The various chapters and ideas in this book have been presented on so many occasions and before so many colleagues, peers, and students that any list of the people who have kindly (and sometimes impatiently) responded to its arguments would no doubt consume several pages. I would like to thank, however, a rather smaller circle of friends and colleagues who have been especially helpful, directly or indirectly, in my continuing efforts to understand revolutions, social movements, and political conflict more generally.

I have been most privileged – perhaps uniquely privileged – to know and to have worked with the two most influential contemporary scholars of revolutions, Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly. I want to thank them for their inspiration and encouragement, both that which they have expressed personally and that embodied in their own exemplary scholarship. I also want to recognize several other important scholars of revolutions who have also greatly influenced my thinking, albeit often from a somewhat greater distance, including John Foran, Jack Goldstone, Tim McDaniel, Eric Selbin, and Timothy Wickham-Crowley. And I would like to thank Mustafa Emirbayer and Jim Jasper, intellectual collaborators who have continually engaged and challenged my thinking about a host of issues.

A number of people at Harvard, Northwestern, and New York Universities (many of whom have since moved on to other institutions) have also helped me, more than they may realize, to think more clearly about revolutions and not-so-related issues.

If one set out in the spring of 1980 to analyze recent revolutions – inspired, perhaps, by the dramatic events of the previous year in Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan – one's attention would have been drawn inexorably and indeed exclusively to the Third World. At that time, certainly, there did not seem to be anything particularly revolutionary occurring in the “Second World” of the Soviet bloc (and certainly not in the “First World” of advanced capitalist societies). Indeed, opposition movements in Eastern Europe seemed extraordinarily weak or simply nonexistent. The fact that powerful movements within and without the ruling Communist parties had been bloodily suppressed by the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956 and rather more easily, but no less thoroughly, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 only underscored the apparently insurmountable difficulties in opposing the extant Communist regimes.

In the preceding chapters, I have tried to demonstrate how a state-centered approach illuminates the uneven development of revolutionary movements in postwar Southeast Asia. But perhaps the power of this approach for that region, at that time, has something to do with the fact that these societies were formal colonies ruled by powerful external states that were then suddenly occupied by yet another foreign power, Japan.

This chapter presents a state-centered explanation of the uneven development of armed, Communist-led revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War. More specifically, it attempts to explain why Communist movements became formidable threats to incumbent regimes in Vietnam, Malaya, and the Philippines during the decade or so following World War II, but not in Indonesia. The following chapter attempts to explain why only the Vietnamese Communist insurgency was subsequently able to seize state power (at least, during the period under examination, in northern Vietnam), while the other two Communist insurgencies that developed in the region were defeated.

After noting some of the common characteristics of Southeast Asian societies at midcentury, I examine two hypotheses about “Indonesian exceptionalism” (i.e., the absence of a Communist-led national liberation movement in that country), and present my own solution to this puzzle.

The impressive growth, especially in the late 1970s, of popular revolutionary movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala was predicated upon the violent closure of the infra structurally weak authoritarian regimes in those countries. Yet these regimes did not prove equally vulnerable to the movements that they unwittingly helped to construct. Only the movement in Nicaragua, which harnessed a vast popular insurrection that it only loosely controlled, actually seized state power, toppling the Somoza dictatorship and the National Guard in July 1979. The Sandinista revolution, moreover, occurred quite rapidly – less than two years after the Sandinistas reemerged publicly following a period of “accumulating forces in silence.”

Before explaining why resource booms lead to the breakdown of institutions, it is important to define my terms and map out the domain of the problem. This chapter describes some basic facts about states that rely heavily on the export of natural resources: it explains what commodity booms are, and how they can create rents; it describes the types of institutions that developing states use to manage their commodity sectors, and to cope with export booms; and it reviews earlier research on the performance of these institutions.

The chapter has three central points: many developing states face periodic booms in their natural resource exports; many of these states have institutions that include features designed to help manage these booms; and despite these institutions, states respond poorly to resource booms.

It may be helpful to mention some of the claims this chapter does not make. It does not claim that all developing states undergo natural resource booms. It does not claim that all booms are followed by institutional collapses. It does not suggest that resource booms are the only source, or even the principal source of failure in these institutions. Finally, it does not try to prove that resource booms cause institutional breakdowns: that is the task of the case studies in Chapters 4 through 7. This chapter lays out the scope of the problem. The rest of the book examines its source.

This book grew out of my dissertation, which in turn reflected my concern about tropical deforestation in Southeast Asia. In 1994 I visited the region's leading timber-exporting states – the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia – to learn more about their forests and forestry policies. Unlike some observers, I believed that these governments were wise to authorize logging on at least a limited scale, and to convert a portion of their forests into agricultural land. The United States had done much the same thing in an earlier era, using its abundant forests to spur development; why should not developing states today make a similar choice?

