The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

The conclusions close the manuscript and make four points. First, they review the macro-level observational expectations tested in Part II, and how my findings, obtained through a triangulation of different techniques, allow for a comprehensive picture of how war affected state formation throughout the entire region. Second, they bring together all case studies in Part III, noting how the historical evidence collected fits the expectations of the theory at a micro-level—e.g., considering the behavior of individual actors and the effects of narrow events like battles within wars—and does so with out-and-out consistency—i.e., case by case, almost without exception. Third, they reflect upon the scope of the theory, discussing many other cases that could be explained by the long-term effects of war outcomes. This discussion covers many regions and time periods, showing that classical bellicist theory not only can travel, but can also solves logical problems and empirical puzzles highlighted by previous scholarship. Finally, the conclusions suggest many lines of enquiry for future research that the book leaves open.

In this chapter I lay the foundations of the book and give an overview of the argument. After introducing the importance of studying state capacity and the main puzzle of why certain states are set in divergent state building trajectories, I discuss the state of bellicist theory and criticisms related to its alleged functionalist approach to history, and lack of fit with a world where inter-state war has become less frequent. I then turn to Latin America, a poster child of anti-bellicist scholars. There I review the aforementioned books by Centeno, Kurtz, Mahoney, Mazzuca, Saylor, and Soifer, amongst others. My book is set against this new consensus which dismisses war as an explanation for intra-regional variation in state capacity. In a final section, I propose the need to rethink the theory with a focus on the long-term consequences of war outcomes rather than pre-war conditions. The introduction closes with a discussion of my case selection strategy and chapter layout.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

Protest in the face of authoritarian rule necessitates a kind of audacity rarely, if ever, called for in daily life. When uprising turns to revolt and revolt to civil war, new questions arise: What comes next? What combination of suffering and joy does the future hold? And to whom should one now turn to manage those matters previously entrusted to the state? Even as new political possibilities arise, the stuff of ordinary life does not disappear but instead must be managed on terms that are both newly expansive and constrained. As people confront the hopes and hardships that come with rebellion, bread must be baked, crimes punished, and garbage collected.

After laying out the substantial challenges faced by the young People’s Republic of China in 1949, this chapter focuses on the particular ways in which revolutionary policies were implemented: by an ever shifting mix of bureaucratic and campaign modalities that were supported by a range of public performances. Bureaucracy was characterized by hierarchy, order, precedent, the strengthening of formal state institutions and a mania for classification, thus radically simplifying complex realities through a process of disaggregation; campaigns mobilized moral commitments through a different type of radical simplification – fusion into morally charged narratives and popular mobilization. Both modalities were in evidence in the two signature campaigns of 1951: the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and land reform. While, in the early 1950s, bureaucratic and campaign modalities were co-constitutive, after the mid 1950s, they were more often in stark tension with each other.

This chapter explains the three core steps in the book’s argument about the power of scarce states. First, I begin by considering the potential for direct effects on society by a scarce state through the distribution of state resources. Second, I suggest that isolated state actions can have effects through a more indirect channel as well. Third, I describe how the societal changes produced – directly or indirectly – by isolated state actions have downstream consequences for who wields political authority and how local actors contest for political power.

This chapter provides an introduction to the main argument, evidence, and contributions of the book.

Chapter 6 details how the collapse of the State in Somalia led to the emergence of severe inter-clan conflicts. These conflicts were rooted in wrenching political conflicts over the monopolization of labor remittances and local currencies and characterized by continued attempts to institute law and order through military and ideological means. In the wake of state collapse, remittances continue to represent the backbone of the Somali economy. These are transferred through informal banking systems and remain untaxed by local authorities. The informal economy’s efficiency in facilitating currency trade, and the extent to which ethnic and religious networks control access to the wages of expatriate Somali labor is determining the political fortunes of local elite’s and variable patterns of state building in different regions of the country. The Somali case calls into question the very principles and analysis of conventional state building and “sovereignty” of nation states in less developed societies.

The first chapter of the book introduces readers to the salience of land as a window into how political authority is constructed and negotiated in modern states. It previews the book’s central argument and situates it within scholarship on historical institutions, state building, and state–society relations. In addition, Chapter 1 presents the central cases and mixed methods empirical approach.

This chapter examines the steady decline and ultimate collapse of the Qajar dynasty and the subsequent establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty. It examines the rise of the dynasty’s founder, Reza Khan, and the social and political context within which the new monarch sought to implement a series of far-reaching social and cultural initiatives designed to modernize the country. A strong central state was established, local rebellions were put down, and various bureaucratic institution were founded in order to affect social change and foster economic development. New, modern schools proliferated across the country. But Reza Shah’s reforms remained ultimately devoid of institutional support, and many were therefore abandoned or altogether reversed when he was removed from office by the British.