3 - The Conquest Equilibrium

Summary

The analytical framework in chapter 2 identified two parameters that affect political violence: variation in rents and the nature of preexisting “sharing” institutions. This chapter aims to explain why so many Muslim countries have institutions that tend to be less sharing compared to non-Muslim societies. The chapter provides a historical narrative for the emergence of an equilibrium of authoritarian power structures in the medieval period associated with the expansion of Islam via military conquest. The chapter describes how Muslim conquest established a set of governing institutions and associated alliances between political actors that set many Muslim societies on a trajectory towards less democratic politics in the contemporary period.