Varieties of Sub-National Authority

Adnan Naseemullah King’s College London

Clionadh Raleigh University of Sussex

Title Page

Varieties of Sub-National Authority

Word Count: 11077

Abstract: This article examines the differences in subnational authorities that populate the developing world. It then categorizes the different forms of authority according to their relationship to the central regime, and the nature of ‘power-resources’ available to them. To that end, four types of authority emerge: agents, who act a local representations of central state power; rivals, who operate in direct defiance and opposition to that same central power; bosses are individuals who have a close relationship to the central regime-- often through party links, but also wield independent local leverage and authority; and chiefs, or customary/traditional authorities, with weak, and largely dependent ties to the central regime. The variation in these forms, but the commonality of these types, transgress the often regionally based literature that seeks to distinguish and isolate forms as an in-situ phenomena. The co-occurrence of subnational authorities across the developing world has striking implications for the risk and modality of political violence, democratic suppression, and ultimately, the emergence of hybrid regimes characterized by both direct and indirect control of territories, populations, and governance practices.

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In 2017, the Catalan separatist referendum met an aggressive response from the Spanish

government; violence by security forces against civilian protesters continued in the Indian state

of Jammu and Kashmir; tensions between the Iraqi government and the Kurdish autonomous

region escalated into the Battle of Kirkuk; regional conflicts between supporters and opponents

of the incumbent government in Kenya erupted in two stunted elections; and there were

humanitarian crises associated with both the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar’s

western Rakhine province and ongoing conflict in northern Kachin. These disparate events, and

dozens more around the world every year, represent specific instances of a common dissonance

between the desires, policies and practices of governments and regimes in national capitals on

one hand and those of social groups, violent forces or political actors in provinces, states and

regions on the other.

A consistently important theme in the politics of developing countries is the extent to

which political structures and processes at the subnational level do not always accord with the

institutions, policies and practices of the national state. But what constitutes the nature of

national authority and subnational governance in developing states, when the presence and

power of the central regime is uneven and often contested? The actual practices of this

governance in these contexts are varied, and yet their distinct dynamics are not easily reducible

to perverse federalism, failed decentralization or fraught center-periphery relations.

Consequently, we do not have a theoretical framework through which we might understand

common patterns in the nature of subnational authority and governance across Asia, Africa and

Latin America. In this article, we aim to provide such a framework, by focusing on the character,

power-resources and legitimacy of political actors at the subnational level and the nature of their

relationship to the central government within national boundaries.

1 We do this in two stages. First, we establish a typology of four different forms of sub- national authority – agents, bosses, chieftains and rivals – based on their distinct relationships to the center and the sources of their power and legitimacy. Agents carry out the will of the central government in sub-national regions based on the latter’s authority and using its resources, while rivals mobilize against the center using resources and authority mobilized among those opposed to the center. Bosses and chieftains occupy a middle ground of actors allied to, but with interests and resources distinct from, the center. Bosses act with relative autonomy from the center but occupy formal roles in the state, regime or ruling party. Chiefs represent customary leadership and traditional power that is affirmed and sometimes supported by the modern state; their objectives are to simultaneously maintain their own legitimacy and regime authority and stability at the local level.

Second, we consider the political implications of the presence of multiple forms of subnational authority on important political and social outcomes. Multiple instances of these common forms of subnational authority often co-occur in “hybrid” regimes, where democratic regimes are not consolidated, formal and informal institutions coexist and leaders are beholden to powerful subnational authorities for regime stability. By understanding the geographical unevenness of hybrid regimes, this framework allows us to traverse levels of development and regime type at the center to explicate the horizontal dynamics of the many developing country regimes that stand in between consolidated democracy and considated authoritarianism, as well as the sources of persistence and the possibilities of political change. Subnational authority can also be usefully deployed to understand dynamics of civil conflict and political violence within national borders by focusing on the interests and identities of particular coercive actors, and how they interact with each other and with the central state. Thus, the multiple types of subnational

2 authority in developing countries alter our perspective of regime dynamics and political disorder, highlighting how subnational authorities are often drivers of important political and social outcomes in developing countries.

This article proceeds as follows. First, we survey the existing literature on subnational authority; much of this scholarship is strongly situated in particular regional contexts and displays a significant amount of under-emphasized internal variation and cross-regional similarity. Second, we specify a typology of four distinct forms of sub-national authority, based on resources and relationships to the central government. We then discuss how the presence of multiple subnational authority forms within states might impact on the nature of political order and democratic representation over national territory. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of political geography perspectives in understanding sub-national politics.

Studying Subnational Authority

The study of national politics has traditionally dominated comparative analysis, yet a more recent focus on subnational politics recognizes how regions within large, multiethnic or federal states might react differently to national-level stimuli, which produce divergent social or political outcomes.1 This variation in outcomes emerges from both checkered authority of central regimes at the subnational level, and relatedly, the multiple, distinct forms of subnational authority that occupy spaces of power within states.

Both the value and the inherent limitations of extant research into sub-national governance is its focus on understanding specific, regionally focused problems of mismatch

1 Kohli 1990; Gibson 2004; Tsai 2005; Sinha 2006; Hurst 2009; Singh 2016. In recognition of the analytical importance of differences within national states, Snyder (2001) has advocated subnational comparative analysis as a means to increase the number of cases and thus receive additional causal leverage on social and political outcomes.

