TY - JOUR
AU - Schwartz, Rachel A
AB - Abstract A central challenge of post-conflict recovery is the reconstruction of state institutions, which often emerge from war destroyed or otherwise unable to carry out core administrative activities. But scholarship on international peacebuilding and post-conflict politics tends to focus narrowly on the functional aspects of the state, the state-system, to the neglect of another critical dimension: the state-idea, or its symbolic and normative authority. How do internationally backed institution-building efforts shape the ideational foundations of the state following conflict? Drawing on original interviews and archival research from postwar Guatemala, this article illustrates how, paradoxically, postwar peacebuilding and rule of law initiatives that sought to strengthen the capacity of state institutions simultaneously contributed to the discursive construction of the state as a criminal organization. Specifically, the United Nations’ International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), in seeking to combat state-based criminal structures and bolster institutions, transformed long-held conceptions of Guatemala's “weak” or “failed” state into an alternative vision of the state as a powerful complex of clandestine, predatory networks, and practices. In conjuring the state as a criminal organization that appropriates the formal organs of political power for illicit ends, this international statebuilding initiative generated a coherent and durable state-idea that belies key advances in institutional capacity and the rule of law. Overall, this article contributes to growing debates about the unintended, deleterious effects of international statebuilding efforts by demonstrating how distinct ideas of state power come to fill the void between state capacity and legitimacy. peacebuilding, statebuilding, conflict, rule of law, Central America In mid-2015, Guatemalans took to the streets to demand the renunciation of then-president and vice president Otto Pérez Molina and Roxana Baldetti following revelations of multiple high-level corruption schemes embedded in the state. What began with the exposure of a customs fraud structure known as La Línea quickly gave way to a broader set of cases that extended to agencies like the Guatemalan Social Security Institute (IGSS), the National Civilian Police (PNC), and the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM), among others. After Pérez Molina's and Baldetti's ouster, the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) and the United Nations International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which led the investigations, eventually asserted what many had suspected all along: that the ruling Patriot Party (PP) was, in fact, an organized crime syndicate that had wielded state authority for personal enrichment. According to a 2016 CICIG communiqué, investigators “came to the conclusion that this was not a government whose members committed isolated acts of corruption, but a criminal mafia structure that had coopted power via the ballot box” (CICIG 2016). For many, the notion that state institutions had been “criminalized” was neither new nor surprising. As I meandered through the mass protests, which were unprecedented since the country's internal armed conflict (1960–1996), I could not help but notice how the image of the state as a criminal actor was a readily articulated part of Guatemala's political imaginary.1 Alongside the calls #RenunciaYa (“Renounce Now”) and #YoNoTengoPresidente (“I Don't Have a President”) were demands for “No Más Mafias en mi Guate” (“No More Mafias in my Guate”) and “¡Fuera! Delincuentes disfrazados de gobernantes” (“Out, criminals disguised as government authorities!”). A sign with the words, “Palacio de los Ladrones” (“Palace of the Thieves”) hung from a lamppost in front of the National Palace. The protestors that filled the central plaza reflected Guatemala's diverse and historically divided social and political landscape, including public and private university students who marched under one banner, indigenous Mayan communities that flocked to the capital from rural communities, labor, women's, and LGBTQ + organizations, and members of the organized private sector—all of which sought to safeguard the broad-based popular movement from cooptation by political party interests, especially ahead of the general elections that would take place months later. Even though the diverse sectors would ultimately struggle to bridge their proposals for reform, they shared a common diagnosis of the problem and a common language to describe it: the “criminalization” of the state. This conception of the state as a criminal organization belies the vision that has long dominated international policy discourse, which constructs the Guatemalan state as “weak” or “failed.” From historical accounts of Guatemalan state formation through a patchwork of personalist regional leaders to US policy proclamations of Guatemala's “failed” institutions as no match for insurgent or criminal threats, much of the country's political trajectory has been couched in the language of institutional ineffectiveness, breakdown, and absence. Yet, the symbolic qualities of the state as expressed through the 2015 protests stand as a stark contrast. Far from “weak” or “failed,” the vision of state authority conjured by the broad-based movement instead portrayed a sophisticated, powerful, and authoritative complex of criminal operators and activities that commanded the levers of power for predatory ends. In the words of one former political official, rather than weak institutions, Guatemala's criminal state is today characterized by institutions that are “rather effective, but for the wrong reasons.”2 But how and why did this shift to the vision of a “criminal” state occur? What does this case tell us about how internationally backed postwar efforts to strengthen state institutions affect the discursive construction of the state—the “state-idea” (Abrams 1988)? In this article, I trace the criminalization of the state-idea in Guatemala, arguing that it is a deleterious, if unintended, consequence of postwar institution-building efforts that have, paradoxically, strengthened the state's functional capacities in some respects. Specifically, in seeking to bolster state institutions and combat corruption, the landmark UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and its domestic and international allies strategically constructed a powerful image of state agencies continually gripped by counterinsurgent elements engaged in clandestine, illicit practices. In contrast to longstanding conceptions of the Guatemalan state as “weak” or even “failed,” post-conflict statebuilding efforts generated an alternative state construct, which envisions state institutions as part of a vast, powerful, and sophisticated organized criminal syndicate. Contemporary conceptions of the Guatemalan state thus betray a remarkable coherence, yet not on the basis of “myths” or “normative doctrines” that legitimize state authority (Young 1988, 31). Rather, its discursive boundaries mark the Guatemalan state as part and parcel of the country's criminal underworld. This case warrants attention not only because it sheds light on the popular expressions that took shape in 2015, but also because it contributes to broader academic and policy debates related to postwar reconstruction and statebuilding. Scholars and policymakers alike have recognized the reconstruction of state institutions as a key facet of peacebuilding following periods of civil war (Paris 2004; Call 2008; Walter 2015; Lake 2016). Indeed, reforming the rules by which state organizations perform core functions is critical to remaking political authority following periods of societal fragmentation and gross human rights abuses. But to focus exclusively on the state's functional capacities overlooks another aspect scholars have identified as fundamental to the state-making enterprise: how state power and practices are discursively constructed and understood—their ideational foundations—which are critical to “socio-political cohesion” and legitimacy (Lemay-Hébert 2009, 21). Building on critical peacebuilding and statebuilding scholarship that notes the dissonance between international capacity-building and domestic perceptions (Pugh 2004; Chandler 2006), this article illustrates the pathway through which statebuilding initiatives may undermine state legitimacy: by refashioning the symbolic foundations of the state and implanting an alternative vision of state power rooted in illegality—what I call the criminalization of the state-idea. It thus contributes a new and deeper understanding of what emerges within the widely recognized gap between state capacity and state legitimacy in post-conflict environments and urges greater attention to how postwar peace- and statebuilding interventions shape the normative construction of state authority, often in pernicious and counterproductive ways. Post-Conflict Statebuilding and the Idea of the State Within contemporary scholarly and policy conversations, experts have converged