Most models of property rights assume they are supplied by the state on demand from society. Property rights are strong when state institutions enforce the law. The strength of state institutions in the provinces determines how well property rights will be enforced on the ground…
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Why do actors sometimes engage in sustained, organized violence against civilians, such that large numbers of the civilians die in a relatively short time span? Between 1900 and 2008, 50,000+ were killed in five or fewer years fifty-five times. Our extant answers about why these…
In the past twenty to thirty years, social scientists and philosophers have begun to move away from traditional conceptions of power and the state, focusing increasingly on the ways knowledge creation and discourse combine to enmesh everyone in webs of power that produce consent…
Since freeing itself from the autocratic control of the former Communist regime, the republic of Tajikistan has confronted numerous problems of underdevelopment which threaten to sink the republic in a new wave of authoritarianism and misery. Implementing democratic reforms aime…
The thematic organization and volume of data in this thesis set it methodologically apart from existing treatments of the colonial encounter in nineteenth-century Afghanistan. Data from South Asian archives illuminates the interaction between three ranges of variables within Ang…
Culture contact between past populations has traditionally been investigated by using a paradigm of unidirectional change forced on a subordinate group by a dominant power. However, recent studies have suggested that such power relations are often more dynamic and bi-directional…
Utilizing the political economy approach, this study offers a systematic analysis of state-society relations in Saudi Arabia during both the pre-oil era and the oil era. The study emphasizes the interpenetration between the state and civil society, and the structural implication…
During the late 1970s Ghana was described as a collapsed and failed state. In contrast, today it is hailed internationally as beacon of democracy and stability in West Africa. In light of Ghana’s drastic image change from a fragile and even collapsed polity to a resilient state,…
This research employs a framework of social power, as coined by Michael Mann (1986; 1993), to understand the processes of state formation and development in Uganda. Using historical knowledge to understand the extent of social power relations in Ugandan society, the thesis asses…
This research has analyzed how the institutions of the merit-based bureaucratic system in the Korean Government changed from 1948 to 1963, applying the gradual institutional change theory of Mahoney and Thelen (2010). Though copious research has been produced on Korean economic …
In the last decade, important members of the international aid community - including the UNDP, the World Bank, and USAID - have produced reports that encourage states to devolve administrative power. In response, the Uzbek government promoted its ongoing efforts to empower local…
This dissertation is a social and military history of the army in Egypt under the Ptolemies (323–30 BC), the Greek rulers who succeeded Alexander the Great in Egypt. Building on approaches developed in state-formation theory, notably Mann's concept of social power (1986) that th…
Historically, the state has established patrimonial ties with relatively homogenous local elites, and used them to make rural life accessible and identifiable for the center. While rural life was reorganized chiefly in functional and territorial terms, the patrimonial ties were …
This dissertation examines the effects of external intervention on state formation in the global periphery, particularly the establishment of sovereign statehood. I posit that the institutions of governance and political authority that define the organisational form of a polity …
Why did Tajikistan's state collapse into a five year civil war while state power in Uzbekistan became mired in prebendal politics? Theories drawn from the comparative study of the state, which have tended to concentrate sources of varying state development in the hands of rulers…
The focus of this dissertation is the Jalayirid dynasty, a family of Muslim sultans who ruled Arab Iraq, Diyarbakr and Azarbayjan in the years following the dissolution of the Mongol Ilkhanate, from 736/1335 to 813/1410. Specifically, the aim of this study is to demonstrate the …
In this study the process of nation-state formation in Turkey is analyzed with reference to various forms of resistance (as distinct from formal political opposition) experienced between the years 1919 and mid-1930s. These include social banditry, military desertion, ethnic and …
This study explains the predominant social, political and economic characteristics of the Islamic Republic by analyzing the internal consequences of the Iran-Iraq war for state capacities and state-society relation in Iran. The war required that the Islamic regime mobilize resou…
This dissertation examines the role of opium in the political and economic development of Afghanistan from a world historical perspective. My research reveals that the Afghan government's adoption of American anti-narcotics policy after World War II led it to enforce prohibition…