Throughout the book, Sisk’s main methodology is reliance on literature review to address his main question of what practices or strategies sustain peace following a civil war. Sisk states that the purpose of the book is to “introduce and explore prevailing concepts, discourses, debates, and dilemmas of statebuilding” (2013, 11). Sisk achieves this by utilizing a wide variety of literature from both scholarly and “practitioner” sources (2013, 11). The practitioner literature is drawn from non-governmental organizations, aid agencies, states included in the analysis, and international organizations like the U.N. and OECD. What also sets Sisk’s book apart is focus on special topics, women’s rights, inclusion of minority groups in governance, and the agency of local leaders and clans. These special topics fit into Sisk’s framework of using the concepts of autonomy, authority, capacity, and legitimacy. This framework is the basis of Sisk’s argument and how the book is organized. Despite Sisk’s insistence that the methodology of these individual literature pieces being “genuine and robust”, there are some drawbacks, such as institutional bias from some practitioner literature (2013, 12). Another drawback of this methodology is that literature on statebuilding is often very context-specific, which makes it difficult to draw generalizations on a global level. Since much of the literature is heavily contextual, this book can’t provide every detail described in the literature, which doesn’t allow Sisk’s book to provide great depth on one situation.

Sisk does provide some original qualitative information in the book. For example, to illustrate the role of civil war in fragile states, Sisk gathered information on the most fragile states from Global Report 2011: Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility, then coded each country for whether it had a “civil war or significant episode of political violence” (2013, 38-40). This small qualitative illustration was included to show correlation between civil war/political violence and fragile states. Overall, Sisk’s methods are largely qualitative and exploratory by examining major literature pieces on statebuilding, then using this information to create a framework to answer his research question.