The international community, led by the United States, has invested trillions of dollars in state-building efforts during the past two decades. Yet despite this commitment of substantial resources, conflict and violence remain a challenge in fragile states. It therefore seems especially important to consider the reasons why state-building has not lived up to its expectations.
Past state-building efforts were predicated on the belief that a centralized government would improve prospects for political order and economic development. These efforts therefore have typically emphasized powerful national governments and centralized bureaucratic administration as the keys to generating improvements in the state’s provision of public goods, including rule of law and collective security.
This article challenges the underlying assumptions to that approach, arguing that centralization actually undermines efforts to stabilize and rebuild fragile states. It describes several risks centralization poses for effective state-building. For example, many highly centralized governments prey on their own citizens and are therefore prone to civil unrest, conflict, and collapse. Most of the countries that have experienced prolonged civil conflict over the past several decades—including Afghanistan, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—had extremely centralized governments prior to the outbreak of conflict. As Roger Myerson points out, centralization may also alienate local elites, resulting in a return to conflict and violence in states subjected to foreign state-building. Another risk is that centralization undermines the quality of public administration by making it largely unresponsive to local demands.
The obvious alternative to trying to build powerful central governments is to encourage polycentrism. Polycentrism allows multiple, coexisting centers of power, which provides for local autonomy in collective decisionmaking. Political decentralization promises several benefits. A more robust system of local governance can reduce the incentives to rebel against the central government and provides resources for those regions to defend themselves from outsiders. Polycentrism can also provide a foundation for local self-governance and reduce the state’s administrative burden by allowing communities to govern their own affairs. By decentralizing political decisionmaking, the state can also improve the responsiveness of the government to local demands, and in the process improve the efficiency of public goods provision.
I use evidence from Afghanistan to illustrate my theory of the pathologies of current models of centralized state-building. Despite vast investments, the government in Kabul has limited legitimacy and struggles to provide public goods. One plausible explanation for the failure of state-building in Afghanistan is that the government remains extremely centralized in all critical dimensions, including the power of the executive, subnational governance, judicial institutions, public budgeting and finance, and the national security forces. Of these, only the Afghan National Army has implemented meaningful reforms. In the other areas, almost no reform has occurred compared to the institutional status quo before 2001. A consequence is that most Afghans continue to experience the same type of centralized, predatory state that they endured prior to 2001. Paradoxically, by resurrecting the centralized, predatory state, the stabilization effort continues to give rise to an antigovernment insurgency across the country.
The Case for Decentralization
It is not a mystery that policymakers, both local and international, would seek to build strong central governments in states riven by conflict. Historically, states emerged to facilitate commerce and provide collective defense at scale, as societies grew and became increasingly complex and older, more traditional political forms, such as tribes, clans, or fiefdoms, were insufficient for the evolving political challenges. Political leaders seeking monopolistic power over their territory are incentivized to provide public goods and encourage production to generate more revenue via taxation. As institutions of wealth creation are established, the government must invest in collective defense to defend commercial interests from external predators. Centralized state capacity thus contributes to economic development and political order.
A government powerful enough to provide these public goods, however, can also use its power for destructive purposes or to misappropriate public goods. To prevent that unwelcome outcome, state authorities must be constrained by counterbalancing political institutions that empower citizens to participate in collective decisionmaking. This is especially important in conflict-affected states where insurgencies began as revolts against predatory, unconstrained central authorities.
Decentralization is a form of polycentrism and can be found in both de jure and de facto manifestations. De jure decentralization provides for constitutional rights of local units in a political system to determine their collective futures. Such decentralization is the basis for formal, law-based self-governance. De facto decentralization occurs when the central government institutions are unable to impose their will on local jurisdictions, thus yielding authority by default.
One justification for decentralization is that it provides a political architecture for checks and balances in government. Local authorities can constrain central governments in ways that prevent a drift toward predatory practices. Decentralization also provides institutional mechanisms for the government to acquire knowledge of local conditions, needs, and demands. The government requires this information to provide public goods efficiently. The grant of local autonomy may even in itself provide legitimacy to the central government.
