SOCIOL 2 Lecture Notes - Lecture 39: Nationstates, De Facto, De Jure
Document Summary
In contrast, weak states do not possess the capacities to carry out the promises. This state weakness is not because of inherent deficits nor is it inevitable or unchanging . It is due to normal difficulties of state-building and the legacy of colonialism. Newly independent nation-states faced the creation of a system of governance and national community. Colonial powers had not invested in local governance structures. Colonial powers had stripped colonies of their resources. Colonial powers had not attended to national integration; in fact colonial borders often drawn arbitrarily across diverse ethnic groups\ Recall that british somaliland and italian somalia were granted independence as a unified country in 1960. Bureaucratic integration posed major challenge: each half of somalia had its own judicial and legal system, currency, taxation rates . It even took ten years to agree on an official language. Since independence, somalia has largely survived on international assistance, unable to generate resources necessary for state governance domestically.