3 between national level policies and regional or local interests. That developing states have uneven authority and governance practices is one of the most important concepts in social science and is supported by research spanning regions and institutional forms. Multiple concepts have been employed to describe the general state of political and institutional inconsistencies between national and subnational power structures: “territorial politics,” “political topographies,” and “regime juxtaposition” are concepts have been used somewhat interchangeably to explain governance strategies and subnational particularities.2 There is broad agreement on the base assumption of the disparate approaches: all concede that developing country governance and state capacity are territorially uneven and the rules and norms that define the national regime are not often equally applied or even applicable throughout the state’s territory. While the resulting patterns of authority and relationships to the state are often quite similar across country cases and world regions, investigations on specific outcomes, very often in particular world regions, limit the extent to which common patterns can be discerned.

Over time, three major traditions of studying subnational authority have emerged, each largely in isolation. First, scholars of federalism in developing countries have studied the causes, consequences and normative impact of particular instances of ‘asymmetry’ in peace and stability.

Second, scholars of comparative democratization have explored exceptions to national processes of democratic consolidation, principally in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Third, scholars in

African and South Asian politics have interrogated the concept of “ungoverned spaces” by emphasizing the roles of sub-national authorities in contexts in which national states have limited reach. These three research programs may seem distinct, but we argue that they are in fact aspects of the comparable exercise of power by different forms of sub-national authority. In what

2 Tarrow, Katzenstein and Graziano 1978; Boone 2003; Giraudy 2015.

4 follows, we will present these approaches separately, and then draw together some of their insights to arrive at a notion of sub-national authority as a separate distinct typology of subnational authority.

Asymmetric Federalism

Scholars of comparative federalism highlight how “asymmetry” – where particular provinces, states or regions within a country are afforded special privileges and freedoms not afforded to most others – is a significant and enduring but also surprising feature of many successful federal systems. Asymmetric federalism has a strong normative component, because the cultural autonomy and self-determination of distinct, often marginalized, people within large multinational states, is considered important for the successful functioning of a democracy.3 As such, the concept is closely associated to consociationalism, where national governance is comprised of one or more self-governing units brought together on the basis of compromise and balance.4 Yet asymmetric federalism is different from consociational arrangements in that it recognizes the distinctiveness, and thus affords the autonomy, of some – often exceptional – subnational units, but does not extend these privileges to others. As a result, it represents a significant departure from the normal practice of federalism as parallel relationships between center and provinces, signaling some level of dissonance between the framing of the polity at the national level and the reactive assertion of particular territorial units within its borders.

Asymmetric federalist arrangements result from contingency and compromise rather than a deliberate framing of constitutional arrangements; they are often the outcome of power-sharing deployed to resolve territorial conflicts in which subnational political actors have opposed,

3 Kymlica 2001. 4 Lijphart 1969.

5 violently or not, the assertive policies and practices of the central state.5 Yet Tillin has argued that asymmetric federalism in the Indian context has been a de facto practice of state actors rather than arising from constitutional arrangements;6 further, it has not led to the actual provision of protection for ethnic or religious minorities, or the resolution of separatist conflicts.

Tillin’s skepticism surrounding the formal institutions and salutary outcomes of asymmetric federalism suggests that the concept raises more questions than it answers about the natural advantages of asymmetric federal arrangements, the choices open to institutional designers and the authority imbued in these arrangements. Further, as a normative argument or a policy proposal, it has weak descriptive and explanatory power. In reality, there is a great diversity in subnational movements that could lead – through successful political assertion – to de facto power-sharing. For example, contentious subnational actors in Jammu and Kashmir failed in their quest for greater autonomy from the central government despite explicit constitutional provisions. These groups are also qualitatively different from the complex array of separatist insurgencies, tribal autonomous councils, religious organizations and political entrepreneurs in the Northeast that have achieved significant levels of autonomy.7 Beyond India, many developing states have de facto asymmetry as a consequence of the political settlements between central governments and favored proxies or allies in some provinces, and conflict with others. Moreover, asymmetry can shift in favor with regime change or the breakdown of political settlements, even as decades-old and often ignored constitutions remain constant. Understanding the component elements and causes of this asymmetry requires information on nature, relationships and changes of subnational authorities that necessitate asymmetrical settlements.

5 Lustick 1979; O’Leary and McGarry 2004; McGarry 2007. 6 Tillin 2006. 7 Bose 2009; Hausing 2014; Adeney 2016; Saika 2017.

6 Sub-National Authoritarianism

A number of scholars of comparative politics have noticed significant variation in subnational practices of democracy within otherwise democratic polities in Latin America and Southeast

Asia.8 These “authoritarian enclaves” in regions of Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia,

Indonesia and the Philippines – are usually framed as deviations to expected norms of democracy, arising from inconsistent democratic consolidation at the center. “Local authoritarians” are often formal officers of the state and many are members of important political parties as governors or mayors, but they govern in ways that diverge from the practices consistent with democracy as it is achieved and consolidated at the center.

