State failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the post-Cold War era. Yet theorizing on the causes of state failure remains surprisingly limited. In State Erosion, Lawrence P. Markowitz draws on his extensive fieldwork in two Central Asian republics Tajikistan, where state institutions fragmented into a five-year civil war from 1992 through 1997, and Uzbekistan, which constructed one of the largest state security apparatuses in post-Soviet Eurasia to advance a theory of state failure focused on unlootable resources, rent seeking, and unruly...
State failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the post-Cold War era. Yet theorizing on the causes of state failure re...
