Collapsed and prebendal states in post-Soviet Eurasia: Cross-regional determinants of state formation in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

Why did Tajikistan's state collapse into a five year civil war while state power in Uzbekistan became mired in prebendal politics? Theories drawn from the comparative study of the state, which have tended to concentrate sources of varying state development in the hands of rulers, do not fully account for the different state forms in these two countries. Through the examples of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan this dissertation examines how economic resources concentrated under local strongmen and patronage relations that link political elites in one province to elites in another provide conditions that can facilitate the spread of particular state capacity outcomes. It utilizes process tracing through case studies of seven provinces in both countries---Kuliab and Kurgan-Teppe in Tajikistan and Ferghana, Kashkadarya, Namangan, Navoii, and Samarkand in Uzbekistan---to infer the causal paths along which some state capacity outcomes spread and others do not. The study finds that patterns of prebendal versus collapsed states emerged at the national level as a result of the varied ways that provincial political elites, who served as the critical link between local strongmen and the state, negotiated shifting access to state resources. In provinces where elites could access resources from the center through trans-regional patronage ties their continued dependence on those ties imported state capture. In provinces where state resources were constricted, provincial elites' disaffection from the center enabled the proliferation of state failure. In addition to elucidating social processes through which institutional breakdown spreads within weak states, this dissertation identifies the Soviet origins of certain characteristics of state weakness that are shared by other Eurasian countries and offers new insight into the causes of Tajikistan's civil war.