There are several broad and complementary factors that explain the persistence of these

“sub-national undemocratic regimes”. When presented as “holdouts,” with high levels of local capacity to contravene or modify national directives for their own ends, they represent an incomplete transition to transparent and competitive forms of political organization. The political changes in the direction and hierarchy of rules that coincided with democratization played a role in entrenching local control. Montero and Samuels and Bähr argue that the decentralization that was a part of economic reform shifted political, fiscal, and administrative power away from the national government toward subnational units.9 Thus the retrenchment of the central state has led to greater autonomy, resources, and leverage at the local level. This, however, this does not

8 Sidel 1999; Gibson 2012; Giraudy 2015. Earlier work on subnational authoritarianism included post-Soviet Eurasia, which has since seen greater authoritarian consolidation. See McMann 2006. 9 Montero and Samuels 2004; Bähr 2008.

7 explain why only some subregions have undemocratic leadership, while others conform to national democratic norms.

Sub-national authoritarians are often considered a legacy of machine politics, where the systematic use of public resources for partisan ends limits the opposition through repression, fiscal starvation and closed networks of patronage. Subnational authoritarians might have received largesse from a ruling party or regime at the center in exchange for supporting that regime in the province, with partisan and patronage links that facilitate accommodation and shared objectives. They can thus choose to facilitate or to limit the central government’s ability to carry out its desired policy goals, making regimes dependent on them. Over time, they might use their positions to gather together independent means of resource mobilization and coercion in order to achieve lasting autonomy from the central regime, even when it undergoes democratic reform.

Thus, as Gibson has powerfully argued, these local authoritarians deploy strategies of

“boundary control,” using extensive networks of power and patronage to prevent reformist national regimes from enabling local competitors.10 Subnational authoritarians at the provincial level have been accused of removing opposition mayors and dismantling or packing city councils, denying funds to municipalities controlled by the opposition, the arbitrary commission of state-level audits to investigate contrived financial misdeeds of opposition mayors, and the co- optation or division of local organized groups, such as small unions, social movements, and street vendors, that could potentially exert societal control over undemocratic incumbents. These practices can continue because central regimes either require allies or cannot afford the disruptions that might arise from their attempted removal, and the resource autonomy built up by

10 Gibson 2012.

8 local authoritarians limits the leverage by the center.11 Therefore, key to this autonomy is the capture of economic rents and resources at the local level, sometimes leveraging changes in formal institutions, which provides the power-resources that entrench power-holders and give national powerholders little choice but to maintain relationships.12

The literature on subnational authoritarianism, grounded in inductive studies of Latin

America and Southeast Asia, largely focuses on the relationships between local authorities and national government. Yet its generalizability is limited, as the examples commonly used in both literatures are rooted in the heightened agency of specific local bosses and limited enforcement abilities of democratic governments at the center. Subnational political regimes can refer to a wide variety of governance forms – with terms like hybrid, authoritarian, neopatrimonial, or

“closed-game” – yet each are only understood as deviations from national norms of democratic consolidation in upper middle-income countries.13 But there are forms of subnational authority other than the despotic party bosses in provinces and municipalities throughout the developing world, even in Latin America; figures of subnational authority can include the military or federal police sent to “occupy” restive regions, or even the narcotraficantes who have set up, in effect, shadow states in order to facilitate their trade without challenge.14 This suggests that the systematic differentiation of specific types of subnational authority – in relation to national regimes – may be key for understanding a wider universe of sub-national politics in developing countries.

Fragile States and “Ungoverned Space”

11 Giraudy 2015. 12 Gervasoni 2010; Sidel 2014. 13 Giraudy 2013. 14 Finnegan 2010; Grayson 2017.

9 Research on failed and fragile states often present countries as a volatile and violent patchwork of different authorities within a national territory, rather than a unified political order. This perspective underlies the focus on “ungoverned space.” Yet there are two diametrically opposed narratives about the subnational nature of power and governance beneath the national level in these contexts. The first, based largely on international relations scholarship, present “failed” states as vacuums of coherent structure of governance outside national capital, a reflection of inconsistent and weak national presence, with “hollow” Westphalian states.15 Frameworks emphasizing central state authority, institutionalization and capacity, with its associated focus on state absence and vacuums of national authority, present such countries as “fragile” and “weak,” with an absence of formal and structural representation and governments incapable of providing even the most basic goods to its populations, including security.16 Scholars have correlated weak state capacity to the emergence of civil wars and insurgent conflict.17 Thus, antisystemic subnational actors are expected to emerge and thrive in this “ungoverned space,” and disappear if and when national states assert or reassert their authority.

Presenting these regions as “ungoverned space,” growing from failures in state and regime formation and consolidation, often disregards the role of that governance agents beyond the state have in creating and perpetrating stability.18 These extra-state agents are often components in heterodox yet durable forms of political order.19 A regime’s primary goal in maintaining its rule may be achieved through building and maintaining relationships with these figures of subnational authority. In these contexts, national institutions selectively and

15 Jackson and Rosberg 1982. 16 Chalk 2008; Lamb 2008; Patrick 2010. 17 Fearon and Laitin 2003; Stanislawski 2008; Collier and Rohner 2010. 18 Raleigh and Dowd, 2014. 19 Naseemullah 2014.

10 intermittently engage with local populations, and connections with elites in the periphery are paramount. Analysis of this kind begins, rather than concludes, with the assumptions that the reach of many developing states is territorially uneven, and interrogates the assumption that states face imperatives to monopolize.20 Subnational political networks are thus key for governance, capacity and violence management, regardless of formal institutional structures.

