"Building the Nation is one of the most comprehensive books you will read about the United State’s efforts to nation-build in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a detailed look at the way forward as we wind down our presence there."—Jason Schott, brooklynfans.com
“Fresh and exciting. In a time when the United States increasingly recognizes how inadequate simple theories of state stabilization and state-building are, Heather Gregg offers a powerful new model for what to do after the shooting has stopped. . . . Dr. Gregg lays out in very concrete ways how such an approach would transform current strategies for post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction. We who live and work in the center of the storm can only hope that her book gets studied carefully by the next generation of policy makers.”—Scott Guggenheim, senior adviser, Office of the President, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
“A robust examination and defense of nation-building and its more nuanced form—national unity building. Had this dimension been appropriately addressed, we would likely not have seen the emergence of Daesh, the collapse of the Iraqi state, and the perils of the new Afghan government.”—Clare Lockhart, director and co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness and senior fellow at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs
“A highly informed and sophisticated analysis of what it take to engage in state-building and in nation-building. If it can be done at all, this book shows the ways.”—Amitai Etzioni, author of Security First and From Empire to Community
