Mind the Gap? The International Sources of Sovereignty and State Weakness
Thursday, October 30, 201412:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific)
Abstract:
Why have some developing countries faced persistent challenges at extending state authority throughout their territories? The consequences of incomplete governance are often severe in terms of public order, public goods, and economic growth, which raise the question of why ungoverned spaces remain without effective authority. Although there are many reasons why states leave broad swathes of their territory ungoverned, existing scholarship has overlooked the role of international politics. This dissertation demonstrates the importance of international factors in accounting for variation in state weakness, and argues that enemy states can subvert or deter the exercise of state authority near the borders of their neighbors. External interference can create or sustain ungoverned spaces in the target state, and yields policy benefits to the enemy state. Drawing on original data and a new measure of state authority, I support this argument with a cross-national statistical analysis that examines variation within countries, and a natural experiment from the case of
Speaker Bio:
Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Freeman Spogli Institute, and other research centers at Stanford University. She is a former research consultant for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.