State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century

By Francis Fukuyama

Categories: Politics & Social Sciences

State-Building (2004) is Francis Fukuyama's short book on weak and failed states. He argues that after the Cold War, poor governance, not too much government, became the main source of problems such as poverty, AIDS, drug trafficking and terrorism. He separates the scope of a state's activities from the strength of its institutions, and he looks at what outsiders can and cannot do to build working states, drawing on cases from Afghanistan to Iraq.

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• Fareed Zakaria: “In more academic nonfiction, Francis Fukuyama, who has amazing range but also real depth.”