Fukuyama begins State-Building with an account of the broad importance of "stateness." He rejects the notion that there can be a science of public administration, and discusses the causes of contemporary state weakness. He ends the book with a discussion of the consequences of weak states for international order, and the grounds on which the international community may legitimately intervene to prop them up.
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow and the Mosbacher director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He is the author of Political Order and Political Decay, State-Building, The End of History and the Last Man, The Origins of Political Order, America at the Crossroads, and Falling Behind.