State Erosion: Unlootable Resources and Unruly Elites in Central Asia

By Lawrence P. Markowitz

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780801469459

Book preview

STATE EROSION

Unlootable Resources

and Unruly Elites in Central Asia

Lawrence P. Markowitz

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To Janet and Arnold

Contents

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List of Figures, Tables, and Maps

Preface and Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Rethinking the Resource Curse

2. Resources and Rents 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

Notes

Figures, Tables, and Maps

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Figures

2.1. Lateral movements of raikom first secretaries, Tajikistan, 1960–91

2.2. Lateral movements of raikom first secretaries, Uzbekistan, 1960–91

2.3. Governors appointed outside region of origin, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, 1961–2004

3.1. Number of incidents of state security fragmentation, Tajikistan, 1992

3.2. Number of deaths in incidents of state security fragmentation, Tajikistan, 1992

3.3. Number of deaths in incidents of state security fragmentation by province, Tajikistan, 1992

4.1. Total seizures of heroin in Tajikistan (kilograms)

4.2. Number of experts ranking regional courts among worst three in Tajikistan

5.1. Claims submitted to provincial economic courts, Uzbekistan, 2001–3

5.2. Land restitution by provincial prokurators, Uzbekistan, 2002

Tables

1.1. Explaining state security outcomes in weak states with immobile capital

2.1. Infrastructure investments by province, Tajikistan, 1939–44

2.2. Gross income of collective farms, Tajikistan (as percent of total)

2.3. Infrastructure investments by province, Uzbekistan, 1933–39

2.4. Gross income of collective farms, Uzbekistan (as percent of total)

3.1. Regional factors promoting onset of state security fragmentation, Tajikistan

3.2. How experts rate local prokurators’ debt collection: regional differences in Tajikistan

3.3. How experts rate local prokurators’ enforcement of crop extraction: regional differences in Tajikistan

3.4. How experts rate local prokurators’ debt collection: regional differences in Uzbekistan

3.5. How experts rate local prokurators’ enforcement of crop extraction: regional differences in Uzbekistan

4.1. State security agencies in postwar Tajikistan

5.1. Central government subsidies to provincial budgets, Uzbekistan

6.1. State security outcomes in weak states with immobile capital

Maps

1.1. Map of Uzbekistan

1.2. Map of Tajikistan

Preface and Acknowledgments

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In response to my request for a dependable research contact in Surkhandarya Province, my friend’s relative—a mid-level employee in Uzbekistan’s security apparatus—made an extraordinary offer. Having just detained a driver from Surkhandarya for (unwittingly) transporting narcotics in his taxi, he would assign the driver’s older brother to take me to the region, host me there, and bring me back to Tashkent. The driver was innocent, he noted, but would be held in custody for a few weeks until I was safely returned. With quiet composure and a steady look, he assured me that "nothing will happen to you, and you will not find a better guide." As I weighed the moral (and legal) implications of advancing my career through the imprisonment of another human being, I considered the effect of adding the brother’s road rage to my usual taxi ride to the region—a nine-hour, seatbeltless journey over decrepit roads, traveling in excess of eighty miles an hour to the beat of blaring Uzbek techno music. I politely declined.

Not long after he departed, I realized that what made this offer so extraordinary (and unsettling) was that it was not at all extraordinary to the person making it. It was a fairly typical, passing occurrence in his otherwise busy day. How were the security services of such a highly coercive state so malleable that such an offer could be so easily made? If this private use of state security could be done for an acquaintance (a foreigner no less), then what kind of actions would be taken for a relative, a supervisor at work, or an important political figure? With a quarter of a million people in Uzbekistan wearing uniforms, carrying guns, and claiming the authority to enforce rules in society, the question of what motivates their behavior seemed particularly pertinent. But my understanding of how the country’s law enforcement and security apparatus fit into the workings of the postcommunist state remained incomplete—in part because Uzbekistan is often credited with possessing too much coercive capacity by human rights and democracy advocates. As I investigated further into this overlap of coercion and corruption in Uzbekistan, I found it difficult to reconcile the view in policy and academic communities of a repressive state with numerous examples of a weak apparatus: that a district prokurator named as a defendant in a trial had arranged to be a judge on the case, leading to a conviction of the plaintiff on trumped-up charges; that police and prokurators earning fifty dollars a month drive luxury cars and remodel their homes; and that the two law institutes and the militsiya institute in Tashkent have witnessed a spike in applications because lucrative careers await their graduates (while degrees are in less demand for professions such as medicine that eke out a subsistence living). It seemed that Uzbekistan manifested the bizarre contradiction of a highly corrupt law enforcement and security apparatus that nonetheless had far more coercive capacity than its Central Asian counterparts. To get a better grasp of the underlying processes at work, I began to look at Uzbekistan through the lens of Tajikistan, where security services had literally disintegrated during a brutal civil war. I realized that the coercive institutions of both countries were at the center of two very different paths of state development. The comparison seemed worth pursuing and, after many permutations, it evolved into the study of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan before you.

