Nation-building and Institutional Change: Lessons from U.s. Special Forces
Abstract: Nation-building is a broad term used to describe international efforts to conduct exogenous institutional change in weak and failed states primarily through the use of military force. We argue that, except in a few isolated cases, this nation-building strategy has failed to achieve the intended economic growth and political stability. While the field of institutional economics has a growing awareness of the importance of informal institutional factors like culture, they have yet to develop a strategy for intervening in national economies in a bottom-up fashion. As a result, the ‘know what’ exceeds the ‘know how’ in creating economic growth (P. J. Boettke, 1996), and the practice of nation-building tends to be top-down only. In Helmand Province, Afghanistan in February 2010, one eight-man Special Operations Detachment pacified its area of operations within a three week period during the Afghan surge operations, coined Operation Moshtarak, by applying Special Forces techniques. This paper explores how Special Forces techniques can overcome the ‘know-how’ deficit and be used to trigger the development of economic institutions during nation-building. This ‘know-how’, rooted within a Special Forces mindset defined by the imperatives to ‘Understand the Operational Environment’ and ‘Establish Rapport’ can be specifically applied to future nation-building activities by civilian organizations. The implementation of a successful bottom-up strategy requires exogenous forces to: (1) understand and adopt the indigenous mindset; (2) work by, with, and through, but not against, the mindset; (3) model the behavior desired in the indigenous population; (4) achieve legitimacy by indirectly applying capabilities and resources toward indigenous objectives; and (5) employ influence within trust-based relationships to nudge indigenous behavior towards desired institutional change.
