Building the Nation

Heather Selma Gregg is an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of Defense Analysis. She is the author of The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (Potomac Books, 2014) and coeditor of The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac Books, 2010). She has spent time in several regions of conflict, including Palestine/the West Bank, Croatia, and Bosnia.

• TablesChapter 1 Bringing the Nation Back into Nation BuildingChapter 2 States, Nations, Nationalism and National UnityChapter 3 State and Nation Building in Europe and the United StatesChapter 4 State Building Programs Post September 11thChapter 5 State Building in Iraq: 2003-2011Chapter 6 Counterfactual State and Nation Building in IraqChapter 7 State Building in Afghanistan: 2001-2015Chapter 8 Counterfactual State and Nation Building in AfghanistanChapter 9 A Program for Population Centric State and Nation BuildingNotesBibliography

"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