Moussa Ibrahim said in a phone call to the headquarters of The Associated Press in New York that “no dignified honorable nation would accept an ultimatum from armed gangs,” the news agency reported.
In 1985, the late great political sociologist Charles Tilly wrote that state making was sort of like organized crime. Based on a substantive body of empirical work, Tilly and his colleagues had found that states in Europe formed out of a process of nearly 500 years of war. Basically, a bunch of guys with access to weapons (wielders of coercion) went to war and had to find some way of financing this, so they built tax bureaucracies, police agencies (and eventually the architecture of the modern state). Those that were good at war making and tax collection won, and the organization that this called forth was a state. A state is just a super good way of deploying violence, extracting revenue, and exercising territorial control. This is, of course, what the mafia does also, and the modern state does this on much larger, more sophisticated scale.
In other words, state formation is the process through which armed gangs, warlords, or other people that hold coercive power come to control a piece of territory, gain some legitimacy as the "government", and become recognized as sovereign by the international community. As Saint Augustine said: "what is sovereignty but organized robbery?"
So sure, the Libyan rebels are a ragtag militia of gangsters. But with a little time, they could be the government of a new Libyan state.
