The recent book on ‘Violence and Social Orders’ by the Nobel Prize winner Douglass North and others distinguishes between limited access and open access states. Most states in the world remain limited access, or natural, states dominated by coalitions of elites capturing rents from the...

Societies under similar geographic and economic conditions and subject to similar external influences nonetheless develop very different types of states. At one extreme are weak states with little capacity and ability to regulate economic or social relations. At the other are despotic states...