In Wars, Guns, and Votes, Paul Collier argues that there is a vital role for political leadership and that “leaders must build the nation before they can build the state” (Collier, p.52). What does it mean to build a nation, and in particular, what is its relationship to building a state? Well first, a nation is a group of people who share some sort of common identity like a language, religion, ethnicity, or shared history (Clark, p. 88). Where as, a state is an entity that relies on coercion and the threat of force to rule in a given territory (Clark, p. 88). Collier points out that societies (states) can function properly even if its people hold multiple identities but mentions that if they focus on their identities and not their loyalty to the nation, the end result would be problems arising (Collier, p. 51).…show more content… He defines the bottom billion as being structurally insecure as well as unaccountable. It’s explained that the because those states are too big, you can find structural problems such as: not having a common sense of identity; lack of social cohesion that collective action requires to establish accountability; and because of some are to small, it’s incapable of producing public goods efficiently, in terms of security. Which in essence, it something like a failed state because they are unable to maintain the approval status of what is defined by being a state. Similarly, he expresses criticism towards the modern state building approach: building the state before the nation. He stands to argue that the ethnic politics, those that are characterized by the triumph of ethnic loyalty over national ones, present in the bottom billion have created an impediment to prosperity. In which we find great ethnic diversity and ethnic favoritism made the cooperation to build check and balances much harder; and thus related in worsening of