I was initially impressed by the forest policies of these three states – or, rather, four states, since in Malaysia forest policies are made at the state level, and most of Malaysia's timber came from the autonomous states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. I was also struck by the dedication of many of their foresters. Yet I gradually realized that the policies of their forestry departments were systematically ignored by politicians, particularly when it came to distributing timber concessions. As a result, these governments had at times authorized logging at rates far above the sustained-yield level, even in forests that were ostensibly set aside for “sustainable” forestry.

Between 1950 and 1995, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia each enjoyed periods of booming timber exports. Each had forests that contained trees from the Dipterocarpaceae family – trees that grew tall and straight, resisted wood-boring pests, and could be milled into high-quality lumber and plywood. While Indonesia's forestry institutions were weak, the Philippines and Malaysia had relatively strong forestry institutions, at least initially. Both had forestry departments that were led by well-trained professionals, that enjoyed a high degree of political independence, and that restricted logging to sustained-yield levels.

Yet over time the forestry institutions of all three states broke down. After timber exports began to boom, the Philippine, Malaysian, and Indonesian forest departments lost their political independence; the quality of their forest policies dropped sharply; and each government began to authorize logging at ruinously high rates – as high as ten times the sustainable level. Why did the forestry institutions of these three states break down? And why did these governments become so eager to squander their forests?

The breakdown of forestry institutions in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia is the central puzzle of this book; in answering it, though, I seek to cast light on two larger puzzles. One is the puzzle of poor forest management in the developing world. Since the 1950s, virtually all developing states with commercially valuable forests – in Latin America, the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, and Southeast Asia – have logged them unsustainably.

In 1951, the Philippines became the world's leading exporter of hardwood logs. Though heavily damaged by the war, the Philippine forest sector was in an admirable position. Almost half the nation was forested, and the logging industry used some of the most advanced harvesting practices in the tropics. Most important, the timber industry was governed by a forestry bureau with a well-trained staff, a considerable degree of political independence, a policy of promoting sustained-yield forestry, and a reputation for avoiding the corruption and patronage that plagued many other government agencies. Yet, by the 1960s, the forestry bureau had lost its political independence; its policy of sustained-yield logging was all but abandoned; and the nation's forests were on their way to being badly overlogged.

This chapter shows how the timber windfall of the early 1950s led to rent seizing, which in turn led to the deterioration of the institutions and policies that protected the forests.

In 1963, the British colonies of North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore joined the Federation of Malaya to create a new state, the Federation of Malaysia. Yet the former colony of North Borneo – now called Sabah – retained many of the powers of a sovereign state, including special control over immigration, religion, language, and land use. It also kept control of its forests, which remained exempt from the federal government's national forestry laws and taxes.

The Sabah government had good reasons to retain authority over its forests: they were densely packed with trees from the Dipterocarpaceae family – the same type that the Philippines so profusely exported. In 1953, Sabah held 2.7 percent of world hardwood market; by 1973, it had captured 20.1 percent of a much larger international market. Sabah was the world's second largest supplier of hardwood logs from 1959 to 1990 – second to the Philippines, then to Indonesia, and finally to its East Malaysian neighbor, Sarawak. Sabah's tiny city of Sandakan became one of the world's leading timber ports. Locals claimed it had more millionaires per capita than any city in the world.

Sabah's spectacular growth as a timber exporter, however, went hand-in-hand with the deterioration of its forestry institutions.

In the late 1960s, Philippine log exports began to decline; at the same time, Indonesia's timber exports began to soar. By 1973 Indonesia had replaced the Philippines as the world's leading hardwood exporter. Timber also became Indonesia's largest source of foreign exchange, after oil.

The case of Indonesia differs from the others in three important ways. First, its forestry institutions were far weaker. In the Philippines, Sabah, and Sarawak, rent seizing damaged the institutions that fostered sustained-yield forestry. The Indonesian government had no such institutions in the 1960s and early 1970s; there was little to dismantle. But the Indonesian forests had been protected, in part, by nonstate institutions – the institutions of adat, or customary law. Of the four cases in this study, Indonesia and Sabah had made the greatest strides – before their timber booms – toward recognizing the customary land rights of forest dwellers. Shortly after the timber boom began, the Indonesian government rescinded those rights, to boost the size of the windfall.

Second, Indonesia's boom was not triggered by rising international timber prices; rather, it was caused by the government's efforts in 1966 and 1967 to lower the costs of cutting and exporting timber.