Relationships of direct and indirect control and authority through local intermediaries replace national government representation, and local power can be persistent, under the condition it does not directly challenge or threaten the central government.21

Explanations for the rise and persistence of multiple forms of subnational authority can lie with the benefits these authorities provide for the central government. In turn, this is a reflection of how the subnational nature of the modern state in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is strongly based on subnational relationships, rather than a hierarchical, formalized and consolidated national institutions. As Scheye notes, the post-colonial state is characterized by “the rule of the ‘intermediaries’, a series of networks and polities that substitute and compensate for the lack of authority of the central, legally constituted state and its ability to deliver essential public goods and services.”22 A wide and growing community of researchers suggests possible parameters, frameworks and agents within of the “negotiated state.”23 These multiple conceptions underlie the variation in form, and emphasize the contingent, constructed and contested nature of governance, public authority and security, and Africanists have developed several descriptions of these processes of local governance. Lund notes “a wider

20 Slater and Kim 2014. 21 Boone, 2003; Mukhopadhyay 2009. 22 Scheye 2009, 5. 23 Muller 2011; Titeca and de Herdt 2011.

11 family of concepts...emphasize the contingent, constructed and contested nature of governance, public authority and security.... related formulations include the notion of ‘governance without government.”24 From these perspectives, the national regime is not a neutral, much less a plural arena of interests, but rather often by far the strongest among a diverse set of political actors. The underlying realities of governance in the context of weak and fragile states is that authority and security are both exercised and contested by a vast array of different actors.

Such “institutional pluralism” is evident from a range of subnational governance agents, represented by traditional leaders to formal officeholders.25 Even where power relationships emerge from indirect co-option, there is a functioning governance hierarchy in which subnational elites and regions are positioned depending on their relationship, proximity and political

“weight” with regard to their influence in and threats to the central regime.

These different research traditions may answer very different questions but still represent disparate, common and comparable subnational forms of authority. We submit that the ways that researchers across regions and disciplines have approached the nature of subnational governance is a case of the three blind men and the elephant: each perceiving fans, snakes, trees and walls where a more systematic comparative approach with solid conceptual foundations, would yield a more coherent unitary outcome. Integrating these insights involves interrogating idealized relationships between national and subnational levels of governance, at once seeing central regimes as employing a wide array of strategies beyond simple monopolization or formal decentralization, while seeing particular sets of governance actors as modal at the subnational level. To do this, we construct a conceptual typology of forms of subnational authority, designed

24 Lund 2006, 694. 25 Bierschenk & Olivier de Sardan 1997.

12 to give us purchase in understanding the nature of governance under the national level within developing countries

A Typology of Subnational Authority

Our starting point is acknowledging that the capacity and authority of the state is uneven, particularly in developing countries. In an effective, well-institutionalized state with ample capacity, multiple actors exist simultaneously and act in concert to enact the regime’s governance agenda; the state operates several scales – local, municipal, regional, national – under a hierarchical infrastructure, with representation and oversight at each level ensures some basic level of legitimacy. Disagreements that arise, however serious, can be managed through formal and informal institutions, including recourse to constitutional courts and electoral mandates, partisan structures and civil society. In an ‘uneven state’ with limited effective capacity, these systems and hierarchies are hollowed out due to ineffective national coordination, management and ultimately institutionalization; thus, autonomous subnational actors at different scales proliferate. The outcomes of governance are thus reliant on the nature and practices of subnational authorities across the political geography of states.

Consequently, the persistence of central regimes become dependent on a patchwork of variegated subnational allies who, in addition to possible rivals to the regime, occupy space within the same national borders. To understand their interaction and its consequences, we must first be more systematic about the different forms of subnational authority. To this end, we construct a typology of these different forms. These types are distinguished by whether they directly execute or challenge central state authority (agents and rivals, respectively), or locate their power within but autonomously from regime and patronage structures, in different ways

(bosses and chieftains). As figure 1 shows, while each of these four types are conceptually

13 distinct, pairs are related by their positions on two spectrums for the purposes of exposition.

Agents and rivals occupy different ends of the “relationship to the regime” spectrum, running from positive and in concert (left) to negative and in opposition (right). In contrast, bosses and chieftains have intermediate and ambiguous relationships with the central regime. Bosses and chieftains are defined by the nature of their respective “power-resources.”26 Bosses have independent, yet partisan, local resources that they can wield over the regime, and are therefore higher on the power-resources scale. Chieftains have power resources based on extant traditional social structures, but they remain dependent on the state to recognize the institutions they represent, and are thus lower on the power-resources spectrum.

[Figure 1 about here]

Agents and Rivals

Discussions of weak state power often suggests that the state is “absent” below the façade of the central government, and thus outside the national capital but within its borders (Herbst 2001).

At its limits, this narrative renders invisible governors, mayors and regional or municipal governments, local bureaucrats and the providers of local services. But even someone with a cursory knowledge of a state – however weak, fragile or affected by crisis – can identify many representatives of the central state: border agents, tax collectors, agricultural extension workers, police and paramilitaries, postal workers. These are political actors that act on behalf the central state and impose the will of the central regime on areas that harbor discontent.

