Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
there is a zone of "purgatory" that occurs between the time that old forms of governance are "defeated" (that could be a Genghis-like effort to consolidate governance over a state-less region of tribal centers of governance or it could be an intervention such as the US most recently in Iraq or Afghanistan) and such time as the new government comes to be accepted by their own populace (and similarly by neighboring governments and populaces as well). This acceptance being broadly described as "Legitimacy."
I suspect that it's really quite rare that the first government that arises after a period of non-governance is accepted by the populace as legitimate. More often the populace accepts it out of fear, fatigue, or both. That government may in time evolve into something that seeks and even finds popular approval, or it may be subsequently overthrown. A direct transition from non-governance to governance approved by the populace is not common.

We've gotten so used to seeing "the populace" as "the COG" that we often forget that the populace is not the arbiter of victory in a non-governance or weak governance situation. The winner is not the party that gains popular approval, the winner is the party that can bring the strongest and most durable armed force to the table. These populaces certainly don't see themselves as the arbiters of victory, for good reason. They aren't concerned with finding legitimate governance, they're concerned with staying alive.

On so-called "failed states", I don't think we call states "failed" because they lack western-style governance structures. We call them "failed" because of famine, genocide, civil war, pestilence, and other evidence of failure. I'd be the last to say they need a western-style government or state, but we also can't pretend that if we don't intervene they will happily revert to functioning self-governance. In many of these areas traditional tribal governance structures (arguably never as benign or popular as Western myth pretends) have been degraded by innumerable interventions and meddlings, and barely function if they function at all. What's left is rule by whoever has the most armed men on any given spot at any given time. It's pretty raw, and calling it "self-governance" is probably putting a bit too kind a face on it.

Building a functioning government is a place where there is none? Why do we assume that we can do that at all? Before we ask "how do we do it", we need to ask whether we can, and whether we need to try.