Most theoretical models of political change and development applied to the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa have emphasized the critical role of “state-building” - stabilizing, extending, and strengthening the institutions of the centralized state - as a virtual precondition for “modernization,” national integration, and economic development. The central issue in these models of state-building concerns “penetration” of the institutions of the centralized state into “empty territories” or peripheral areas and into culturally and economically diverse regions which have undergone uneven economic and social development. It also involves establishing the authority of state laws and values over the traditional laws, customs, and values of autonomous religious, tribal, and other local communities. It includes as well the implementation of state goals of urban industrial development, increased agricultural production using advanced technologies, and agrarian reform in societies whose populations are overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, and dominated by peasant cultivators.

One influential model of state-building has been woven around the argument that there is a basic tension between the needs for strong state authority and the increased demands for participation by populations mobilized by nationalist leaders, party politicians, and others in pursuit of a multiplicity of goals which ultimately come into conflict with each other and with the broader public interest which only an institutionalized and autonomous state can pursue effectively. This view magnifies such demands for participation into a developmental “crisis,” threatening to state authority and civil order.

All these views tend to exalt the centralized state, to assume its inevitable triumph in one way or another, and to give it an anthropomorphic shape while assigning only a secondary role to the specific actions of the wielders of state authority. It is sometimes suggested that the state may adopt federal features and may decentralize power to local institutions, but these are rarely seen as anything but measures to make more effective the capacity of the central state itself. Political leaders, especially the nationalist leaders, and some of the more dynamic contemporary military leaders, have generally been seen as playing the important, but secondary role of transferring their charisma to state institutions and thereby imparting legitimacy to them. The “overloads” and crises which may lead to the collapse or functional irrelevance of “differentiated modern [state] structures” do not arise from the actions of the leaders but occur “when environmental strains become too great.”