Professor James Hughes

Professor Jim Hughes is the teacher responsible for the course, GV4E3: Conflict and State-Building, offered by the Department of Government, LSE.

This course provides a theoretically informed assessment and critique of the debates on the relationship between democratization, violent conflict and state-building. It seeks to explain why some state-building projects have succeeded while others failed or are failing.

Case studies will be drawn mostly from post-communist Europe and Eurasia, principally focusing on the Western Balkans, North and South Caucasus, and Central Asia, including Afghanistan.

Themes considered include: theories and forms of state-building, democratization and nation-state building, internal armed conflicts; conceptualising 'failed state'; nationalist mobilisation and the 'nationalising' state; 'ethnic democracies'; authoritarian state-building; colonial legacies; national and ethnic conflict management; the political economy of armed conflicts; democracy promotion, international conditionality and intervention; the politics and security challenges posed by of 'frozen conflicts'.

Source: LSE