State failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the post-Cold War era. Yet theorizing on the causes of state failure remains surprisingly limited. InState Erosion, ...Lawrence P. Markowitz draws on his extensive fieldwork in two Central Asian republics-Tajikistan, where state institutions fragmented into a five-year civil war from 1992 through 1997, and Uzbekistan, which constructed one of the largest state security apparatuses in post-Soviet Eurasia-to advance a theory of state failure focused on unlootable resources, rent seeking, and unruly elites.
In Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and other countries with low capital mobility-where resources cannot be extracted, concealed, or transported to market without state intervention-local elites may control resources, but they depend on patrons to convert their resources into rents. Markowitz argues that different rent-seeking opportunities either promote the cooptation of local elites to the regime or incite competition over rents, which in turn lead to either cohesion or fragmentation. Markowitz distinguishes between weak states and failed states, challenges the assumption that state failure in a country begins at the center and radiates outward, and expands the "resource curse" argument to include cash crop economies, where mechanisms of state failure differ from those involved in fossil fuels and minerals. Broadening his argument to weak states in the Middle East (Syria and Lebanon) and Africa (Zimbabwe and Somalia), Markowitz shows how the distinct patterns of state failure in weak states with immobile capital can inform our understanding of regime change, ethnic violence, and security sector reform.
Counterterrorism experts and policy makers have warned of the peril posed by the links between violent extremism and organized crime, especially the relationship between drug trafficking and ...terrorism funding. Yet Central Asia, the site of extensive opium trafficking, sees low levels of terrorist violence.Webs of Corruptionis an innovative study demonstrating that terrorist and criminal activity intersect more narrowly than is widely believed-and that the state plays the pivotal role in shaping those interconnections. Mariya Y. Omelicheva and Lawrence P. Markowitz analyze the linkages between the drug trade and terrorism financing in Central Asia, finding that state security services shape the nexus of trafficking and terrorism. While organized crime and terrorism do intersect in parts of the region, profit-driven criminal organizations and politically motivated violent groups come together based on the nature of state involvement. Governments in high-trafficking regions are drawn into illicit economies and forge relationships with a range of nonstate violent actors, such as insurgents, erstwhile regime opponents, and transnational groups. Omelicheva and Markowitz contend that these relationships can mitigate terrorism-by redirecting these actors toward other forms of violence. Offering a groundbreaking combination of quantitative, qualitative, and geographic information systems methods to map trafficking/terrorism connections on the ground,Webs of Corruptionprovides a meticulously researched, counterintuitive perspective on a potent regional security problem.
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A method to calibrate measurement instruments through the fulfillment of physical laws is described. This method is particularly well suited to determine and/or improve magnetic spectrometer optics ...databases as well as to establish the best resolution achievable with them. This method was applied to obtain the best resolution achievable in the excitation and binding energy spectra of several hypernuclei produced in the experiment E94-107 performed at JLab, allowing us to obtain sub-MeV resolutions.
Objectives. Using the example of Uzbekistan, this article examines the challenges and opportunities for conducting field research in a context of tightened scientific closure in those countries with ...highly autocratic regimes. Methods. Drawing on the author’s own field experience conducting elite interviews in Uzbekistan in 2002 and 2003 (as well as many subsequent visits), it examines three strategies of field research that emerged in this context of tightening scientific closure. Results. The article outlines several essential features of authoritarianism in Uzbekistan and tracks the regime’s shift toward scientific closure over three distinct phases, tracing out the implications of this shift for those carrying out systematic field research. Conclusions. Uzbekistan illustrates the challenges and opportunities facing researchers under conditions of scientific closure in the 20–30 other countries ruled by hard authoritarian regimes.