26 Our definition of power-resources extends the classical definition by Korpi (1985) to include the tools of mobilization and coercion that allow subnational actors to maintain power over others. This includes not just material and ideational resources but also social capital, access to organized violence, territorial control, foreign support, entitlement, and alliance structures.

14 Agents of the central regime are part of – or act on behalf of – the formal central bureaucratic and coercive apparatus, and are thus usually subject to hierarchical, principal-agent relationships. They derive their authority from speaking or acting on behalf of the national leadership, and acquire their resources from the national budget to continue operating.

In a functional, balanced, democratic federal system, a balance is possible between two sets of agents where one represents central government and the other, regional or local governments, each following institutional roles that are complementary. In developing countries, a fundamental dissonance between the interests and policies of the center and those of certain regions is much more commonplace. This is in part because of the troubled and contested formation of national states and stunted processes of consolidation of states and regimes. In contexts where looser alliances with disparate actors prove impossible, and in the face of fundamental challenges to sovereignty, the central regime deploys its own agents to suppress discontent or limited effectiveness; their authority is thus “imposed.”27 This often involves military or paramilitary forces, creating in effect a martial occupation over a region within its own territories, with officers taking on de jure and de facto governance authority. This is frequently forwarded as a response to rivals in contexts as disparate as the Mexican military occupation of Chiapas, the overwhelming Turkish military presence in Kurdish majority regions in southwestern Turkey, and the de facto Sri Lankan military occupation of the Tamil minority areas in the North and East.28

In special cases, the state can also recruit and empower temporary or informal agents to execute its policies without necessarily maintaining control or oversight over them, following the

27 Boone 2003: 36. 28 Serrano 1995; Geri 2017; Daniel 2013.

15 longstanding concept of posse comitatus in common law. In contemporary parlance, these are often referred to as proxies or contras. In its campaign against Maoist insurgents in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, a senior police official formed a contra force called the Salwa Jadum by arming those who had been displaced by the conflict.29 In Latin America from the 1970s, state- sponsored paramilitaries were employed to fight left-wing guerrillas in the overall context of the

Cold War and the war on drugs.30 In modern day Burundi, the regime’s party youth militia (the

Imbonerakure) has taken on police duties, election duties and repression activities (Sterck 2015).

Indeed, in the Burundian case, there are several accounts of Imbonerakure engaging in battles with police, where the agendas of the state and regime forces diverge.

It is perhaps not surprising that these proxy forces can present challenges when the interests of the national state and those of proxy actors diverge; in this way, agents acting as proxies can become rivals when the interests of these groups and that of the central state diverge.

Another clear instance of this dynamic was the decision of Indira Gandhi’s to arm and empower radical Sikh nationalists, led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, against more moderate but more serious opposition challenges. When the government tried and failed to exert control,

Bhindranwale and his followers occupied the Golden Temple in Amritsar, leading to a siege and then invasion of the Indian army, inaugurating a decade-long insurgency in the state of Punjab.31

Rivals are those who act explicitly against the policies, governance strategies and the overall governance project of the state. They mobilize resources, support and ultimately legitimacy by taking a stand against the power and presence of the central government, even though their actual objectives or ideal outcomes might fall short of complete replacement or

29 Sundar 2006. 30 LeoGrande 1998. 31 Chima 2008.

16 independence. Rival subnational authorities often base their claims to sovereignty on alternative state-building projects, and frequently resort to armed opposition as a strong component of their stance against the state. An armed presence is central to the act of “taking” authority from the state, as well as often subjecting the people within the rival government to their authority. In addition to violence, serious rivals will attempt to establish a parallel system of governance.

Mampilly has argued that some rebel movements engage in activities such as tax collection and the administration of justice as a means to gain and retain legitimacy in Sri Lanka and Congo.32

Part of the popular support for the Taliban movement, as it reemerged in southern Afghanistan in opposition to the Karzai regime, lay in their capacity to administer quotidian justice and resolve disputes in a more effective and impartial manner than a corrupt and sclerotic official court system.33

Multiple forms of stronger and weaker rivals plague developing countries, from ISIS across Syria and Iraq to petty warlords challenging state authority in parts of Liberia, Sierra

Leone and South Sudan. Some rivalries have been present since the beginning of the state, arising from the chaotic and flawed creation of modern states in the postcolonial world and persistence of national borders during European colonial competition during the nineteenth century. The principle of self-determination has repeatedly crashed into the reality of border fixity, leading to longstanding attempts by rebel actors to resist central states perceived as foreign occupiers, and equally longstanding attempts by the state to resist these challenges.

Legion as rivals are, they are rarely successful in their ultimate goal of challenging central state authority; the scores of failed liberation and separatist movements and insurgencies

32 Mampilly 2012. 33 Chaudhuri and Farrell 2011.

17 in Africa and Asia from the 1960s saw few successes.34 Why? This is mainly because recognized states can mobilize resources internally and externally to persist, and often do so by consolidating domestic political elites to represent and support them subnationally.35 Yet rival groups may also mobilize their own resources to continue fighting when it is feasible to do so, even when the chances of ultimate victory are small.36 Thus, agent-rival dynamics are an enduring feature of different forms of subnational authority in developing states.

