The Port, which had thrived off of its ambiguity and the smooth functioning of translocal networks, faced threats from growing nativism among its multiethnic constituency and the emergence of territorially focused regimes in its neighborhood. However, Mo Tianci was presented with several contingent opportunities to dominate the thrones of Siam and Cochinchina and forge his own state. But he lost on both occasions and ended up an exile in Siam, where he took refuge with his former rival, the half-Chaozhou Taksin. Suspecting him of trying to seize the throne, Taksin imprisoned him and his retinue, eventually resulting in his suicide. However, his descendants managed to play on the continued rivalry between Siam and Vietnam to ensure the survival of The Port as a distinct entity well into the nineteenth century, beyond its prime.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 despite peace talk efforts in late 2020 and early 2021. International pundits had been predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s government might need to share power with a resurgent Taliban, but none had expected such a swift and complete takeover as the Americans readied to leave for good. Two decades of international intervention in Afghanistan were erased. The efficacy and desirability of intervention has been thrown into serious doubt, and with it the prospects for post-conflict state-building. This chapter introduces the rise, and possible fall, of the post-conflict state-building agenda. It introduces the reader to important concepts, noting the relationships between state-building, peace-building and nation-building, as well as underscoring the role of liberal ideology in shaping post-conflict state-building efforts, asking readers to reflect on what they believe external actors should, or should not, do.

Neither southern Africa’s archaeology nor its history or contemporary social and political structure can be understood without reference to its experience of colonialism and conquest or of the resistance to this. This chapter therefore looks at the archaeology of Portuguese exploration and subsequent settlement in Mozambique, as well as at the much more expansive colonisation of southern Africa set in motion by the establishment of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) base at Cape Town in 1652. It traces the spread of European settlement into the region’s interior, the emergence of new creolised populations on and beyond the frontiers of that settlement, the institutionalisation of the social, economic, and political structures that led to apartheid, and – crucially – the resistance of Indigenous societies to this. Chapter 13 also discusses the Mfecane and the emergence of the Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Swazi states, among others, to emphasise their contemporaneity and potential connections with European settler expansion and to encourage comparative study of processes of state formation, migration, and population incorporation common to both.

This chapter examines the arrangements for foreign judges in domestic courts of East Timor. Building on semi-structured interviews with Timorese judges and lawyers, foreign judges, United Nations Development Programme professionals and field observations, it engages with questions of why foreign judges were introduced as part of state-building initiatives and how they assisted Timorese judicial actors in strengthening judicial independence. The chapter, at the outset, provides a ‘thick description’ of the challenges that foreign and local judges had to traverse to strengthen the role of the judiciary locally. Relying on data from the field, it problematises the tensions between pursuing ‘ideal’ transnational standards of judicial independence and what may be ‘ideal’ for establishing the authority and legitimacy of courts in a state that is in transition. The chapter also highlights the shifting influence of foreign judges in East Timor.

Despite having few natural resources and peasant serfs, Denmark developed public primary education in 1814, while Britain delayed the mass, public school system until 1870 and provided little instruction to working-class students. Later, Denmark’s secondary education system included publicly-funded vocational training programs, while Britain developed a single-track system that ignored technical skills. Fiction writers and their cultural narratives contributed to educational choices. Authors became important individual political agents in school reform movements, by using fiction to advance policy ideas and inspire emotional outrage. Writers collectively contributed to the nationally distinctive symbols and narratives about education that appeared in their country’s literature. Each generation of authors inherited these distinctive cultural tropes from their literary ancestors, reworked these for new problems, and passed these along to future generations. Studying fiction writers and their narratives offers a tangible way to evaluate how culture matters to political outcomes, as we may empirically (with computational linguistics and a close reading of texts) observe significant cross-national differences in historical literary images of education. The work suggests how cultural narratives contribute to the emergence of coordinated and liberal varieties of capitalism and reflects on how cultural narratives provide a source of continuity within long-term processes of institutional change.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.

We have worked to establish, throughout this book, that institutional closeness is both an important and understudied good for rebels striving to achieve authoritative rule. We explored various forms of closeness through connection and the means by which they mediated the management of coercion and capital in local insurgent-controlled communities. We also considered the possibilities and limits of these social solidarities to compensate for these young institutions’ material deficiencies. But, ultimately, absent the sinews of national institutions capable of binding them to one another, even the most authoritative of local opposition councils, while markers of profound political change, would remain perpetually disaggregated in structure and effect. Therefore, in this penultimate chapter, we move from the local level of insurgent politics up to the national level to examine the opposition institution of the Syrian Interim Government (SIG) that was meant (and failed) to bring the counter-state together.1

The institutions that constitute a rebel government have long been understood and evaluated in comparable terms to those of a state government, the only difference being orientation (i.e. against versus on behalf of the state). Similarly, the doctrine underpinning modern state-building and counterinsurgency campaigns, repurposed in Syria in the service of a “good” rebellion, has emphasized the import of rationalized governance in winning the population’s support, its “hearts and minds.” In this chapter, we consider the limits of employing rational legitimacy as a conceptual outcome and offer our own – institutional closeness – as a theoretical alternative with distinct analytical possibilities for the study of insurgent rule.

The book’s evidence has implications for scholars of state-building and rural politics, as well as for policymakers concerned with improving state effectiveness in the developing world. I conclude by highlighting three of these implications.

Returning to the comparative argument made in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the other three sub-national regions defined by the interaction of state presence and resource advantage. It demonstrates the externality validity and scope conditions of the book’s main argument.

The conclusion situates the politics of legal pluralism within a comparative perspective by contrasting Chechnya with other Russian regions and other contexts of postcolonial and post-conflict political development. The concluding chapter discusses the broader implications of this study for our understanding of the “dark side” of legal pluralism as an instrument of domination and of state law as a “weapon of the weak.” It outlines a future research agenda on the role of international law in legally pluralist environments and legal pluralism in diasporas. Finally, the chapter reflects on the implications of the findings for post-Soviet Russian politics and asks why the Kremlin allows Kadyrov’s lawfare.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.