Local autonomy and the experience of self-governance are valuable in conflict-affected states where communities must often rely on local problem-solving skills when the central government is unable or unwilling to address local needs. Most places plagued by long-term conflict are home to a plethora of powerful “warlords” or local commanders. Stabilization efforts typically seek to bring these individuals under the umbrella of a centralized state, often neglecting the role such individuals and groups play in crafting order based on local preferences.
Decentralized governance is not a panacea. Politicians and leaders do not become angels simply because their power extends to the local context. There are indeed risks associated with decentralization, such as local corruption. Nonetheless, the risk from local rulers behaving badly pales in comparison to grand corruption at the national level, where leaders often have few ties to local communities. In stabilization contexts, this situation is exacerbated as many view those appointed by the international community as puppets rather than legitimate leaders. Another fear is that decentralized systems may fail to maintain cohesion. Such systems may be more prone to separatist movements.
The Political Problem of State-Building
Despite the benefits of political decentralization in state-building, international and domestic actors typically prefer the centralization model. Consider the international actors who play an important role in state-building efforts. First, in unstable environments, outside actors—both military and civilian—prefer to interact with entities that exercise unity of command. They seek one interlocutor upon whom they can count to implement policies. The more actors involved, the more diffuse the decisionmaking, which tends to slow down the policymaking process. Second, it is easier for external actors to exert influence over a unified single entity rather than a group of individuals; external actors prefer to have control centralized in the capital in order to exercise oversight and have a single accessible partner to hold accountable. Centralized government reflects the desires of the international community in postconflict situations because they have a primary relationship with the national figures they believe they can control.
Newly elected domestic leaders also prefer highly centralized power, especially when this authority comes with international support. In most conflict environments, power tends to diffuse across a range of actors at subnational levels who may have recently challenged a newly installed leader. During the immediate postconflict period, new leaders desire centralized authority, enabling them to exert greater control over regions and increasing their national authority. Unlike states not affected by conflict, the decentralization issue presents very real threats to the endurance of a polity, as subnational regions may be controlled by or under the heavy influence of armed groups that may pose or have recently posed a serious challenge to the central government.
These demands for political and administrative centralization often conflict with the reality of political power in such contexts. During conflict, power necessarily diffuses as central governments lose their monopoly of violence. It is the primary goal of stabilization and state-building efforts to help nascent states assemble or reassemble disparate pieces of power into a cohesive unit. But during this process, policymakers often eschew informal rules, norms, and other practices that emerge locally during periods of conflict.
New governments seeking to assert authority typically view informal practices as impediments to the uniformity of authority they seek to establish. These rules may be the result of longstanding custom or newly developed practices that emerged as coping mechanisms during conflict. They may be rules imposed by warlords or local commanders who were parties to the conflict. Regardless of their origin, those international and domestic forces seeking to build and stabilize states see them as a source of fragmentation rather than contributing to the coherence and legitimacy of a new government.
The desire to centralize authority and impose uniform rule over fragmented and weakly institutionalized environments widens the gap between de facto practices and de jure laws and regulations. This growing gap challenges both development and stability. Typically, stabilization processes do not seek to modify their rules and procedures to account for local practices but instead attempt to encourage citizens to turn to the state. By imposing highly centralized forms of governance in fragmented environments, stabilization efforts inadvertently undermine their own mission by exacerbating development challenges in such contexts.
In addition to centralization, the international community frequently prioritizes national elections, rather than the quality of governance, as the measure of success. In the “golden hour” after the cloud of war clears, state-builders rush to congratulate themselves for organizing successful elections that they believe consolidate political transformation. The distribution of power—especially to subnational units—and the way that power is executed through the bureaucracy receive comparatively little attention. However, national elections are often a poor measure of the quality of government. They have in many instances little bearing on the provision of public goods or implementation of beneficial policies. Indeed, in some instances, non-democracies may be better at governance, in terms of delivery of services, predictability, and order, than democracies.
The Afghan Context
The desire for greater political centralization is perhaps the fundamental political theme in Afghan history. From its inception with the Durrani empire in 1747, the Afghan state was more like a loose confederation of tribes than a centralized state, with tribal and local leaders as well as blood relatives of the monarch exerting substantial autonomy. Political power was exercised through indirect rule, in which monarchs and other political leaders exerted authority through a network of autonomous princes while maintaining a role for tribal and customary authority.
