[20.05.11] From Kublai Khan to David Petraeus:
Relearning the Lessons of Externally Driven Statebuilding , with Roland Paris
A leading authority on peacebuilding, Professor Roland Paris compares externally-driven statebuilding in early modern China and contemporary Afghanistan, focusing on the dynamics of learning by the external statebuilders and their propensity to forget the lessons of the recent and distant statebuilding past.
Programme 13:00-14:00
- Lecture by Roland Paris
- Q&A
- Chair: Cedric de Coning
Lecture summary
Like contemporary Western statebuilders, Mongol rulers faced the challenge of establishing functioning, durable systems of domestic governance in foreign territories under their control. Like contemporary statebuilders, the Mongols approached the problem with a set of unquestioned prejudices about how the political space should be governed.
Like contemporary statebuilders, the Mongols learned through hard experience and a series of failures that their “imported” conceptions of governance could not be easily applied to another society. Finally, like contemporary statebuilders, the Mongols ended up falling back on more “hybrid” concepts and models of governance in the foreign territories they occupied, mixing indigenous and foreign ideas and institutional forms.