Doctoral Dissertation Research: State-Making Amidst Precarity

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New nation states, both outlaw and legitimate, continue to arise in the modern world. Some are welcomed into the world community while others remain on the fringes, where they may be the source of significant political and economic concerns. Social scientists know that new states do not come about at a single moment. Rather, they are the outcome of a long process in which individual people come together to create new institutions and a collective identity and sense of purpose. The process begins long before a state receives recognition and it continues long afterward. However, despite the importance of new states for global security, exactly how they develop, particularly post-independence, is not well understood. In the research funded by this award, University of California at Davis graduate student, Christian Doll, who is supervised by Dr. James H. Smith, will take advantage of the rare opportunity provided by the recent coming into existence of a particularly precarious new state to investigate the initial stages of post-independence state-making on the ground.Doll will analyze state-making in the new nation of South Sudan, which was founded only in 2011. He will undertake a year of ethnographic research in South Sudan's capital city, Juba, where ideas of the state and of national identity are being actively debated and newly enacted. He will employ a mix of social science research methods to gather data from multiple stakeholders and organizational levels. He will conduct semi-structured interviews with state planners, regulators, and community representatives. He will employ participant observation methodologies during state ceremonies on national holidays to understand how official ideas of the South Sudanese state and South Sudanese national identity are formed and performed. He also will conduct participant observation in a Juba neighborhood to collect data on how the state is made and experienced in everyday interactions and experiences. Specific attention will be paid to contestation over land, the building of new housing and offices, the running of businesses, the implementation of government and international organization projects, and public discussions of current events. By capturing official and local ideas and actions, the research will provide a needed understanding of how state-making takes place in the world today, information needed both for social theorists and for policy makers.