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. In State 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."
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