Systemic drivers of state formation
| dc.contributor.author | Iqbal, Husnain | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Watson, Scott D. | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Ramraj, Victor V. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-05-26T20:33:13Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-05-26T20:33:13Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2026 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Political Science | |
| dc.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy PhD | |
| dc.description.abstract | This study develops a systemic theory of state formation that places dynamic change in international systems, rather than the bellicist theory’s emphasis on war occurrence, at the centre of long-term political development. War-centric scholarship has illuminated important aspects of state formation in Europe, but its explanatory reach narrows when extended beyond that historical context. The literature on non-European state formation is divided between internalist and externalist accounts that privilege a single scale of analysis and often rest on short time horizons that obscure longer-run sequences of consolidation and reversal, producing mixed findings and a fragmented scholarly consensus. Moreover, where external dynamics are considered, international politics is often treated as fixed and divided along a West/non-West binary. These limitations produce problematic implications: non-Western societies are portrayed as inherently incompatible with modern statehood or as destined for enduring weakness, while relatively strong cases of extra-European state formation remain unexplained. These problems stem from the incorporation of the contentious ‘decline-of-war’ thesis, a partial account of hierarchy, and, most critically, a neglect of systemic change in international politics. I address these limitations by integrating insights from International Relations theory, historical sociology, global history, and political geography into a framework that explains how states emerge, transform, and persist across time and space. My core claim is that state formation is fundamentally an international-systemic process and is best understood in these terms rather than in monadic or dyadic ones. Shifts in system-wide capabilities periodically reconfigure the international-political setting within which political authority is organised, territorially anchored, and spatially extended. Political units respond to these shifts through material, institutional, and ideational practices of spatial ordering. The timing and intensity of state formation are conditioned by systemic-contextual influences conceptualised as ‘structural modifiers’, including geography, technological change, transnational networks, and shifts in the forces of production and destruction that shape strategic exposure and organisational capacity. Great powers are principal actors in this process because their ordering strategies translate systemic pressures into uneven effects on spatial transformation across multiple scales, extending into national and subnational arenas, including ‘grey spaces’ where formal sovereignty and effective control diverge. These strategies are mediated by the responses of other political units and by social forces. State formation is therefore a multiscalar process that unfolds through interactions among political units as systemic conditions shift over time. Empirically, I develop a longue durée account of state formation across Eurasia to explain why the national state consolidated earliest in Europe despite parallel islands of territorial consolidation elsewhere. I also show how the national state form drew on polycentric foundations, with key practices and institutional templates developing earlier or in parallel across multiple Eurasian systems before consolidating unevenly into a dominant model across the emergent global system. The empirical chapters then apply this framework to South Asia and Southeast Asia, organised around major river systems as spatial frames. Across these cases, the findings support the claim that state formation remains historically open and spatially uneven. Even without system-wide war since 1945, sustained competitive pressures continue to drive spatial transformation through alignments, economic statecraft, infrastructural integration, and the extension of security architectures against emergent threats. | |
| dc.description.embargo | 2027-05-07 | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/23946 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | |
| dc.subject | state formation | |
| dc.subject | national state | |
| dc.subject | systemic theory | |
| dc.subject | structural realism | |
| dc.subject | international process | |
| dc.subject | great power politics | |
| dc.subject | Eurasian international systems | |
| dc.subject | international system | |
| dc.title | Systemic drivers of state formation | |
| dc.type | Thesis |