on a common denominator underlying the challenges of post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding: the state's “weak capacity to carry out basic functions of governing their population and territory” (OECD 2011, 11). Postwar state weakness is thought to fuel violence, first and foremost, because ineffective institutions are unable to peaceably channel political disagreement. But beyond this, weak state institutions are incapable of providing basic goods and services like justice, security, healthcare, and education, which can foster widespread grievances and empower violent, non-state actors to fill the governance void (World Bank 2011, 7). The link between armed conflict and weak or ineffective state institutions has prompted scholars of peacebuilding to focus increasing attention on post-conflict “statebuilding” or “governance” as the critical determinant of durable peace. For example, Paris (2004, 7) argues that “a rudimentary network of domestic institutions” is the first imperative of peacebuilding, while Walter (2015) similarly posits that “good governance” in the form of robust political and legal institutions is the answer to staving off renewed conflict. Though the terminology varies, contemporary scholarship generally portrays statebuilding as “the telos (or end goal) of consolidating peace” (Sisk 2013: x), prompting the international community to privilege assistance to enhance public administration and ameliorate the “capacity problem” (Chandler 2006, 4–5). The weakness of post-civil war states is thus not only widely recognized, but understood as a core problem underlying conflict recurrence and motivating peacebuilding agendas. Yet, by and large, the international policy focus on bolstering state institutions has adhered to conventional conceptualizations that consider “the state” to be a set of concrete organizations that, while complex and overlapping, perform common, well-defined functions. Elsewhere, however, social scientists have long recognized the importance of the state's normative dimension. Even as historical institutionalist approaches urged us to “bring the state back in” as an actor with its own interests and capacities (Evans et al. 1985), the state as a discursive concept, imbued with varying levels of coherence and meaning, has remained a salient lens through which to examine political practice. According to this perspective, the state reflects a “notion” that is “incorporated into the thinking and actions of individual citizens,” a “common ideological and cultural construct,” rather than merely a set of organized bureaucracies (Mitchell 1991, 81). For example, Crawford Young (1988, 30–1) posits that alongside its other defining features—territoriality, sovereignty, nationality, participation in the global system, and institutions of rule—the state is “an idea, deeply implanted in the minds of its citizens as something abstract yet personal that is much more than the simple sum of its institutions of governance.” Though the ideational component reflects only one of the state's multiple dimensions, this metaphysical quality—the notion of the state as an idea “projected, purveyed and variously believed in different societies at different times”—plays an important role in constructing state power (Abrams 1988, 82; Thornton 2007). There is reason to believe that war may not only erode institutional capacity, but diminish the state's normative force as well. Whether a result of insurgent challenges to territorial control or state withdrawal from conflict zones, the state as a discursive construct may lose its authority and coherence in the context of civil war. As Schlichte (2003, 38) notes “experiences of war [. . .] deepen the frictions and fissures that run through a society and hinder the emergence of a state mentality as a prerequisite of legitimate rule.” Though the state-idea rarely surfaces on postwar peacebuilding agendas, it is nonetheless molded by the dynamics of armed conflict in potentially consequential ways. Given the possible deterioration of the state's normative authority amid war, what is the relationship between the state-system and state-idea—its functional and metaphysical qualities—in post-conflict environments? If standard international policy prescriptions focus on strengthening state institutions in a functional sense, what do such efforts mean for the normative and symbolic dimensions of the state? Scholarship on the effects of international assistance3 suggests that enhanced institutional capacity, even through international donors or non-state actors, can sometimes bolster government legitimacy (Sacks 2012; Dietrich and Winters 2015); however, other theoretical and empirical accounts signal a clear dissonance between the state's functional and ideational dimensions, particularly in conflict-ridden settings. They instead suggest that conventional international approaches to enhancing institutional capacity—the state's ability to carry out core functions—comes at the expense of or diminishes the state's normative force—its ability to command loyalty and its perceived “right to rule” (Holsti 1996, 82; Lemay-Hébert 2009). Critical peacebuilding and statebuilding scholarship has been at the forefront of interrogating the perverse effects of international statebuilding on the idea of the state by highlighting the chasm between state capacity and legitimacy in post-conflict polities subject to such reforms. For example, in labeling international statebuilding as an exercise of “empire in denial,” Chandler (2006, 11, 26) argues that the purportedly “non-political, therapeutic, [. . .] purely technical, administrative, and bureaucratic” quality of state-strengthening initiatives leads to the institutionalization of “phantom states,” which have “little relationship to their societies and lack legitimate authority.” Similar insights have been derived by Pugh (2004, 54), who argues that the narrow, problem-solving quality of peace support operations reproduces the structural dysfunctions that make them necessary—claims echoed by Richmond's (2009, 558) examination of local resistance to international peacebuilding interventions perceived as “ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive toward its subjects.” Indeed, the contradictions between international statebuilding “best practices” and local views and needs have surfaced in a range of post-conflict settings as diverse as Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor, the Congo, Sudan, and Afghanistan (see Richmond and Franks 2015; Autesserre 2014). While existing research illustrates that international statebuilding interventions often have pernicious consequences for the “socio-political cohesion” of the state, these accounts tell us far less about the process by which international statebuilding efforts undermine or diminish the state's normative authority and its perceived right to rule. How do capacity-building efforts shape state legitimacy? What are the mechanisms linking these two phenomena? Is it simply the dependence on international donors and lack of local buy-in, as critical peacebuilding approaches suggest? To answer these questions, I unpack to the “criminalization of the state-idea” and how it unfolds in post-conflict settings. Conceptualizing the Criminal State-Idea Building on existing insights on the gap between post-conflict capacity-building efforts and government legitimacy, this article contributes a novel understanding of precisely how international statebuilding interventions undermine the state's symbolic qualities and normative force. I posit that international statebuilding efforts do not necessarily diminish the legitimacy of post-conflict institutions because of the lack of local ownership or international donor mismanagement, but because of how capacity-building efforts, wittingly or unwittingly, create alternative conceptions of state power—alternative normative constructs that mark the state as outside of the formal legal boundaries to which it ought to be confined. In other words, apart from their material consequences, international statebuilding initiatives have important symbolic effects, refashioning the idea of the state in ways that do not merely envision it as weak and ineffective, but as the core of a vast and sophisticated criminal conspiracy. I refer to this process as the “criminalization of the state-idea,” defined as the ideational construction of state institutions as penetrated by organized criminal actors and appropriated or transformed to achieve illicit, often predatory, objectives. In broad strokes, this concept envisions the state apparatus as a vast criminal enterprise deployed for illegal profit-seeking. State agencies and actors are themselves imagined as part and parcel of a polity's criminal underworld. The criminal state-idea bears resemblance to parallel concepts that have been developed to describe the nexus between state actors and organized crime (see Chabat 2019). For example, Naím (2012) refers to “mafia states” as contexts in which “high government officials actually become integral players in, if not the leaders of, criminal enterprises,” while