Abdur Rahman sought to centralize government during his brutal reign from 1880 to 1901. He took it upon himself to stamp out the “middlemen”—tribal and customary leaders, as well as religious authorities—whom he viewed as a source of political disorder. Subsequent regimes continued these efforts at centralization, although the tactics were less brutal. Amanullah (1919–29) attempted to increase the role of the state in Afghan society and economy through a series of centralized directives. He admired the strong leadership of Ataturk in Turkey, who used executive authority to promote an expansive agenda of social transformation. However, most of Amanullah’s reforms were met with opposition, and he was ultimately ousted in a peasant-led rebellion that briefly unseated the Afghan monarchy.
After several years of instability, Afghanistan experienced a long peace under the rule of the Musahiban, a Durrani Pashtun sub-tribe from which its leaders descended. These leaders included Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933 until his overthrow in a bloodless palace coup by his cousin, Daud, in 1973. Daud ruled from 1973 until 1978, when he was ousted by a Soviet-supported faction of the Afghan communist party.
In general, the Musahiban pursued an economic development strategy that relied heavily on foreign subsidies from both the United States and the Soviet Union, leading to continuation of the rentier state dynamics begun in the 19th century when monarchs began accepting British aid in turn for quiescence. They also relied on centralized economic planning. Despite a constitutional reform in 1964 that created a brief flirtation with democracy under a constitutional monarchy, the monarchy remained committed to principles of centralism, with most important governance decisions emanating from Kabul.
The growing influence of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan after World War II reinforced the historical struggle toward increasing centralization. Beginning with Daud’s reign as Prime Minister in the 1950s (he would later become president in 1973), the Afghan government adopted many Soviet features. Daud famously fell out with the Americans and grew to mistrust them after his unconditional requests for weapons systems to facilitate the creation of a modern army were rejected by Washington, which he perceived to support newly independent Pakistan. Labelled the “Red Prince,” Daud also imported bureaucratic centralization and five-year plans along with Soviet loans. The organization of the central government, the system of public financial management, and the bureaucracy were very similar in design to their Soviet counterparts. Such influence continued to grow over time and escalated in 1978 with the Saur revolution that brought Afghan communists to power for the first time and marked the end of the Afghan monarchy.
The Saur revolution of April 1978 brought a divisive period in which the Khalq and Parcham factions of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) vied for control. In late 1979, the Soviets invaded partly in response to instability brought about by local opposition to Khalq policies. Soviet leaders were wary that the Afghan government had moved too quickly in its efforts to achieve “communism” and that its actions would continue to provoke unrest in the countryside (which they did, as the mujahideen emerged in direct response to communist policies). They were also increasingly wary of the infighting among the PDPA factions that fueled instability. Once the Soviets invaded, the centralized Soviet imprint on Afghan bureaucracy and government became heavier. Although the Soviets did move to reverse some of the more drastic reforms initially imposed by the Khalqis, they continued to support centralized state control.
The PDPA government fell in 1992. Although there have been few studies of governance during the civil war period (1992–96), formal institutions had very little influence. Once the Taliban government (1996–2001) came to power, it began to reform; however, the logic of Taliban governance was also one of centralization. Instead of relying on old networks of bureaucrats, the Taliban relied on a network of its own local mullahs to administer authority. But the character of public administration was characterized by centralized governance. While the Taliban were never fully able to provide effective central administration, they did little to encourage local autonomy.
Post–Taliban State-Building
After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners, along with several factions of the Afghan resistance and the former monarchy, gathered to sign the Bonn Accords, which established the 1964 constitution as the interim source of law for the country. The agreement appointed an interim president, Hamid Karzai, and planned for elections. Thus, the first move of the “new” Afghan state was to adopt a decades-old constitution. Yet over the course of a decade, the 1964 constitution had failed to establish a stable government, let alone a government that could implement reforms. In fact, many Afghans met the overthrow of the 1964 constitution by Daud with relief, believing it to be inherently unstable and preferring authoritarian rule. Nonetheless, the constitution of 2004 would copy many elements directly from the 1964 constitution. Indeed, in most major areas of Afghan public administration—the national government, the degree of centralization of the government, judicial institutions, public finance, the security forces, and administration of land—state-building efforts have reinforced old, inefficient institutions. Interestingly, one exception is the Afghan National Army.
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