From the outset, the project has benefited from the support of many institutions. During graduate school, the U.S. Fulbright-Hays Program, American Councils for International Education, International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Global Studies Program at University of Wisconsin–Madison all provided generous financial support, which enabled me to conduct field research in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and a Social Science Research Council fellowship afforded me time to write. Later as I developed the research into a book, grants from the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Rowan University, and a postdoctoral fellowship from Georgetown University, each provided time for reflection as I developed various parts of the book. Some of the material used in the book has drawn on articles I have previously published: Unlootable Resources and State Security Institutions in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Comparative Political Studies 44, 2 (February 2011): 156–183 and Local Elites, prokurators, and extraction in rural Uzbekistan, Central Asian Survey 27, 1 (March 2008): 1–14. I thank the publishers for their permission to use this material.

Along the way, many individuals have been helpful as I entertained, discussed, discarded, and retained various arguments. The book began in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where faculty and fellow graduate students created a wonderful environment that provided support, feedback, and critique: Melinda Adams, Jon Boyle, Alex Caviedes, Rachel DeMotts, Michael Franz, Kathryn Hendley, Eunsook Jung, Daniel Kapust, Lynda Kellam, Baharah Lampert, Joe Lampert, Simanti Lahiri, Tamir Moustafa, Travis Nelson, David Parker, Uli Schamiloglu, John Scherpereel, Ed Schatz, Mark Schrad, Patricia Strach, Aili Tripp, and Ayse Zarakol to name a few. At Wisconsin and beyond, Mark Beissinger has been my teacher, advisor, and colleague—and throughout it all he has carefully read my work, challenged my ideas, and encouraged me to keep my nose to the grindstone.

A number of individuals in Central Asia made it possible to learn Uzbek and Russian, to gain insight into the politics, culture, and society in the region, and to carry out systematic research, but unfortunately I cannot thank them by name. I thank the Academy of Sciences in both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as staff in local offices of IREX, American Councils, and the US embassies in both countries for providing critical institutional and logistical support while I conducted field research. Both in Central Asia and in the United States, I have benefited greatly from comments and suggestions over the years from others who work in the postcommunist region. They are too numerous to list, but I especially thank Eric McGlinchey and Scott Radnitz, who each read the manuscript in its entirety. While I was teaching at Georgetown University, Oberlin College, and Rowan University, many congenial colleagues helped me in the writing of this book. At Oberlin College, advice from Michael Parkin sharpened my use of statistical methods. As the manuscript approached its final stages, it has been improved substantially by constructive criticism from two anonymous, yet conscientious, reviewers at Cornell University Press and has been ushered ably toward production by its patient editor, Roger Haydon.

Finally, I thank my family for being a constant source of support. My two children, Timur and Laylo, have sustained me during long hours of writing, perhaps more than they will ever know. Their mother Guli has been with the book for so many years, through so many stages of its development, that she has influenced nearly every part of it. Because of me, my brother Dan has learned more about Central Asia than he would ever admit, but he has never failed to offer encouragement. And my parents, Arnold and Janet, have supported me in more ways than I can possibly relate here, except to say that without them this book would not have been possible. I dedicate it to them.

Abbreviations

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INTRODUCTION

To be successful, social science must steer a careful course between Scylla of lovely but untested theory and Charybdis, the maelstrom of information unstructured by theory.

—Barbara Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles

State failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the post–Cold War era. It has emerged with alarming frequency in contemporary weak states, contributing to a rise in civil wars, insurgency, and terrorist attacks. Having rapidly gained currency in the 1990s, the problem of state failure—the collapse of the central government’s authority to impose order—has become a preoccupation in academic and policy circles.

Prominent voices call for new (or renewed) attention to state failure as a primary foreign policy concern. The charge, they contend, is to commit to fixing failed states despite high costs or long time horizons.¹ And commitments are being made. Large government-commissioned studies, multiyear development projects, and prominent nonprofit organizations have all cropped up to answer the call to prevent state failure and promote sustainable institutions.² Annual assistance to fragile states totals $46 billion.³ The United States alone spends $1 billion on governance aid each year through its Agency for International Development, to which another $124 million was added in 2004 to establish the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization and an additional $649 million was set aside in 2009 to create a Civilian Stabilization Initiative.⁴ Designed to develop a coordinated capacity across the 15 United States Government civilian agencies and the Department of Defense, these constitute a significant investment in addressing weak and failed states.⁵ The international community has also expanded its involvement in postconflict reconstruction, sending more than 170,000 troops to projects in twenty countries—representing an increase of 600 percent in UN troop levels since 2002.⁶ And alongside these efforts, a growing industry of think tanks, academic specialists, and policy experts has emerged.⁷ The problem of state failure has absorbed an inordinate amount of attention and resources over the last twenty years, and it is likely to do so for much of the twenty-first century.

