Is State Building the Road to World Order?

We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political science and international relations with insights from the New Institutional Economics. We suggest that doubts remain concerning the theoretical framework proposed and that many links between theory and a series of substantive claims are left unarticulated; this raises the possibility that the book’s policy recommendations are unwarranted.