Reno (2000) describes the “shadow state” as a “framework of rule outside of formal state institutions” created by the “private uses of state assets and prerogatives.” Unlike these concepts, however, the criminal state-idea places the normative and discursive element front and center, focusing on the ideational construction of the state as overseen by criminal actors and utilized for illicit ends. The myths and normative understandings that give the state meaning in individuals’ lives are rooted in illegality. Alongside organized crime syndicates, gangs, and other illicit organizations, the state comes to occupy a central place within collective imaginings of the subterranean criminal landscape. While this symbolic dimension may parallel the actual functioning of state institutions and behavior of state officials, it is, in fact, a distinct facet of “stateness”; rather than a set of concrete, overlapping organizations and competencies, it considers the state as a normative construct, which, in turn, shapes citizens’ confidence in institutions and the perceived “rightness” of their rule—their legitimacy.4 How does the criminalization of the state-idea unfold amid post-conflict statebuilding? How do institutional strengthening efforts contribute to the discursive construction of the state as a criminal organization? In elaborating the postwar criminalization of the state-idea, I begin with the premise that the effects of international capacity-building measures on the perceived legitimacy of domestic institutions are conditioned by “the ideational and relational significance” of such interventions rather just their empirical or material consequences (McLoughlin 2015, 341). In seeking to enhance state functions, international interventions “act as a conduit for the state's norms and values,” the “main myths and symbols of the state” (Gupta 1995; McLoughlin 2015, 343). In other words, as international peacebuilding and statebuilding programs provide economic and technical assistance to improve the capacities of security and administrative agencies and strengthen governance, they simultaneously transmit ideas and beliefs about how those agencies operate and their place vis-à-vis broader society. Depending on their reach, those ideas and beliefs can supplant prevailing conceptions of the state. While the criminal state-idea is by no means the only symbolic construct that might develop, it may be particularly salient in post-conflict settings that are subject to international capacity-building interventions, which not only highlight the weakness of state institutions—their inability to carry out routine extractive, coercive, and administrative functions—but must also lay bare and overcome the systematic distortion of policymaking that seeks to keep formal institutions enfeebled to further illicit activity. In doing so, however, statebuilding campaigns, wittingly or unwittingly, conjure and reify the criminal state-idea, which further undermines confidence in political and bureaucratic institutions and thus widens the legitimacy gap. Chandler's (2006, 157) analysis of internationally backed anti-corruption campaigns in postwar Bosnia illustrates these dynamics. As public awareness programs reached more of the Bosnian population, they had a perverse effect on the idea of the state and related political processes: It seems the conclusion Bosnian voters have drawn from the institutionalization of anti-corruption into every walk of life has been that no politicians can be trusted. While the international community promoted the corruption issue partly as a way of undermining support for the nationalist parties, the impact has been a wider one, undermining the political process more broadly. If all politicians are corrupt then voters are less likely to see change and progress as possible through the ballot box. This excerpt illustrates the criminalization of the state-idea in action: as statebuilding and rule of law initiatives undertake capacity-enhancing administrative reforms, they simultaneously mold the idea of the state as thoroughly corrupt and comprised of criminal political actors and processes, often as a strategy to substantiate and rationalize their agendas. This dynamic accounts for the oft-cited lapse between the material and normative dimensions of international statebuilding—why improved institutional performance and capacity does not necessarily translate into enhanced legitimacy and the strengthening of the state's normative authority. International statebuilders and their domestic allies have strategic incentives to mark the state as criminal—to supplant existing symbolic constructs and refashion the ideational foundations of the state as rooted in illegality—to justify and give meaning to their interventions. Yet, in doing so, they also construct and consolidate new “normative myths” premised on the state as a criminal organization, which, in Young's (1988, 30–1) words, “become deeply implanted in the minds of its citizens.” As a result, even objective improvements in bureaucratic capacity may fail to dislodge the criminal state-idea if statebuilding interventions preserve and reify it as part of their justifying logic. Case Selection, Methodology, and Data This article analyzes the criminalization of the state-idea laid out above through an in-depth examination of Guatemala's post-conflict political trajectory, specifically international peacebuilding and statebuilding reforms like the UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). This case warrants attention for several reasons. First, Guatemala, which experienced 36 years of civil war (1960–1996), is emblematic of a range of countries that suffered irregular, Cold War-era conflicts during the second half of the twentieth century (Kalyvas 2006, 66–8; Kalyvas and Balcells 2010, 418), allowing me to derive insights on conflict and post-conflict legacies that likely have wider purchase. Further, because Guatemala has avoided the “conflict trap” and not relapsed into civil war, it constitutes a favorable context for exploring the dynamics of post-conflict statebuilding uninterrupted and over a significant period of time. It thus allows me to overcome the “short-term” orientation of most peacebuilding scholarship and instead examine the longer term material and symbolic effects that may surface after initial peacebuilding gains (Barma 2016). Relatedly, in the aftermath of Guatemala's internal armed conflict, the international community, led by the United Nations, established peacebuilding and postwar recovery initiatives not only premised on demobilization and reconciliation, but on rebuilding state institutions, adhering to conventional prescriptions applied across numerous post-conflict settings. Following the December 1996 settlement, the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) oversaw peace accord implementation until the end of 2004, then transitioned into an in-country arm of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (see Gavigan 2009; Stanley 2013). But in addition to this more traditional UN peacebuilding focus, the Guatemalan case also reflects the broader international shift toward prioritizing institution-building and the rule of law as a means of staving off renewed conflict and instability. Arguably, post-conflict Guatemala has witnessed one of the most robust international mechanisms developed to realize postwar rule of law aims: the CICIG, which investigated criminal structures embedded in the highest levels of government and assisted the MP in prosecuting those involved until September 2019.5 Notwithstanding its critiques and shortcomings (see OSF 2016), the CICIG is emblematic of the kinds of hybrid rule of law missions imagined by advocates of internationally backed institution-building, combining hands-on investigative and prosecutorial work with inter-agency collaboration to strengthen capacities (see Matanock 2014; Ciorciari and Krasner 2018). It thus provides a unique setting in which to examine how postwar reconstruction efforts attempting to bolster the state-system also affect the state-idea. To unpack the criminalization of the state-idea in postwar Guatemala, I engage in both interpretive and historical analysis (see Simmons 2016, 27–30), drawing on fine-grained qualitative data collected from a number of interview and archival sources, as well as participant observation. This study is interpretive insofar as it takes the object of analysis—here, state institutions—as “socially made” (27). In other words, it is less concerned with classifying or evaluating state institutions according to some objective performance criteria, but instead focuses on how people make sense of state institutions—what they imagine them to be and how they articulate those meanings and understandings. Further, this analysis is historical insofar as it seeks to chart and compare the construction of the state in ideational terms over time and at critical historical moments—prior to civil war, during and in the immediate aftermath of the peace process, and following the creation of the CICIG. By carrying out careful and contextualized interpretive historical