conception of good governance — law and order, institution-building and fiscal transparency for a vibrant private sector — producing a statehood “not based on sovereignty but on management of financial resources and credible claims to management of an uncertain future”, as quoted from Stamatopoulou-Robbins (PDF p.25-26).
- The general literature (Hanieh): a successful state is assessed by authority, capacity and legitimacy, on a neo-Weberian definition of the state by its monopoly of legitimate physical force within a territory; states lacking the balance are classed weak, fragile, fragmented or stressed (PDF p.51).
- In Palestine, donor support focused on the PNA’s capacity and authority — above all security, the largest PRDP allocation at 257 million dollars — conceived as ensuring Israeli security (PDF p.52-53).
- Hanieh’s critique: the neo-Weberian conception separates state from society and abstracts class power; the state is a form of appearance of capitalist social relations, so the operative questions are authority in whose hands, capacity to do what and in whose interest, legitimacy in whose eyes (PDF p.55-56).
Related pages
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, Liberal peace, Methodological nationalism, Palestinian Authority, Adam Hanieh