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.
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.
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.
It is often noted in resource curse literature that agricultural economies are less conflict-prone than countries managing mobile, high-value resources. In the vast literature linking resource ...endowment and conflict, cash crop economies are often considered immune to civil violence, believed to stand apart from the many horrific episodes of violence and civil war centered on "lootable" wealth (such as alluvial diamonds, tin, tungsten, or other conflict minerals). But many incidents of violence-especially local violence-are in fact occurring in cash crop economies. Drawing on newspaper accounts, policy analyses, ethnographic interviews, and in-depth reports by international organizations, I examine an episode of local violence in 2010 in Kyrgyzstan. Through this case study, the article provides a better understanding of local violence in cash crop economies that can apply to other weak states.
Many countries have securitized their policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by framing it as an existential threat demanding extraordinary security responses. The politics of securitization are ...particularly advantageous to nondemocratic regimes. Yet, contrary to the expectation that the Central Asian governments would resort to their tried-and-tested method of framing a new policy issue as a national security threat, these governments have used a deliberately constrained representation of the pandemic with some even diminishing the significance of a threat posed by COVID-19. What explains these unexpected patterns of securitization in response to the pandemic? This study argues that autocratic regimes' concerns with legitimacy and their specific legitimization practices shape their choices about securitization of a policy issue. In Kazakhstan, the government's response to the crisis became part of a political struggle between competing claims to presidential legitimacy. In Kyrgyzstan, weak government legitimacy rooted in poor economic performance coupled with the fear of unrest preempted any coherent effort to securitize the crisis. In Uzbekistan, the government's new technocratic self-image limited securitization within its COVID-19 response. In Tajikistan, a strategy of denial and delay emerged, since securitization of COVID-19 promised little additional security aid.
This article applies a political economy approach to questions of presidential succession in Central Asia. Using the cases of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, it examines how institutions governing rural ...economies generate, channel and distribute rents within these authoritarian regimes. In some, these institutions concentrate rents under long-standing rulers; in others they diffuse rents away from rulers. The article then specifies obstacles to leadership change that arise from these rural economies, and the crises those obstacles may pose for authoritarian regimes in the region.
This article argues that increased anti-immigrant mobilization (the targeting of ethnic migrants to limit their rights and/or promote their resettlement) in Russia's regions is a consequence of local ...social movements adopting an anti-immigrant frame as part of their efforts to promote recruitment, acquire resources, and advance their movement's particular cause. Using the cases of Sverdlovsk's Gorod Bez Narkotikov (City Without Drugs) and Krasnodar's Cossack groups, it develops the argument and demonstrates specific ways in which an anti-immigrant frame is taken up by local movements. As a complement to existing studies of anti-immigrant sentiment or far right ideology, these cases highlight the practical politics of mobilizing support for anti-immigration causes in contemporary Russia.