analysis, this case study seeks to uncover new theoretical insights related to a relatively unexplored postwar political process, the construction of the state-idea, and thus contribute to broader conversations on peacebuilding and statebuilding. Data for this analysis come from 38 semi-structured elite interviews conducted with current and former government and military officials, lawyers, academics, international community representatives, and human rights and pro-justice advocates in May–July 2015 and September–November 2016.6 I selected interviewees via snowballing sampling based on my experience and contacts accumulated over a decade of scholarly activity in Guatemala. In analyzing interviews, I utilized the “interpretivist” approach identified by Fujii (2017, 73), which does not necessarily take interviewee statements at face-value but instead seeks to “decipher, decode, and interpret the meanings and logics” behind them. Key to this endeavor, and for the purposes of understanding the meanings attached to “the state,” I coded the different descriptors and images interviewees articulated when discussing state agencies and actors and identified patterns across them. In addition to the interview data, this analysis draws on participant observation at anti-government protests and civil society forums and archival material such as news clippings, truth commission findings, human rights reports, and press releases from a range of civil society organizations and the CICIG. I assumed a similar interpretive approach to analyzing this material, focusing on portrayals of “the state” and seeking to identify patterns within and across various sources. As I will illustrate below, across time there is contestation between some visions of the state as “weak,” “failed,” and “absent” and others that instead conjure a powerful and sophisticated criminal organization. This case study analysis unfolds in three parts. The next section examines long-held, historical conceptions of state institutions as weak and absent, which often earned Guatemala the label of a “failed state.” My analysis then turns to Guatemala's postwar period and examines the establishment of the CICIG, which was marked by contestation over prevailing ideas of the state as ineffective and newer conceptions of the state as rooted in illegality and criminality. I illustrate how, through the creation of the CICIG, the international community and its domestic allies strategically implanted a new symbolic construct conjuring state institutions as a series of highly developed criminal schemes. The final part examines how the CICIG's approach to dismantling the PP “crime syndicate” reinforced the criminal state-idea. Yet, even at the height of CICIG-led advances and objective improvements to institutional capacity and the rule of law, perceptions of state institutions continue to lag behind, illustrating the gap between international statebuilding and domestic legitimacy. Guatemalan State Formation and the Discourse of State “Weakness” The contemporary criminalization of the state-idea that emerged from international capacity-building efforts reflects a departure from long-standing conceptions of Guatemalan institutions as “weak,” “ineffective,” and even, at times, “failed.” The weak state image is largely rooted in historical processes of state formation, which in Guatemala occurred through a loose patchwork of regionally based personalist leaders that left national institutions enfeebled and subordinate to particularistic forms of political authority. Even with the wartime centralization of state power, Guatemala's inability to address a range of perceived threats—from leftist insurgency to organized crime—reinforced the idea of the state as incompetent and incapable, particularly in the eyes of its primary international backer: the US government. In this section, I elaborate how, up until post-conflict statebuilding interventions, the ideational foundations of the Guatemalan state were primarily rooted in notions of “weakness” and “failure,” drawing on historical accounts of state formation and US policy discourse. The symbolic construction of the Guatemalan state as weak and ineffective appears in historical discourses surrounding the process of state formation as early as Central American independence from Spain in 1821. As historian González-Izás (2014, 68) writes, the short-lived Federal Republic of Central America quickly gave way to “small and weak states with new institutions” that remained beholden to “provincial oligarchies that fought to achieve commercial and administrative autonomy in their territories.” Rather than experience war-driven processes of bureaucratic expansion, as in classic studies of European state-making (Tilly 1990), the loci of political power in Guatemala throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were “small, local territorial bases created on the basis of long-standing favoritisms.”7 Amid the “failure of the federal state, weak provincial governments were established [. . .] with long periods of institutional crisis in which all power was concentrated in figure of the caudillo [strong man] of the moment” (González-Izás 2014, 102). Guatemala's political and administrative institutions were thus born weak and subservient to personalist rule. Even as institutions such as the military and police acquired more formal organization and greater territorial coverage, the image of the state as hollowed out and enfeebled persisted. With the ascendance of powerful coffee-planter elites and military strongmen to the presidency from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, Guatemala did experience processes of centralization that laid the foundations of a more modern state apparatus; however, rather than create autonomous central state institutions, these leaders acted as national-level caudillos, replicating once-provincial forms of personalist authority and clientelistic exchange more broadly. Thus, even as the contours of a national state apparatus evolved, institutions continued to lack bureaucratic autonomy and administrative capacity, instead succumbing to despotic rulers that acquired unprecedented “levels of personal power and longevity” (Holden 2004, 57). Guatemala's first century of state formation thus did little to bolster the symbolic authority of the state, instead rendering it weakly institutionalized and subordinate to the personalist strongman of the day—far from contemporary visions of a sophisticated and autonomous criminal organization that wields political power for illicit ends. This vision persisted into the mid-twentieth century descent into political violence following the 1954 coup that ushered in a virulent anti-communist campaign and over three decades of civil war and military authoritarianism. Even as the armed forces acquired greater institutional autonomy (see Isaacs and Schwartz forthcoming), international allies, namely the US government, recurred to the image of Guatemala's weak institutions as necessitating robust counterinsurgent support to squash the mounting leftist guerrilla threat. US policy discourse painted Guatemala's security agencies as incompetent and unreliable, lacking resources, professionalization, and resolve. For example, USAID advisors considered the military intelligence divisions tasked with rooting out insurgency to be “small and ineffective” (USAID 1968, 11), while US Embassy officials argued that the “police forces have a limited capacity to face up to any large-scale internal subversion, rioting or guerrilla warfare that might be fomented by Castro-Communists or to act as an effective deterrent” (US Embassy in Guatemala 1961, 4). Indeed, the high degree of US economic and technical support for counterinsurgency in Guatemala was not only premised on flailing and incapable institutions, but further reinforced the image of a deficient and dependent state subordinate to the United States, which remained a “distant yet still involved patron” during civil war (Grandin 2004, 188). Even with the end of the Cold War and the Guatemalan conflict, the discursive construction of the Guatemalan state as “weak” remained a dominant trope within international policy discourse as the country faced a new existential threat that it was incapable of overcoming: transnational criminal groups, namely high-powered Mexican drug smuggling organizations. Sky-rocketing homicide rates, endemic corruption, and limited territorial control in the early and mid-2000s prompted international observers like UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Anders Kompass to publicly label Guatemala a “failed and collapsed state” (Ruhl 2011, 2), while then-Brookings Institution expert Casas-Zamora (2009) renamed the country “Guatemalastan,” referring to it as a “failed state in our midst.” In contrast to the criminal state-idea that would later take hold, Guatemalan state institutions were not conceived of themselves as agents of subterranean criminal activity but were powerless and ineffectual in the face of those transnational groups that were. Though Guatemala's degree of bureaucratic organization evolved significantly since its independence, the “normative myths” that imbued the state with meaning continually imagined it as weak and ineffective, whether subordinate to personalist strongmen, dependent on US assistance and policy dictates, or overrun by powerful transnational crime syndicates. This long-held idea of the state, however, underwent marked transformations with the emergence of postwar international capacity-building measures, which I turn to next. Peacebuilding, the CICIG, and the Evolution of the Criminal State-Idea In December 2006, ten years after the peace settlement, representatives of the conservative government of Óscar Berger (2004–2007) and the United Nations signed a landmark agreement for the establishment of the UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). The CICIG was applauded by international and domestic advocates as a watershed moment in the country's postwar history and a critical step toward strengthening institutional capacity and reviving Guatemala's “failed” state. