Beyond Nation-Building and State-Building: Nationesis as a Regenerative Science of Political Communities

Traditional paradigms of nation-building and state-building have dominated political theory and international policy for decades, yet their explanatory and prescriptive power remains limited in postcolonial and conflict-affected contexts. Recurrent instability, institutional fragility, and governance failure are often interpreted as operational deficiencies, yet this article contends that the root cause is primarily epistemological. Existing frameworks fragment political life into discrete domains—institutions, identity, legitimacy—while remaining anchored in Westphalian assumptions that fail to capture the dynamic, adaptive nature of political communities. This article introduces Nationesis, a novel transdisciplinary science dedicated to the study of nations as living, adaptive systems whose persistence depends on regenerative processes rather than mere stabilization. Nationesis integrates insights from political theory, comparative constitutionalism, postcolonial scholarship, and systems science to provide a unified analytical framework encompassing institutions, collective meaning, historical memory, leadership intelligence, and legitimacy. Using the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a paradigmatic case of systemic complexity, the article demonstrates why conventional paradigms systematically misread patterns of persistence, fragility, and renewal. The study concludes that the future of political order relies not on institutional replication alone but on a community’s capacity to regenerate meaning, legitimacy, and collective coherence under systemic strain. Nationesis thus offers a transformative lens for political theory, global constitutionalism, and the science of sustainable political communities.