2014

Honorable Mention: Lawrence P. Markowitz
Title: State Erosion: Unlootable Resources and Unruly Elites in Central Asia (Cornell University Press)

Lawrence Markowitz’s State Erosion: Unlootable Resources and Unruly Elites in Central Asia explores state-building in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. He uses the latter’s “descent into violence,” which began and grew from the periphery, to illustrate the competitive predation that emerges from a state without a strong nexus of regional authorities, security forces, and central government officials. By contrast, in Uzbekistan, where cash crops, such as cotton and cereals, had created in the Soviet era a much stronger nexus of security forces and local elites, the security forces and central authorities were able more effectively to hold together a weakened state. This is a major work on the political economy of the post-Soviet era. It exhaustively documents the cooptation of political elites in one case, and, elsewhere, their fragmentation, and brings this evidence to bear on a question of considerable current interest, state failure.

Winner: Dinissa Duvanova