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed the CICIG's approval, stating that, “Guatemala has sent a clear message, both to its people and to the international community, that it is committed to fight crime and impunity, and to provide security for its citizens.”8 Then-presidential candidate Álvaro Colom from the left-leaning National Unity of Hope (UNE) party, who would triumph at the polls months later, took out a full-page ad in the Guatemalan daily El Periódico (2007) committing to work with the CICIG, which he described as “an essential instrument to combat organized crime, drug trafficking, parallel groups, and, above all, to put an end to impunity.” However, beyond representing a novel experiment in hybrid approaches to institutional strengthening, the process leading up to the CICIG's creation—the contestation over its mandate and functions—also played a critical role in refashioning the idea of the state. Specifically, the arguments strategically deployed by international and domestic members of the pro-CICIG coalition conjured the Guatemalan state as rooted in illegality, as part and parcel of the country's vast and sophisticated criminal underworld. The criminal state-idea thus stood at the core of the CICIG's justifying logic, paradoxically undermining the state's normative authority in the service of building institutional capacity. In this section, I trace the emergence of the CICIG through its roots in the peace process to its ratification by Congress in late-2007, illustrating how state and civil society contestation supplanted visions of a “weak” and “failed” state with new conceptions of the “criminal” state. The seeds of the CICIG were sown during Guatemala's peace process, which produced provisions and truth commission reports that first alluded to the criminalization of the state as a result of illicit and predatory counterinsurgent structures that maintained a stranglehold on domestic institutions. Despite the de-escalation of conflict violence and the 1985 transition to elected civilian rule, attacks on civil society leaders pursuing truth and justice for wartime abuses persisted, largely driven by the military's abiding view that targeted violence must be wielded “to control and eliminate ever-present Opponents of the State” (Schirmer 1998, 239). Beyond committing gross human rights violations, military intelligence structures were also perceived as utilizing their intelligence tools and coercive capacity to engage in other illicit activities, including tax fraud and drug trafficking. As one anti-corruption expert noted, “After moving on to democratically elected governments in 1985, the traces of military structures persisted in strategic areas. Above all, this had to do, in theory, with national security—customs, migration, the police, sea ports, airports [. . .] But many of these structures that had worked with a national security mentality were converted into mafia-like business networks, for exclusively criminal ends”9 (See also, Gavigan 2009; Peacock and Beltrán 2003). Amid the continuation of state-perpetrated violence and military-led predation, domestic and international representatives within the peace process not only sought to craft a durable end to the conflict, but to highlight the sustained threat posed by violent and predatory counterinsurgent structures embedded within the Guatemalan state, thus laying the groundwork for the criminalization of the state-idea. While measures such as the 1996 “Agreement on the Strengthening of Civilian Power and the Role of the Army in a Democratic Society” sought to “enhance, modernize, and reinforce the State” (Government of Guatemala 1996, Ch. 1, Art. 2)—strengthen state capacity—another accord provision recognized the persistent danger posed by the extreme, counterinsurgent elements that had woven their illicit practices into the fabric of the state. In the 1994 “Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights,” the Government of Guatemala committed to ensuring that there would be “no illegal security forces or any clandestine security machinery”—phenomena that, in Spanish, were referred to as “cuerpos ilegales y aparatos clandestinos de seguridad” or “CIACS” (Government of Guatemala 1994, Ch. 4, Art. 1). Though an unwieldy term, “CIACS” is a concept devised by human rights advocates and bound to a particular moment and specific actors. According to one security expert, The CIACS involve ex-military officials that committed criminal acts during the internal armed conflict […] [They] also require the involvement of public officials. They are networks of people that have contacts with influential powers. They have instruments such as wiretaps, spying, and intelligence. Military intelligence is where the clandestine machinery and parallel groups were born. During the conflict, the groups learned how to operate things. And they used impunity as a mechanism or strategy.10 In other words, “CIACS” specifically referred to the criminal networks crafted by military intelligence officers to eliminate political opponents and profit from illicit activities. They were conceived of as structures rooted in the state apparatus, sustained through access to state power. While the text of the Accords provided important recognition, “it was civil society that brought the topic [of CIACS] to public opinion,”11 building on the Peace Accords’ conceptualization to strategically refashioning the idea of the state as itself criminal. This vision first implanted through the Peace Accords was deepened through the dissemination of information on CIACS activity via two channels: (1) reports on compliance with the Accord on Human Rights published by the UN verification mission (MINUGUA) and (2) findings from two truth commissions, one led by the Catholic Church and another by the UN. Between 1995 and 2003, MINUGUA published 24 reports on government compliance with human rights provisions, including that stipulating the elimination of the CIACS (Gutiérrez 2016, 85). In each report, MINUGUA documented cases related to the CIACS. For example, the third report issued in October 1995 found that “illegal groups of distinct natures continued to operate [. . .] Many of these groups, organized to kill and commit other crimes, have acted with impunity for years” (Ch. 1b, Par. 104). Eight years of such reports provided additional substance to the concept of “CIACS” and further ingrained it within civil society's vernacular, reinforcing the deep criminal linkages within the state. Guatemala's two truth commissions played a similar role in molding the criminal state-idea. In 1998, the Church-led Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI) released its report Guatemala: Never Again, which, in addition to documenting conflict-era atrocities, highlighted the organization and criminal exploits of military intelligence officers. Echoing the concept of CIACS, the REMHI findings posited that, “[intelligence] structures were employed by their commanders to engage in illicit activities, like car theft, kidnappings, extortion, and narco-activity” (ODHAG 1998, Vol. 2, 155). The subsequent UN-led Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) (1999) portrayed the post-transition state in a similar light. In its detailed section on military intelligence, the CEH report Memory of Silence (1999, Vol. 2, 113) contends that the paramilitary “death squads” that operated through the 1990s “were not structures that were autonomous or independent of the Army, but simply clandestine intelligence structures that disguised themselves under “a name” as a mechanism of psychological war.” The peace and immediate post-peace years thus reflected increasing contestation over competing visions of state power. On the one hand, and in line with long-held conceptions, Accord negotiators sought the creation of a robust state apparatus characterized by capable administrative institutions to address chronic state weakness. Yet, on the other hand, civil society pressures increasingly implanted another concept of the post-transition state—one not premised on institutional absence or incapacity but instead on institutions deeply