Nation Building
Nation building is fighting a constructive form of "peopleīs war." You start with organizing the people to defend themselves and advocate for their own interests and needs. The process is "bottom-up," not "top-down."
Why? Because a nation is not the same as a state. (Reference)
A state is the government, its agencies, and its capabilities. It refers to an institutional capacity 'to plan and execute policies and to enforce laws cleanly and transparently', as Professor Francis Fukuyama writes in his important recent book, State-Building: Governance And World Order In The 21st Century. A state is 'a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory'.
A nation is something larger than a state. A nation is a community bound together by shared history and culture. A matter more of shared sensibilities than institutions, a nation is the work of generations.
Given these facts, the first thing the international community should realise about the nation-building exercises it is undertaking in various parts of the world is that it is an impossible task. Nation-building is much more ambitious than state-building. Anyone can create an army or a police force, but to convince people of different ethnic groups that they live in the same society and have common interests is much more difficult to pull off. There it is wise for a country to build a state first, and then nation can come later.
There are three distinct phases in state-building:
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The post-conflict reconstruction stage, 'where state authority has collapsed completely and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up'. Here the issue is 'the short-term provision of stability through infusions of security forces, police, humanitarian relief and technical assistance to restore electricity, water' and so on;
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Creating 'self-sustaining state institutions that can survive the withdrawal of outside intervention'; and
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Strengthening weak states, 'where state authority exists in a reasonably stable form but cannot accomplish certain necessary state functions, like the protection of property rights or the provision of basic primary education'.
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