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Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship - which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures - overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes ungoverned space. Enemy governments empower insurgents to destabilize the state and create ungoverned territory. This kind of foreign subversion is a powerful instrument of modern statecraft. But though subversion is less visible and less costly than conventional force, it has insidious effects on governance in the target state. To demonstrate the harmful consequences of foreign subversion for state authority, Crippling Leviathan marshals a wealth of evidence and presents in-depth studies of Russia's relations with the post-Soviet states, Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s, and Thai subversion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1980s. The evidence presented by Lee is persuasive: foreign subversion weakens the state. She challenges the conventional wisdom on statebuilding, which has long held that conflict promotes the development of strong, territorially consolidated states. Lee argues instead that conflictual international politics prevents state development and degrades state authority. In addition, Crippling Leviathan illuminates the use of subversion as an underappreciated and important feature of modern statecraft. Rather than resort to war, states resort to subversion. Policymakers interested in ameliorating the consequences of ungoverned space must recognize the international roots that sustain weak statehood.

Managing the threat of violence remains a central concern in international security and development. International actors seek to terminate civil wars and prevent conflict recurrence by building peace and strengthening state institutions. In this article, I review the scholarship on international statebuilding, defined broadly as external efforts to create, strengthen, reform, and transform the authority structures of the state. Much of this literature models international statebuilding as provision, in which external actors provide a solution to the enforcement problem that plagues postconflict bargains. However, in many cases, the assumptions about domestic politics underpinning the provision model do not hold. When the central problem of domestic politics concerns bargaining over the distributional consequences of the peace rather than the parties' ability to credibly commit to the peace, international statebuilding is more fruitfully modeled as imposition, in which terms are imposed on recalcitrant domestic actors. The imposition model allows the preferences of external actors over the postwar order to diverge from the preferences of domestic actors. Divergence arises because statebuilding interventions have distributional consequences that threaten the interests of domestic elites. To unpack why this is the case, I turn to the literature on the domestic politics of statebuilding, which shows that governance arrangements that appear to outsiders as weak statehood can help manage violence by facilitating the distribution of sovereignty rents. Insights from these literatures suggest exciting new avenues for future scholarship.

AbstractWhy do some countries fail to govern their territory? Incomplete domestic sovereignty, defined as the absence of effective state authority over territory, has severe consequences in terms of security, order, economic growth, and human well-being. These negative consequences raise the question of why such spaces remain without effective authority. While the international relations literature suggests that state weakness persists because of an absence of war and the comparative politics literature treats political underdevelopment as the consequence of domestic factors that raise the costs of exercising authority, these views are incomplete. I argue that hostile neighbors weaken state authority over territory through a strategy of foreign interference. Foreign interference in domestic sovereignty is a powerful instrument of statecraft that can yield domestic and foreign policy benefits. I investigate the effects of hostile neighboring states through a cross-national, within-country statistical analysis utilizing a novel indicator of state authority, and pair this analysis with a qualitative case study of Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s. Together, this evidence shows how this international factor is an underappreciated yet important contributor to weak state authority even after accounting for domestic factors. The study's conclusions challenge our understanding of the effects of international politics on internal political development.

Although attempts to conquer entire states became rare after 1945, attempts to conquer small pieces of territory persisted. Why do states so often seize—and even fight wars over—remarkably small areas? We argue that traditional explanations predicated on the material or ethnic value of disputed territories largely cannot explain the escalation of territorial disputes since 1945. Instead, actors more often seize territory to be seen seizing it. We theorize that the roots of these conquest attempts often lie in careerist incentives within militaries. Military officers seize small pieces of disputed territory in pursuit of promotions or political office, especially in states where the military wields greater political power. We test this theory with a statistical analysis of conquest attempts in territorial disputes (1965–2000) using new geospatial and conquest data along with a medium-n process analysis of all conquest attempts since 1945. Our results suggest that careerist self-aggrandizement plays an important role in contemporary territorial conflict.

International law enforcement is an understudied but indispensable factor for maintaining the international order. We study the effectiveness of elite justifications in building coalitions supporting the enforcement of violations of the law against territorial seizures. Using survey experiments fielded in the USA and Australia, we find that the effectiveness of two common justifications for enforcement—the illegality of a country's actions, and the consequences of those actions for international order—increase support for enforcement and do so independently of two key public values: ideology and interpersonal norm enforcement. These results imply elites can build a broad coalition of support by using multiple justifications. Our results, however, highlight the tepidness of public support, suggesting limits to elite rhetoric. This study contributes to the scholarship on international law by showing how the public, typically considered a mechanism for generating compliance within states, can impede or facilitate third-party enforcement of the law between states.

AbstractModern states are distinguished by the breadth and depth of public regulation over private affairs. This aspect of state capacity and state power is predicated on frequent and dense encounters between the state and the population it seeks to control. We argue that literacy in the language of state administration facilitates state–society interaction by lowering the transaction costs of those encounters. We support this claim with evidence drawing upon detailed historical data from nineteenth‐century France during a crucial period of state and nation building. Focusing on the specific domain of French marriage regulations, we find that increasing literacy predicts greater popular involvement with local authorities across French regions over time. These results demonstrate that literacy plays an important role in political development not solely by enhancing loyalty to the state, as the literature has recognized, but also by lowering linguistic and human capital barriers to state–society interaction.

AbstractA distinguishing feature of the modern state is the broad scope of social welfare provision. This remarkable expansion of public assistance was characterized by huge spatial and temporal disparities. What explains the uneven expansion in the reach of social welfare? We argue that social welfare expansion depends in part on the ability of the governed to compel the state to provide rewards in return for military service—and crucially, that marginalized groups faced greater barriers to obtaining those rewards. In colonial states, subjects faced a bargaining disadvantage relative to citizens living in the colony and were less likely to win concessions from the state for their wartime sacrifices. We test this argument using a difference-in-differences research design and a rich data set of local spending before and after World War I in colonial Algeria. Our results reveal that social welfare spending expanded less in communes where the French subject share of the population was greater. This paper contributes to the state-building literature by highlighting the differential ability of the governed to bargain with the state in the aftermath of conflict.

Global performance indicators can help leaders overcome rent-seeking politicians or competition-fearing monopolies by empowering allies, shaming bureaucrats, mobilizing publics, and promising to attract investment.19 External validation.

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority—the right to make and enforce binding rules—occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor's vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the "United States" from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of imagined sovereignty, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers (1800–99) and congressional speeches (1851–99). We demonstrate that war shapes imagined sovereignty, but for the North only. Our results further suggest that Northern Republicans played an important role as ideational entrepreneurs in bringing about this shift.

State‐building is a central tenet of many current development efforts. This primacy of the state rests on a global normative script that emphasizes the role of the modern state in providing collective goods and services from security to education to health. We analyze state performance in six dimensions of service delivery in a cross‐sectional sample of more than 150 countries. In addition to exploring the explanatory power of statehood, we examine various control variables and also analyze whether external actors affect the delivery of collective goods and services. The core finding of this article is that there is remarkably little evidence of a consistent relationship between statehood and service delivery. This result casts doubt on the conventional wisdom about the centrality of the state for the provision collective goods and services, and suggests that other factors may explain the observed variation.