penetrated by sinister, criminal networks rooted in conflict-era military intelligence structures. The latter vision, that of the criminal state, would gain increasing traction and come to supersede the historically constructed “weak” state through the subsequent campaign to enhance institutional capacity and root out clandestine security structures, which eventually gave birth to the CICIG. The escalation of civil society calls for a commission dedicated to dismantling the CIACS occurred during the administration of populist president Alfonso Portillo (2000–2004), who hailed from former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt's right-wing Guatemalan Republican Front. The Portillo years coincided with a ten-fold increase in attacks on human rights defenders and the perceived intensification of criminal activity rooted in state agencies (Samayoa 2004). The domestic and international human rights community cast blame on the renewed political influence of several ex-military figures, who had reactivated the criminal networks forged at the height of counterinsurgent operations. According to one human rights activist, “it was clear that the attacks were coming from the state.”12 In effect, the Portillo administration had instated a “revolving door” of officials linked to the “hidden powers” that distorted political authority and engaged in extrajudicial violence (Zamora 2002). Civil society and journalistic accounts thus portrayed the Portillo government as the criminal state at its apex, utilizing official policy-making channels to further illegal activities. Facing deep political fragmentation and continued civil society pressure, the Portillo government acceded to civil society calls for the creation of a UN-backed anti-CIACS commission (CICIACS) with “the power to investigate the structure and activities of illegal group and clandestine security organizations, their modalities of operation and sources of financing” and to “initiate” prosecutions against criminal network operators (UN 2004, Art. 2, Par. 1–2). The extraordinary authority granted to international CICIACS personnel eventually led Congress and the Constitutional Court to declare it unconstitutional; however, its mandate, functions, and high degree of independence had an important effect on the construction of the Guatemalan state as a criminal organization—the criminalization of the state-idea. By equating state institutions and the CIACS, domestic and international civil society advocates argued that the state was not merely weak and incapable of addressing criminality and corruption, but that state institutions were themselves the locus of criminality, necessitating sweeping international action. In the words of one justice advocate, “[CIACS practices] were state policy, the CIACS are sheltered by the state with total impunity. And so, the state would have to prosecute itself [. . .] The state has never been capable of prosecuting its own.”13 As this rationale illustrates, the conceptualization of the state as criminal drove the delegation of key governance functions to the proposed hybrid commission. By conjuring the state as itself a criminal organization, domestic and international actors conveyed that an infusion of resources, training, and personnel would not be enough; robust international involvement would be necessary to recover institutions that were not merely weak or incapable, but penetrated by powerful criminal interests and unwilling to cleanse themselves. Moreover, such an understanding located the source of illicit activity not in a handful of “bad apples” that had infiltrated national agencies, but in the very fabric of the state. As one former state official recognized, “it is not simply the corruption or cooptation of certain offices [. . .] [The state] is prisoner of a structure that regenerates every four years.”14 Thus, despite its rejection on sovereignty grounds, the tabled CICIACS agreement reinforced the systemic quality of the state-based threats to peace and the rule of law. Building on these conceptualizations of the criminal state, the incoming Berger government remained committed to the creation of an international anti-impunity commission, agreeing on a new initiative that would address illegal security groups that fed on state power, but with a more limited prosecutorial role tied to domestic institutions (OSF 2016, 34–5). Known as the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the body was given a three-part mandate: To “determine the existence of illicit security forces and clandestine security organizations, their structure, forms of operation, sources of financing and possible relation to State entities or agents and other sectors that threaten civil and political rights in Guatemala.” To “collaborate with the State in the dismantling of illegal security groups and clandestine security organizations and promote the investigation, criminal prosecution and punishment of those crimes committed by their members.” To “recommend to the State the adoption of public policies for eradicating clandestine security organizations and illegal security groups and preventing their re-emergence, including legal and institutional reforms necessary to achieve this goal” (UN 2006, Art. 2). While the first pillar of the new mandate ambiguously frames the links between clandestine security organizations and the state, the agreement, in fact, defines the former as groups “linked directly or indirectly to agents of the State or that have the capacity to generate impunity for their illegal actions” (Art. 1d). The new proposal thus envisioned the criminal networks subject to investigation as either anchored in state agencies or, at the very least, beneficiaries of state cover. In this sense, the CICIG, like the CICIACS before it, reinforced the notion of the state as a central part of Guatemala's criminal landscape. The negotiations to establish a commission to combat criminal networks embedded within the Guatemalan state took seven years and spanned two different presidencies. But despite the difficulties, the CICIG's approval marked an inflection point in the criminalization of the state-idea: not only had domestic and international civil society actors crafted the powerful image of a “criminal state” at the service of clandestine security groups, but they had devised a hybrid legal apparatus to take action against it. Paradoxically, this multi-million dollar, internationally funded initiative that vested unprecedented legal authority in multilateral partners to rescue and strengthen institutions depended on refashioning the symbolic and normative dimensions of the state as a criminal organization. In the following section, I illustrate how the CICIG's activities, specifically its investigations of the PP, reified the criminal state-idea even as Guatemala made significant gains in strengthening institutions and the rule of law, illustrating the initiative's divergent material and symbolic effects. Widening the Legitimacy Gap: The Paradoxical Effects of Combatting the Criminal State The criminal state-idea constituted the conceptual foundation and justifying logic of internationally backed institution-building efforts implemented with the creation of the CICIG; however, the investigations and operations of the CICIG and its domestic counterpart, the Special Prosecutor against Impunity (FECI) further reified the idea of the state as a criminal organization. Though the CICIG's initial years were plagued by political tugs-of-war over how to interpret the mandate,15 the tenure of the third commissioner Iván Velásquez (2014–2019), a Colombian jurist who previously investigated the links between members of Congress and the paramilitaries in his home country, cemented the notion that the Guatemalan state had been inhabited by a dense system of illicit networks that redirected political power for personal enrichment. Paradoxically, this fortification of the idea of the state as a criminal organization occurred alongside substantial improvements in institutional capacity and the rule of law, generating dissonance between state performance and attitudes towards the state, as I will illustrate below. The final years of the CICIG thus demonstrate how, even at their apex, international capacity-building efforts can have perverse, unintended consequences on the normative force and symbolic authority of the state institutions they seek to strengthen. After spending its early years pursuing discrete cases, the CICIG deepened and revamped the criminal state-idea by conceptualizing the state's criminal underside as a vast, interwoven, and sophisticated complex of illicit networks and activities. As Velásquez himself articulated, “this criminal macrostructure resists disappearing. It is not temporary corruption, it is not even the desire for enrichment among some people; on the contrary, it is something much deeper that seeks to keep the state apparatus as an instrument of the few” (Gramajo 2017). Moreover, the new approach refashioned the concept of “CIACS” to reflect the ways in which they had evolved over the three decades since Guatemala's transition to democracy. Rather