State formation through secession often requires two critical steps: building mass support for independence, and engaging in violent conflict against a state resisting territorial loss. Combining satellite data with archival sources, we statistically document how exposure to the 1970 Bhola...

Why did enduring socio-economic inequality emerge between the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE, after millennia of substantial egalitarianism? We test the hypothesis of inequality being a by-product of state formation in an archeological panel covering Southern Iraq between 3900 and 1900 BCE. We...

On 24 March 2024, presidential elections were held in Senegal, with opposition politician Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye, who was 43 at the time, emerging as the winner. On 2 April 2024, he was sworn in as the fifth President of the Republic of Senegal. This event may mark a turning point in the...

What is the effect of state capacity on economic development? I argue that strong and centralised states are capable of mobilising the resources required to establish an efficient administration and provide public goods, which are preconditions for modern economic growth. To test this...

This is a replication of Mayshar et al. (2022) (henceforth MMP).1 The article posits that the state (defined as societal hierarchy such as tax-levying elites) originated from cultivation of appropriable cereal grains, contrary to the conventional theory that the state originated from increased...

I examine whether and how the means through which a civil war ends affects the success of a country's state-building strategy after conflict. I show that two distinct modes of conflict termination-military victories and negotiated settlements-lead to differential long-run statebuilding outcomes...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine came on the heels of a series of crises that tested the resilience of the EU as a compound polity and arguably reshaped European policymaking at all levels. This Element investigates the effects of the invasion on public support for European polity building across...

Building a cohesive nation-state amid deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity is a central challenge for many governments. This paper examines the process of nation building, drawing lessons from the remarkable experience of Indonesia over the past century. I discuss conceptual...

How do radical reforms of the state shape economic development over time? In 1790, France’s first Constituent Assembly overhauled the kingdom’s organization to set up new administrative entities and local capitals. In a subset of departments, new capitals were chosen quasi-randomly as the...

To date, there is limited understanding about the consequences of wartime dynamics for post-war state-building processes. This paper explores one such dynamics-the forms of governance exercised by armed groups during wartime-and proposes a theoretical framework outlining how forms of wartime...

Why is the recent track record of state-building so poor? Over the past decade, international interventions in Afghanistan, Somalia, Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have not resulted in meaningful improvements in the capacities of...

We analyze a general commitment problem inherent to the formation of tax states: How can a state credibly promise to use tax revenues for pre-specified purposes? At the start of the early modern period in Europe, monarchs controlled expenditure. Where parliaments controlled taxation, the result...

This paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of political jurisdictions in different political regimes, democratic or not, and in different economic environments, with more or less economic integration. We focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions in...

What explains citizens' preferences for redistribution in fragile states? We examine fiscal capacity in the context of modern state-building in Afghanistan. As emergent governments struggle to supply their end of an "Hobbesian bargain" by establishing political order after state collapse, we...

How does one build a centralized bureaucratic state? A dominant view is that wars incentivize rulers to directly extract resources, thereby increasing state capacity. The Chinese empire, one of the earliest states to develop a centralized bureaucracy, can provide useful insights. Using...

The paper focuses on the post-Maidan and post-Velvet Revolution state-building in Ukraine and Armenia. Examining the cases of Ukraine and Armenia, the qualitative, comparative analysis presented in this paper uncovers some of the similarities and differences between the two post-Soviet...

This is a replication of Mayshar et al. (2022) (henceforth MMP).1 The article posits that the state (defined as societal hierarchy such as tax-levying elites) originated from cultivation of appropriable cereal grains, contrary to the conventional theory that the state originated from increased...

"Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence, 1821-1867 investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between the year of the country's definite separation from Spain and the year of the defeat of the French occupation and the...