State Erosion: Unlootable Resources and Unruly Elites in Central Asia

Conclusion

147 In the eyes of local elites, the dramatic events during the collapse of the Soviet Union have long ceased to threaten their access to rent-seeking opportunities. The disruptive economic reforms,large-scale political purges,and sweeping mass demonstrations of the early 1990s are already part of history in many postcommunist textbooks. Even memories of Tajikistan’s horrific civil war have begun to fade as years pass. But economies of immobile capital have remained remarkably durable, continuing to shape the bargains struck between rulers and local elites. Underpinned by resources and patronage, a subtle political economy of rent seeking pervades the postcommunist region, fostering intense competition among some local elites and ensuring the co-optation of others.As in weak states elsewhere, political order often rests on the surprisingly fluid foundations of the postcommunist state. In this book, I have studied this interplay of resources and rent seeking at the local level through these examples of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan . Using these contrasting cases, I showed how some weak states may be pulled into state failure and civil war, while others may develop highly cohesive and expansive state security apparatuses. In Tajikistan—where local elites in large swathes of the country commanded sparse resources, accessed little patronage, and saw precious few rent-seeking opportunities—the regime found it could not use co-optation to retain local elite support during the tumultuous early 1990s. As these elites were increasingly disaffected from the government in Dushanbe, they became highly susceptible to competitive pressures as they jockeyed for greater access to avenues of rent seeking. By 1992, these pressures led to the widespread defection of state Conclusion 148 VERSO RUNNING HEAD 148 CONCLUSION security actors to nonstate militias, diffusing state security fragmentation across the country’s localities over several weeks. State failure and a five-year civil war followed. In Uzbekistan, by contrast, resources and patronage were far more evenly distributed across provinces and, consequently, rent-seeking opportunities were opened to local and provincial elites across the country in the early 1990s. These avenues enabled local elites to convert their resources into rents, making them dependent on the regime and opening them to co-optation.Their support for the regime enabled Uzbekistan to consolidate and extend its hold over local security services and construct one of Eurasia’s largest security apparatuses.Alongside the expansion of rent-seeking opportunities to local elites, the regime invested heavily in law enforcement and security services, granting them broad responsibilities over administrative, political, and economic affairs.While promising in the short term, provincial patrons and local elites drew state security bodies into resource extraction and rent-seeking activities. This has produced a highly coercive state apparatus, but one that is held together at the local level by mutually beneficial resource exploitation and rent seeking. These transformational changes have also ushered in long-term consequences for their overall trajectory of state formation. A fractious state apparatus has emerged in Tajikistan,while in Uzbekistan cohesion around coercive rent seeking has become the state’s defining feature. Few would have expected such different paths from these countries, but at the center of these processes is the shared dynamic of state erosion—the gradual destruction of states by patrimonial practices embedded deep within their core institutions. In Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and other weak states with low capital mobility, local elites cannot convert their control over resources into rents, forcing them to seek out patrons and direct their rent-seeking activities inside the state apparatus. This fosters an erosion of institutional structures that will pose significant obstacles to state development in the long run. Indeed, despite significant international assistance provided to Tajikistan and the fiscal, personnel, and coercive resources brought to bear in Uzbekistan, the task of “nation building”—constructing an effective and accountable state infrastructure—in both countries remains stymied to a surprising extent by local elites and their informal relationships permeating territorial administrations. The remainder of the chapter consists of three sections. First, I revisit the argument ,elaborating on its contribution to understanding state failure in weak states, both comparatively and in the postcommunist region. Second, I apply the argument to questions of regime change,ethnic violence,and security sector reform to highlight insights that might be gained from a focus on weak states with immobile capital. Finally, I briefly conclude with implications for the study of the state. RECTO RUNNING HEAD 149 CONCLUSION 149 Understanding State Failure Over the...