than rigid, military-like illegal security organizations, such groups were now portrayed as “illicit political-economic networks,” or “groups of people that were interrelated, either in a hidden or semi-hidden way, with the purpose of exercising political control and generating profitable business.”16 No longer betraying the same ideological motives as in the 1990s, the CIACS were conceived of as more fluid and opportunistic, yet they still inhabited and transformed state authority for criminal ends. With this approach, the CICIG, alongside attorneys general Claudia Paz y Paz (2011–2014) and Thelma Aldana (2014–2018), pursued a new set of cases that would strike at the core of state-based predation and illustrate the extent of capacity-building gains under the CICIG. Between mid-2015 and mid-2016, the CICIG and MP uncovered a vast criminal complex created by Pérez Molina and Baldeitt's PP government—a series of illicit schemes that reflected what one academic called the “feudalization of the state,”17 again signaling how criminal actors penetrated and appropriated state institutions for illicit gain. The first case came to light in April 2015, when prosecutors revealed a major customs fraud network, La Línea, mentioned above. Under the scheme, importers arranged to pay 40 percent of the customs duties they legally owed to the tax administration and 30 percent to the illicit structure, pocketing the remaining 30 percent. Authorities eventually discovered that Pérez Molina and Baldetti—named in wiretaps as “El Uno” [“Number 1”] and “La Dos” [“Number 2”]—sat atop the La Línea hierarchy, receiving over half of illicit profits (CICIG and MP 2015). In making sense of the La Línea revelations, experts framed the customs administration as emblematic of the deeply rooted criminal nature of the state, rather than the product of chronic institutional ineffectiveness. As one political analyst told me, “These structures have been around for a long time, they're very well articulated, and they have political backing at the highest levels [. . .] La Línea is not the first and it won't be the last.”18 There was thus a sense that this case, while remarkable in its pursuit of Guatemala's highest officials, was also merely scratching the surface, producing important rule of law gains but also illustrating the sophistication of the state as a criminal organization. “La Línea is really a small structure. The structure of big business behind it has not yet been uncovered,” one NGO leader remarked a few months after the scandal broke, also conjuring the powerful complex of criminal interests that inhabited state institutions.19 But unlike prior cases, La Línea would merely serve as an entrée into a much broader array of illicit networks, which led Attorney General Aldana to declare the PP “a criminal structure that organized and implanted itself within the state” (Fonseca 2016). Following La Línea’s discovery, the CICIG and MP revealed a corruption scheme within the IGSS, in which a fraudulent contract for faulty renal dialysis drugs led to serious infections and some deaths among dozens of patients (García 2016a). Subsequent cases involved influence peddling and kickbacks within the MEM for the approval of natural gas and electricity plants and similar bribes for a contract to upgrade port infrastructure (Solano 2015; Prensa Libre 2016). Finally, in June 2016 the CICIG and MP unveiled their biggest case to date, which outlined the vast network of shell companies created by Pérez Molina, Baldetti, and their associates to house illicit campaign contributions given in exchange for multi-million dollar state contracts once they entered office. The case became known as Cooptación del Estado [“Cooptation of the State”], a title emblematic of the criminal state-idea. Swept up in the investigations were major gas, construction, and pharmaceutical companies, as well the former presidents of two major banks and Mexican media magnate Ángel González (García 2016b). The painstaking collection and analysis of intercepted phone calls, bank transactions, and state licenses led investigators to assert that, “at least 450 contracts within state institutions [. . .] were processed by the criminal structure” (CICIG 2016). Through the Cooptación del Estado revelations, the CICIG and MP further reinforced the criminalization of the state thesis, with its contemporary roots in the political party system. Rather than portray state institutions and actors as weak, passive, or ill-equipped to perform their core functions, the interconnected series of predatory schemes laid bare the sophistication and highly developed nature of Guatemala's criminal state operations and operators. As one anti-corruption expert explained, “The political parties really function as electoral businesses. Someone buys the parties, they have an owner. And this owner then comes to the state as the “czar” of the mafia structure to do business. In the end, this became the concept of government.”20 As this formulation illustrates, the state was imagined as an empty vessel that is inhabited by a series of powerful, economic interests that utilize it for illegal, personal gain—rather than the exception, this was standard, the “concept of government” itself. The unprecedented spate of cases mounted by the CICIG and MP advanced a coherent and widely intelligible state construct that differed markedly from historical constructions premised on state “weakness” or “failure”—a concept that was strategically fashioned by international and domestic civil society leaders, but which also became readily articulated by ordinary citizens, as the 2015 protests detailed at the beginning of this study suggest. Yet, importantly, the reification of the idea of the state as a criminal organization also coincided with objective advances in institutional capacity and the rule of law—the very aims of the CICIG. As the criminalization of the state-idea deepened, Guatemalan institutions actually developed greater investigative, prosecutorial, police, and judicial capabilities. Illustrative (if blunt) indicators of Guatemala's capacity-building success can be seen in both its steadily decreasing intentional homicide rate over the past decade and its improved clearance rate within the judicial system. According to police data, in 1997, the year after the signing of peace, Guatemala's murder rate shot up from 31.7 to 37.1 per 100,000 people. After a slight decline, intentional homicide levels again skyrocketed, peaking at 46.4 per 100,000 people in 2008, the year in which the CICIG became operational (Mendoza 2019). Yet, over the subsequent decade, Guatemala witnessed a 5- percent average annual decrease in homicides (International Crisis Group 2018), which, according to Trejo and Nieto Matiz (2019, 24) amounts to the prevention of over 18,000 deaths between 2008 and 2016. Scholars attribute these improvements directly to the CICIG, specifically its role in implementing a new paradigm for criminal investigation and prosecution and strengthening inter-institutional coordination. Another arena in which the CICIG had important material consequences was in addressing impunity and mitigating the extraordinary backlog of unresolved criminal cases. Prior to the creation of the CICIG, an estimated 98 percent of violent crimes remained in impunity, yet by 2016, this figure had dropped to 86 percent (WOLA 2019). Moreover, a mere 7 percent of homicide cases in Guatemala were solved prior to the CICIG; however, during the first half of its tenure, the homicide clearance rate jumped four-fold to 28 percent (International Crisis Group 2018, 1). In all, the CICIG is touted as having dismantled some 70 criminal structures, with guilty sentences handed down in 85 percent of the cases it brought alongside the MP (CICIG 2019, 52). Though imperfect, the CICIG and its domestic partners had a dramatic effect on the capacity of investigative and judicial institutions. However, these objective advances, which were hailed by international and domestic CICIG advocates, did little to move public trust in state institutions,21 thus illustrating the divergent effects of international statebuilding initiatives on the capacity and ideational substance of the state—its material and symbolic dimensions. Survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) indicates that while confidence in the CICIG stood at 57.2 percent in 2019 (and had reached as high as 70 percent in 2017), trust in core government institutions, even those within the judicial and security sectors, largely remained stagnant (seeZechmeister and Azpuru 2017, 3; Azpuru 2019, 28). In 2006, prior to the CICIG's creation, trust in the Supreme Court stood 30.8 percent, only witnessing a slight bump up to 34.6 percent by 2019. Over the same period, confidence in the PNC also exhibited a marginal increase from 30.7 to 31 percent. The Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) is the one state agency in which trust has increased substantially, from 30.7 percent in 2006 to 46.6 percent in 2019, illustrating that capacity-building has gone hand-in-hand with more favorable perceptions where the CICIG has had