This article surveys research on regimes and states in Central Asia and assesses its contribution to Political Science, specifically the subfield of comparative politics. It discusses three areas in ...which research on the region has been influenced by and, in turn, fruitfully shaped the comparative political analysis of state and regime: a turn from macro- to micro-level topics; innovations in research design; and the embrace of interdisciplinarity. It then addresses the challenges confronting scholars of the region, including uneven theoretical contributions to comparative politics and impediments in the feasibility of field research. It identifies several lively debates in comparative politics to which Central Asianists have the potential to contribute important insights. It concludes that the study of states and regimes in Central Asia has greatly enriched some debates in comparative politics (and vice versa), but declining pools of funding, the politicization of academic research, and unequal access to institutional resources among local and Western scholars threaten to diminish the field's contributions in the coming years.
Due to the lack of free neutron targets, studies of the structure of the neutron are typically made by scattering electrons from either 2H or 3He targets. In order to extract useful neutron ...information from a 3He target, one must understand how the neutron in a 3He system differs from a free neutron by taking into account nuclear effects such as final state interactions and meson exchange currents. The target single spin asymmetry Ay0 is an ideal probe of such effects, as any deviation from zero indicates effects beyond plane wave impulse approximation. New measurements of the target single spin asymmetry Ay0 at Q2 of 0.46 and 0.96 (GeV/c)2 were made at Jefferson Lab using the quasi-elastic He↑3(e,e′n) reaction. Our measured asymmetry decreases rapidly, from >20% at Q2=0.46 (GeV/c)2 to nearly zero at Q2=0.96 (GeV/c)2, demonstrating the fall-off of the reaction mechanism effects as Q2 increases. We also observed a small ϵ-dependent increase in Ay0 compared to previous measurements, particularly at moderate Q2. This indicates that upcoming high Q2 measurements from the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV program can cleanly probe neutron structure from polarized 3He using plane wave impulse approximation.
This article analyzes the temporal variation in far-right violence by examining it as a series of interrelated attacks that are embedded within and arising out of a broader cycle of far-right ...mobilization. It argues that the changing nature of far-right violence occurs as a trial-and-error process - what Sidney Tarrow terms "tactical innovation" - within a mobilizational cycle. As we demonstrate below, far-right mobilization is characterized by innovation, experimentation, and selection of specific types of attacks and particular targets that are deemed likely to garner public support and increase pressure on state officials. Consequently, over the course of the mobilizational cycle, far-right violence employed more organized forms of violence and increasingly targeted ethnic minorities and migrants. We find empirical support for this argument in the case of Russia, using event analysis of a ten-year span of mass violent attacks and an in-depth examination of selected riots.
Kompromat, or compromising material used against political elites, is widely considered to be essential in shoring up authoritarian durability. While it is useful in preempting or penalizing ...individual challengers, however, Kompromat is a highly targeted and selective
tool that does little to deter widespread elite defection in authoritarian regimes in the middle of a crisis. Instead, where autocrats have previously contracted on violence-coopted security for their use in repression-ruler concessions concentrate rent seeking under the national
executive, creating winner-take-all stakes that makes defection prohibitively risky. Through the example of Uzbekistan's regime durability during the 2005 Andijan uprising, this article examines the effect of this political economy of coercion on deterring elite defection.
Abstract
The post–Cold War environment has ushered in an era of threats from terrorism, organized crime, and their intersections giving rise to the growing literature on the so-called crime–terror ...nexus. This article takes stock of this literature, assesses its accomplishments and limitations, and considers ways to deepen it conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. To challenge assumptions informing the crime–terror studies and suggest avenues for future research, the article draws on ideas from the scholarship on political economies of violence. These insights are used to probe the (1) non-state actors that form the crime–terror nexus, (2) conditions under which the nexus is likely to emerge, and (3) varied effects of criminal–terrorist intersections. The article emphasizes the ties of criminal and terrorist groups to local politics, society, and economy, and relationships of competition, rather than cooperation, which often characterize these ties. The conditions under which these groups operate cannot be understood without considering the role of the state in criminal–terrorist constellations. The structure of resource economies influences both the preferences of terrorist groups for crime and the consequences of terrorist–criminal convergence, which are also mediated by state participation in crime.
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