Yet theorizing on the sources and dynamics of state failure remains surprisingly limited. Initial portrayals of a coming anarchy in the early 1990s predicted a new world disorder. These influential neo-Malthusian readings often presented state failure as an inevitable consequence of scarcity, crime, tribalism, and disease.⁸ While the literature on state failure has clearly moved beyond such assessments, the emerging debate has not spawned a level of theory building commensurate with the human and financial resources that practitioners have committed.

Instead, scholarship on state failure has been pulled in three directions. During the 1990s, a small number of single-country studies examined state failure as it unfolded on the ground, demonstrating that elites pursuing concrete political and economic benefits often lay behind the façade of crisis and disorder.⁹ These works provided a rich empirical baseline from which generalizations could be formulated. Unfortunately this opportunity for theory building was missed and no enduring analytical framework(s) arose despite efforts to encourage cross-case comparisons in edited volumes.¹⁰ Another group of studies has broached state failure using large datasets to identify which variables—such as poverty, demographic pressures, factionalized elites—make states vulnerable to failure.¹¹ These analyses put forward causal inferences linking an array of explanatory factors to state failure and developed ambitious forecasting models. Employing high-powered statistical methods without theories to guide them, however, proved premature. As one assessment found, there is much to criticize in this relatively atheoretical search for specific causal factors, and that without a theory that rules out hundreds of variables in the task force data set, forecasting models were limited.¹² A third group of scholars has contributed to the study of state failure, but only in passing while they focused on other debates. Rigorous analyses of ethnic conflict or civil war have certainly provided analytical leverage in approaching state failure, but they have not advanced theory development on the subject.¹³ If successful social science must steer a careful course between Scylla of lovely but untested theory and Charybdis, the maelstrom of information unstructured by theory, then state failure research has too often been swept into the whirlpool of Charybdis.

By inductively developing a general theory from empirical cases that can be applied to a select set of weak states, I seek in this book to make sense of the maelstrom of information surrounding state failure. Specifically, I make three contributions. First, I challenge a tendency in the literature to lump together weak and failed states, which often elides the very processes that perpetuate state decline in some cases and lead to state failure in others. Varieties of states and quasi-states abound, but an analytical distinction can be made between those that are weak and those that fail. On the one hand, many countries have become mired in state crisis, remaining palpably weak for decades but avoiding a full disintegration of state authority.¹⁴ On the other, state failure in countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Liberia has introduced a level of violence that has pulled large swathes of territory outside government control, destroyed local governing structures, and brought about the collapse of national institutions. All too often, however, the latter is subsumed under long-term trends of the former. As William Zartman once noted, state failure often appears to be a descending spiral devoid of clear turning points, warning signals, thresholds, or signal spots.¹⁵ Although his subsequent work departs from this depiction, many studies have adopted this perspective. Analyses from Africa to Central Asia regularly warn that countries are flirting with state failure, sliding into collapse, or on the road to failure.¹⁶ But these same countries defy such predictions, sitting on the threshold of failure without crossing over the brink. We need to move away from images of a seamless descent and consider state failure as a highly irregular, disjointed process—an aggregate of individual moments when local-level state institutions may be transformed into formations of nonstate violence. Drawing on insights from the recent micropolitical turn in comparative research, I investigate the internal processes of state failure, uncovering the mechanisms that lead some states to fail and enable others (even so-called impending failures) to stay stable.¹⁷

Second, I question the assumption that state failure begins at the center and radiates outward. The breakdown of national institutions in the capital is frequently the point at which observers conclude state failure has occurred, but this misdirects our attention away from the origins and dynamics of the process. As this book demonstrates, state failure begins on the periphery and moves to the core in many cases. This should not be a surprise. Weak states by definition have a very limited governing presence in peripheral areas, where systems of authority are notoriously diffuse and difficult to control. Even the most ambitious projects to penetrate and transform societies have been undermined by social forces on the ground.¹⁸ As Joel Migdal has argued, many weak states contain a field of interacting, at times conflicting, social forces in which struggles for domination can challenge the viability of the state itself.¹⁹ The periphery of weak states, then, is fertile ground for the beginning of state failure. Examining this outside-in pattern, moreover, brings to light important dynamics of how state failure spreads across localities. Although a vibrant debate exists on how state failure spills over international borders, few scholars have examined its spread within states.²⁰ One of my goals in this book, then, is to explain how state failure starts, travels, and ends: how it proceeds from the regions to the center.

Third, I reconsider the links between resource endowments and state failure. Several studies explore the effects of resource abundance, but most of them focus on fossil fuels (oil and gas) or mineral wealth (gold, copper, and diamonds).²¹ This book proposes expanding the resource curse argument to investigate how cash crop economies insert very different mechanisms by which resources promote state failure. In countries whose economies are structured around cotton, groundnut, or grain production, for example, subtle changes in the underlying patterns of rent seeking determine whether states keep or lose a monopoly of force within their borders. Often the causes of state failure have to do with local-level questions of how the territorial apparatus is staffed, to whom resource rights are allocated, and to which regions subsidies are directed. Historically, these questions were addressed in studies of peasant wars and rural insurrections that linked cash crops to collective action and conflict but not state failure itself.²² More recently, authors of works about state failure see cash crop economies as zones of resource scarcity (in which environmental degradation promotes economic stresses and social conflict), leading them to examine cash crops but not the resource rents they produce.²³ This book demonstrates how cash crop abundance does constitute a type of resource curse, giving rise to a hidden politics of rent seeking that consolidates some states and pulls others into failure.

To explore the problem of state failure more concretely, this book begins with an empirical puzzle: Why did Tajikistan’s state fail while Uzbekistan’s state remained weak but stable? During the 1990s, state failure and civil war in Tajikistan left its institutions—its police, prokurators, and offices of internal security especially—impoverished, internally divided, and incapacitated, while Uzbekistan’s state security apparatus centralized its personnel system, modernized its facilities, and extended its reach into communities through village and neighborhood organizations. The fragmentation of security institutions in Tajikistan began in May 1992, when elites in several regions formed self-defense forces from volunteers and local police units. Local law enforcement and security bodies joined independent militias mobilizing across Tajikistan, paralyzing the central government and leading to a five-year civil war in which nearly 50,000 people died and 800,000 people were displaced. In Uzbekistan, however, potentially unruly elites remained bound to the regime, averting civil war and supporting the construction of one of the largest and most cohesive state security apparatuses in post-Soviet Eurasia.²⁴ Uzbekistan’s law enforcement and security offices enforce highly extractive demands on local citizens, impose unrivaled coercive controls across the country, and remain the primary institutions for adjudicating disputes in society.

These two state security outcomes—fragmentation in Tajikistan and cohesion in Uzbekistan—have shaped each country’s long-term political development.²⁵ Although Tajikistan has received significant international aid toward reconstructing its state, these efforts continue to be plagued by internal divisions within its security services. In many parts of the country, its coercive institutions are staffed by former commanders and regional actors who have used their position and influence to operate outside the central government’s control and even lead insurgencies against the regime. In Uzbekistan, security and law enforcement agencies have been entrusted with broad responsibilities in maintaining social order and promoting economic development. But critical to this success in empowering Uzbekistan’s state security apparatus has been a strategy of linking coercion to rent-seeking activities, which has eroded the rule of law, hindered economic growth, and fostered popular discontent. Uzbekistan has certainly consolidated state security institutions, but over time it has generated a wave of local protests that culminated in the 2005 Andijan uprising and the brutal crackdown that followed. As the experience of Uzbekistan suggests, state security cohesion built on the shaky foundations of rent-seeking elites can avert state failure in the short term, but it may be unsustainable in the long run.

Why, then, did Tajikistan fail while Uzbekistan did not? What are the influences on agents of internal security and law enforcement that account for such contrasting trajectories? What explains their unwavering support for Uzbekistan’s embattled regime and their sudden defection to nonstate militaries in Tajikistan?

The Argument

In this book, I advance a theory of state failure that explains the cohesion and fragmentation of security institutions as a consequence of resource rents, which critically influence how local elites leverage local offices of state security. I examine economies with low capital mobility—where resources cannot be extracted, concealed, or transported to market without state patronage and involvement. In countries defined by immobile capital (such as cotton, coffee, or cocoa producers), local elites commanding farms and factories confront a fundamental problem: how to convert their hands-on control over resources into rents. In order to generate a worthwhile profit, bales of cotton or loads of grain are simply too large and too heavy to extract, transport, and sell outside state surveillance. Local elites, working under constraints that prevent them from independently exploiting the resources under them, are therefore forced to seek out political patrons.

This embeds rent seeking within state politics, raising age-old questions of corruption, favoritism, and political protection.²⁶ To explain how cash crop rents drive state cohesion and fragmentation, I identify two factors that structure the rent-seeking opportunities of local elites: local concentrations of resources and local access to political patronage. I argue that different rent-seeking opportunities either promote the co-optation of local elites to the regime or foster their competition over rents, which in turn lead them to differentially mobilize security institutions in their locality.

In some localities, densely concentrated resources, access to patrons, and open rent-seeking opportunities promote the co-optation of local elites to the regime, encouraging them to use local law enforcement and security bodies as tools