the most direct involvement. But the survey data also indicate that confidence in the MP lagged behind that placed in a range of non-governmental institutions, such as the Evangelical and Catholic churches (63.1 and 56.6 percent respectively) and the media (49.2 percent), illustrating the still-significant deficits. Moreover, on the whole, in 2019, just over one-third of respondents expressed “pride in the political system” and just over one-quarter felt “the courts guarantee a just trial”—this despite the clear signs of institutional strengthening. Though identifying the precise causes of these shifts in public opinion are beyond the scope of this study, the juxtaposition of objective indicators of institutional strengthening (homicide and clearance rates) and attitudes toward institutions (trust) is illustrative of the chasm identified within critical statebuilding and peacebuilding scholarship—a gap that, I posit, can be attributed to the refashioning of the idea of the state as a criminal organization. Had the discursive construction of Guatemalan institutions as “weak” abided in the post-conflict period, it is possible that the advances would have been read as signs of newly strengthened state institutions; however, by implanting a distinct vision of the state as a criminal organization, successful capacity-building measures have not translated into a “de-criminalized” state, instead, perhaps, entrenching its place within Guatemala's criminal underworld. Conclusions and Broader Implications Guatemala's postwar statebuilding experience illustrates a central paradox. On the one hand, key political developments and civil society pressures allowed for the creation of an unprecedented international initiative to strengthen the rule of law, the CICIG. But on the other hand, the discursive processes during the post-transition years that made such an initiative possible and facilitated institutional strengthening have also recast the Guatemalan state as a “corporate mafia structure” (Amnesty International 2002, 62). In the postwar period, the Guatemalan state has been understood as morphing from weak and incapable—outmatched by insurgent and criminal threats—to itself an agent of organized crime as civil society advocates strategically refashioned the state-idea to justify robust international capacity-building measures. Though scholars of state formation and postwar reconstruction have focused relatively little attention on the ideational foundations of the state, the Guatemalan experience is instructive and may have important implications for state authority following violent conflict more generally. The criminal state-idea may be a particularly salient symbolic construct in post-conflict settings in which political authority and illegality become intertwined. As noted above, scholars and policymakers have long recognized the complex linkages between formal and informal political and economic actors that “do well out of war” and allow illicit activities to flourish (Collier 2000). Such dynamics can be observed in a range of country contexts, from Bosnia, where illicit resource flows that proliferated during conflict “were strategically used to empower rival nationalist statebuilding projects” (Andreas 2008, 120), to Sierra Leone, where illicit informal markets entwine state and non-state actors (Reno 1995), to Eurasia, where “the cooptation of illicit networks by the central government” has brought political stability (Kupatadze 2017, 61), to Sri Lanka, where contemporary patterns of corruption are rooted in the wartime militarization of the state (Mampilly 2011). Yet, at the same time, whether such postwar environments give way to renderings of the state as a criminal organization specifically also depends on local cultural context. It is possible, if not likely, that the criminalization of the state-idea in Guatemala was both strategically fashioned and readily intelligible because of the salience of organized criminal activity in the country given its central geographic role in the smuggling of drugs, arms, and people—a reality that is routinely communicated in popular media. By contrast, in conflict-ridden settings like Afghanistan where warlord governance has refashioned the symbolic foundations of the state (Mukhopadhyay 2014), the normative understandings cultivated by international statebuilders and reproduced by domestic actors in the service of capacity-building, while similarly consequential, may look distinct. In any case, the ability of internationally backed capacity-building initiatives to transmit and inculcate new normative conceptions of the state has important policy implications, particularly as “governance delegation” (Matanock 2014) and “internationalized” rule of law initiatives become a model that the international community exports to countries as diverse as Kosovo, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea (Zürn, Nollkaemper, and Peerenboom 2012; Matanock 2014; Call 2019). As Guatemala's CICIG suggests, such interventions can have positive effects on state performance and earn the trust of the local population. But in reshaping the idea of the state to lend credence to robust capacity-building measures, domestic and international statebuilders must also be attune to the potential perverse effects on long-term perceptions of state legitimacy. Doing so should entail not painting the entire state apparatus with the same brush and as a monolithic actor, instead highlighting material gains within different policy arenas as signs of agencies overcoming the criminal operatives or other actors that once held them hostage. Unless international statebuilding and rule of law interventions place similar weight and resources on remaking the idea of the state, the widely recognized chasm between state capacity and state legitimacy is unlikely to close. Funding Funding for this research was provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Regional and International Studies and from the United States Institute of Peace. Footnotes 1 Field notes, June 13, 2015. 2 Author interview, June 23, 2015. 3 See Schmelzle and Stollenwerk (2018) and Blair and Winters (2020) for summaries. 4 Scholars have recognized that legitimacy is a multi-faceted concept that includes various sub-types and forms of measurement. This article does not seek to wade into these debates but merely recognize that, as scholars like Lemay-Hébert (2009) suggest, legitimacy is ideational in nature, reflecting beliefs about state authority, rather than some objective capacity to perform specified activities. 5 The CICIG began in 2007, and it exited Guatemala in late-2019, when embattled president Jimmy Morales refused to renew its mandate. 6 Per IRB protocol, because this research examines illegal activities, interviewees remain anonymous to protect their identities. 7 Author interview, June 16, 2015. 8 Statement available at https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/08/227142-secretary-general-welcomes-guatemalan-approval-body-probe-armed-groups. 9 Author interview, July 3, 2015. 10 Author interview, July 2, 2015. 11 Author interview, July 2, 2015. 12 Author interview, July 1, 2015. 13 Author interview, July 13, 2015. 14 Author interview, June 23, 2015. 15 The Berger administration saw the CICIG as a means of dismantling organized criminal networks and gang structures, while the United States viewed it as a key anti-narcotics tool. Meanwhile, traditional business elites sought to deploy the CICIG to undercut their “emerging capital” rivals, whereas human rights organizations hoped the commission's work would disable the powerful counterinsurgent structures that continued to target political opponents and engage in illicit activities (OSF 2016, 92). The earliest cases taken on by the CICIG reflected the divergent interests of various sectors. They included the arrest of former President Portillo and several members of his government on embezzlement charges (CICIG 2009, 16–7); the assassination of prominent lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg who, in a pre-taped video, accused the sitting, center-left government of Álvaro Colom (2008–2011) of orchestrating the murder (Grann 2011); and accusations of extrajudicial executions in several Guatemala City prisons, orchestrated by Berger's minister of the interior Carlos Vielmann and top police officials (Fernández 2011). 16 Speech at CICIG event on April 25, 2015. 17 Author interview, June 23, 2015. 18 Author interview, June 15, 2015. 19 Author interview, July 1, 2015. 20 Author interview, July 3, 2015. 21 There are wide-ranging scholarly debates about what trust in institutions does and does not mean (see Levi and Stoker 2000). 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TI - Conjuring the Criminal State: The “State-Idea” in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and International Statebuilding
JO - Journal of Global Security Studies
DO - 10.1093/jogss/ogaa031
DA - 2021-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/conjuring-the-criminal-state-the-state-idea-in-post-conflict-rFd1M4hAsP
VL - 6
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -