States are often minimally present in the rural periphery. Yet a limited presence does not mean a limited impact. Isolated state actions in regions where the state is otherwise scarce can have outsize, long-lasting effects on society. The Scarce State reframes our understanding of the political economy of hinterlands through a multi-method study of Northern Ghana alongside shadow cases from other world regions. Drawing on a historical natural experiment, the book shows how the contemporary economic and political elite emerged in Ghana's hinterland, linking interventions by an ostensibly weak state to new socio-economic inequality and grassroots efforts to reimagine traditional institutions. The book demonstrates how these state-generated societal changes reshaped access to political power, producing dynastic politics, clientelism, and violence. The Scarce State challenges common claims about state-building and state weakness, provides new evidence on the historical origins of inequality, and reconsiders the mechanisms linking historical institutions to contemporary politics.
Nathan
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Weitere Infos & Material
Part I. Introduction: 1. The politics of state scarcity; 2. The large effects of scarce states; 3. Northern Ghana's scarce state; Part II. Societal Effects: 4. The origins of inequality; 5. Bottom-Up responses to scarcity; Part III. Political Effects: 6. Dynasties; 7. Invented chiefs and distributive politics; 8. Non-State violence as a state effect; Part IV. Extending the Argument: 9. Shadow cases; 10. The paradox of state weakness; Appendix: Qualitative interviews; Bibliography; Index.
Nathan, Noah L
Noah L. Nathan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Electoral Politics and Africa's Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana (2019).