This is particularly the case at national peripheries, where the state’s administrative and coercive reach is limited; ethnic insurgencies in northern Myanmar and northeastern India have persisted at low levels since at least the 1950s. In other instances, significant opposition can be triggered by state overreach: far-left civil conflict across Latin America, South and Southeast

Asia arose out of the modernization or commercialization of decaying feudal landowning structures.37 As Scott has more recently argued, there are long traditions of highland communities across Asia deploying strategies to successfully resist the incorporating impulses of the modern state.38 Naseemullah argues that the rise of sovereignty-challenging violence in India is often a reaction of communities faced with a unilateral abrogation of traditional practices of governance restraint and non-incorporation, due to national security imperatives or the alienation and extraction of precious resources.39

Of course, in cases of complex and long-lasting insurgencies, agents and rivals co-occur but lines are blurred and roles can shift abruptly. This is particularly the case when the

34 Clapham 1996; Reid 2005. 35 Jackson and Rosberg 1982. 36 Collier, Hoeffler and Rohner 2009. 37 Scott 1976. 38 Scott 2009. 39 Naseemullah 2018.

18 composition of the regime and thus its constellation of interests change; proxies of the state might become adversaries – as in Punjab – while erstwhile rivals may blunt their opposition or fragment into different factions. The interaction between rivals and agents can be a dynamic that is informed both by (changing) relationships to the state and the nature of resources afforded to both sides. The relative capabilities and strategies of agents and rivals can produce an array of different outcomes. Staniland surveys the various constellations of engagement between between the state’s agents and multiple rivals in contexts of insurgent violence in post-colonial Asia, ranging from brutal repression to selective non-confrontation.40 Without paying attention to the particular interests and capabilities of agents and rivals as distinct subnational actors, such outcomes may remain obscure.

Chieftains and Bosses

Attention to the extreme “poles” of subnational authority based on relationships with the regime occludes the many brokers and intermediaries that are common representatives of political order throughout the developing world. In the universe of subnational authority, ambiguous distance – rather than opposition or acting as agents or proxies – distinguishes bosses and chieftains from agents and rivals. Bosses and chieftains both maintain a relative distance while continuing long- standing, often patronage-based, relationships with states and regimes. Through these

“partnerships,” transactional exchanges occur involving legitimacy, material and symbolic resources, and the maintenance of political order in regions and localities. In return for supporting regime continuity, the variable autonomy of both bosses and chieftains persist. Yet

40 Staniland 2012.

19 they differ in the sources and nature of this authority, giving them different levels of agency and independence from the center.

Chieftains represent a localized and culturally embedded form of subnational authority that significantly predates the formation of the modern states. “Traditional authority” was the basis of political order before the onset of the modern state.41 In the colonial world, the persistence and maintenance of traditional authority represented the norm rather than the exception. As Naseemullah and Staniland have argued in the Indian subcontinent, this gave rise to an array of different forms of indirect rule, from princely states, to districts with nominal state authority but significant de facto power for landlords and other elites, to “hybrid” political agencies where tribal leaders and state actors share coercive power.42 Bifurcation in such patterns of colonial rule were common in Africa as well, with British and French imperial authorities empowering chiefs to maintain order in rural areas while exerting direct control over cities and plantation-based agriculture.43 Caciques were an important feature of customary authority in colonial Latin America; even though Spanish conquest did not explicitly preserve traditional elites, their power was sustained and transformed in the nineteenth century revolutions and subsequent state-building.44

Post-colonial governments, facing real constraints on the deployment of coercive and infrastructural power, chose to maintain certain structures of traditional authority as a means to maintaining political order and social legitimacy. Due to these legacies, modern states in the developing world are engaged in inconsistent and ambiguous relationships with still powerful

41 Weber [1919] 1991. 42 Naseemullah and Staniland 2016. 43 Mamdani 1996. 44 Mahoney 2010.

20 structures of traditional authorities. Large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa are dominated by traditional chiefs managing agrarian relations on behalf of the state.45 Baldwin and Logan have emphasized the continued presence and influence of traditional authorities in contemporary social and political outcomes throughout sub-Saharan Africa.46 Naseemullah (2014) has described the de jure self-governance of tribal maliks and jirgas in the tribal agencies of northwestern Pakistan, arising from treaties and exceptional legislation from British rule that were incorporated into the post-independence state. Yet while these are social institutions that are nominally distinct from the national government, they are increasingly dependent on it for continuity, legitimacy and resources; their social positions have become increasingly tied to states and regimes.

Chieftains often maintain regime capacity and presence through activities normally reserved for the state or regime – block voting, the execution of decrees, tax collection and the maintenance of local security. In extreme cases, the state formally subcontracts governance to customary elites in areas where the state’s presence is delimited; patronage is thus channelled through traditional structures rather than quotidian bureaucracies, thus maintaining the importance of customary elites to the population.47 These subcontracting relationships can represent hazards for their independence, at the limit they become de facto government employees. The more they are formally incorporated into the state’s governance framework and identified with the central state or regime by local populations, the less autonomy of action they have, and the more they represent targets for rivals challenging their authority and the authority

45 Boone 2015. 46 Logan 2015; Baldwin 2016. 47 Naseemullah and Chhibber 2018.

21 of the state, as we see with the attacks on tribal maliks by the Pakistani Taliban in the late

2000s.48

More commonly, the central state, by providing active support to its allies or the adoption of policies of wilful neglect, simply allows traditional elites to continue to exert enormous political influence, either directly or by proxy through influence in the legislature or government.

