Description
Book SynopsisState failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the postCold 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 republicsTajikistan, 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 Eurasiato advance a theory of state failure focused on unlootable resources, rent seeking, and unruly elites.
In Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and other countries with low capital mobilitywhere resources cannot be extracted, concealed, or transported to market without state interventionlocal 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 co
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Markowitz therefore offers a vivid and much-needed picture of the nuances of the post-Soviet transformations in the countries of Central Asia. The perceptiveness of his analysis makes his book one of the most ambitious and provocative considerations of the dynamics and transformation of state institutions in weak and fragile states. In face, his analysis will illuminate the explorations not only of scholars of post-Soviet and post-communist statehood, but of anyone interested in weak statehood.
-- Emilian Kavalski * Political Studies Review *
Table of ContentsList of Figures, Tables, and Maps
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Rethinking the Resource Curse
2. Rents and Resources under Soviet Rule
3. Pathways to Failure: Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
4. Tajikistan's Fractious State
5. Coercion and Rent-Seeking in Uzbekistan
6. Weak and Failed States in Comparative Perspective
Conclusion
Appendix