Traditional authorities are adept at transitions in their status and agency, parlaying symbolic authority into the accumulation of material resources with which to preserve their political independence in provinces and localities, while participating in patronage transactions upward to the central state and downward to client, dependent populations, as with Datus in the contemporary Philippines.49 The key to understanding the importance of chieftains and the persistence of customary authority in the developing world is the very real limits on the capacity of the state to penetrate and reshape social relations within their borders. States do, however, have greater potential leverage over chieftains because of the heterodox and tenuous nature of their authority, which is dissonant with the norms and expectations of the modern state.

Developing countries after decolonization, or during the populist reordering of oligarchic regimes, did initiate projects to build modern regimes and states and displace traditional authorities. Outside extreme revolutionary contexts, however, party-based regime mobilization was not fully successful; regimes at the center incorporated all sorts of actors with different interests and had limited ability to discipline these members and allies in the periphery. As a means to maintain legitimacy and some degree of consolidation, many leaders and regimes settle

48 Naseemullah 2014, 517-519. 49 Sidel 1999, 13-14.

22 for the continued persistence of strong local elites, and their incorporation into political machines.

Bosses, then, are figures of power and authority from positions within governing parties or regimes, but who have maintained or attained significant levels of independence from national leadership.50 Bosses often sustain power through formal designations in the national regime, while mobilizing resources and capturing rents at the local level to maintain their independence.

The predominance of bossism in developing countries is thus closely tied with weak regime consolidation, and the inability of regimes to discipline members. These contexts create opportunities for actors to capture and entrench local power through their roles in electoral or political mobilization.51

Even though they may be card-carrying members of the regime, bosses differ significantly from agents in that they have various levels of autonomy and are able to leverage their influence within the government in return for continued resource allocation and local power concentrations. Their relative independence from the regime can be based on the features of the particular system (e.g. federal or consociational) which confer power and thus resource mobilization directly to regional representatives. Local and personal characteristics, such as captured rentier wealth, communal or ethnic cohesion, or the importance of electoral mobilization or legitimacy in certain regions and localities for parties in power at the centre.

The boss category crosscuts regime type as all leaders are, to different degrees, dependent on those with power at the local level. In India in the decade after independence, rich peasants and local dominant caste leaders mobilized by form the provincial base of the Congress party,

50 There is a large and developed literature on bosses in the politics of more developed countries, in relation to urban political machines. See Banfield and Wilson 1966; Stokes 2005. 51 Scott 1969.

23 used their party and provincial government positions to maintain political domination over lower caste groups and thwart efforts by the center to intervene in agrarian relations.52 In Mexico, the

1911 Revolution established nearly a century of one-party rule, with regional officials establishing fiefdoms in regions while providing stability and support for the center; these dynamics of “subnational undemocratic regimes” are a common feature of Latin American politics that has persisted even after the rise of democratic competition, as noted above. In

African countries, most regimes constitute shifting alliance structures among powerful regional bosses and a broadly inclusive central regime resulting in recycled elites, who enter and leave regimes and parties through negotiations and transactions.53

A relatively common pattern in developing countries from independence to the present day is the shift from chieftains to bosses, as more political power and resources are to be gained through becoming incorporated through party structures, particularly when customary authority is challenged. In Latin America, the term cacique has changed its meaning from a figure of traditional authority to connote a political boss; regimes in Latin America have transformed from

“parties of notables” to more notionally popular forms of representation, with feudal patrons and hacendados transforming themselves to party officials through the shift from traditional patronage to the capture of state-implicated clientelism.54 In India, former princely rulers have, since the dual challenges of land reform and the abolition of aristocratic privilege, entered party politics as a way of defending their traditional influence.55 In Pakistan, many of the most

52 Weiner 1968. 53 Raleigh and Dowd 2018. 54 Dix 1992. 55 Erdman 1967.

24 powerful political figures used their customary influence – as pirs, or guardians of Sufi shrines – to cement their political power through party mobilization.56

This might reflect the slow transition from one form of authority to the other, or it might otherwise signify the strategy of customary authorities taking on, sometimes temporarily, bossism to supplement their authority. Many cases of influential politicians across Africa and

Asia switching parties or forming their own political groups to maximize political advantage.57

The risk is, however, that governments at the center can fall or different factions take control of regimes, leaving no central source of patronage and influence; both bosses and chieftains use different techniques to maintain access to largesse while maintaining autonomy.

Subnational Authority: Outcomes and Implications

Despite detailing the variation in forms and practices, there is a significant benefit in putting these authority structures back together into national perspectives of sub-national politics. All of these forms exist in a national state, and ultimately, we are interested in exploring how they influence broader national outcomes. We argue that multiple forms of subnational authorities regularly exist within developing countries and can indeed co-exist within the same space, giving rise to competition, contention or outright conflict. The different constellations of subnational authorities within national territory means that there is no “one size fits all” definition of subnational governance. Multiple combinations of patterns of authority can emerge, and a wide range of outcomes can result. As such, it is important to understand that constellations of

56 Herring 1979; Tunio 2018. 57 see Van de Walle 2003 on the proliferation of parties in African political systems, and Chhibber, Jensenius and Suryanarayan 2014 for similar dynamics of proliferation in Indian states.

25 different forms of subnational authority constitutes national political geographies on their own terms, rather than simply aberrations from the ideals of democratic federalism.

The presence of different forms of subnational authority exerts direct influence on several features of modern statehood, including the legibility and control of populations, the stability of the regime, the form and extent of corruption, the uniformity of policy outcomes, and the likelihood of political violence. In what follows, we will outline the implications of different forms of subnational authority in two areas of particular concern for the politics of developing countries: that of hybrid regimes and failures of democratic representation, and that of complex forms of political violence.

Hybrid Regimes

Regimes throughout the developing world that have some democratic as well as significant authoritarian elements are characterized as “hybrid regimes.”58 Hybrid regimes are often seen as either democracies with defective elements or authoritarian regimes with some popular and electoral characteristics,59 reifying the dichotomy between the two. A more fruitful approach to characterizing, classifying and explaining regime hybridity is to assess its functional components and practices. Adeney, in analysing Pakistan’s hybrid regime, usefully disaggregates its various dimensions, finding significant democratic features in electoral competition but authoritarian ones in the weakness of civil liberties and the reserve domains of non-democratic control.60

Thus, a more multidimensional understanding of the nature and limits of democratic governance in developing countries might more appropriate for understanding outcomes than that of

58 McMann 2006; Levitsky and Way 2010; Diamond 2015, 163-175 59 Bogaards 2009. 60 Adeney 2017.

26 aggregate scores of deviation from ideal democracy, as used in assessing crossnational variation in democratic competition.

We argue that variation in democratic governance within regimes can be geographic as well. The forms and actions of subnational authorities in these contexts are a crucial determinant.

For areas under the control of different forms of subnational authority, the role of the state is mediated in different ways, as authorities dictate the parameters and rules within which populations live. Agents impose the will of the central state to the populations it controls; these can represent the imperatives of the central state rather than – and even as opposed to – that of regional populations. Agents of central regimes de facto occupy south-eastern Turkey, northern

Sri Lanka, western and north-western Pakistan, and various states in India under the Armed

Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), such as Kashmir and Assam; these operate in “states of exception,” where the norms of democratic representation, rule of law and human rights are de facto suspended.61 The enduring presence of rivals also complicates notions of representation, given that those in areas under rivals’ control have no recourse to the protection of the state of which they are citizens. Rivals often perform salutary governance roles, but are likely to establish “protection rackets,” as a means to mobilize resources and ensure obedience, as with

Maoist dominated areas in eastern India.62

In contrast, in areas controlled by bosses and chieftains, regional populations operate under a form of “decentralized despotism,”63 where decisions regarding policy formulation and implementation are often relegated and then captured. For bosses, their own autonomy is paramount, and can often act against the wishes of democratically elected governments or

61 Agamben 2005. 62 Shah 2006. 63 Mamdani 1996.

27 popular demands if it is compromised. In areas of traditional authority, meanwhile, chieftains are often “supervising” rather than determining the actions of subject populations, thereby enforcing political arrangements that actively prevent changes in traditional hierarchies. Thus, hybrid regimes – like many in the developing world – may have geographical as well as functional components.

Moreover, the implementation of policy formed through democratic processes is uneven and closely related to the control of or influence over populations by subnational authorities. The established literature on undemocratic authorities in Latin America has pointed to the selective implementation of policy by governors, mayors or party bosses.64 This suggests that bosses will only support and implement national policy in ways they deem beneficial to their local support.

Pressure by national authorities to implement economic or social policies or to enforce the rule of law or electoral procedures is only as successful as the independent power of the central regime is capable of exerting its will over these figures. In areas of traditional authority, the issue is often not in the motive of chieftains, but the means of carrying out policies through governance structures that delimit the state’s direct control.65 In contrast, agents may be imposed solely to enact dramatic policy changes, but often against the wishes of populations in the regions. Rivals, to the extent they can control a territory, are not in the business of imposing national policy, but actively subverting it.

The diversity of subnational authorities in many hybrid regimes in the developing world presents a much more complex picture of the geographical unevenness and political diversity, rather than simply aberrations from democratic federalism. This has significant implications for

64 Giraudy 2012. 65 Naseemullah and Chhibber 2018.

28 democratization. Far from simply overcoming “boundary control,” the establishment of democracy to citizens under subnational despotisms in many hybrid regimes may involve such contradictory goals as empowering the security forces to defeat rebels, and then reining in these security forces before they establish and maintain occupation to further their own interests.

Moreover, it is also not evident that all forms of subnational authority are antithetical to standards of democratic competition. If machine politics in developing countries are the norm rather than the exception, and were moreover rampant in American and European democracies at earlier periods, can they not coexist with a procedural minimum definition of democracy?66

Baldwin, meanwhile, has argued that customary leaders in African states actually enable democratic governance by providing informal conduits between the government and the population.67 Regime hybridity, when viewed through the lens of political geography, offers a more complex landscape of the political relationships between states, political groups and citizens that complicates any straightforward understanding of the processes of democratization.

Political Order and Varieties of Violence

Subnational authorities have important implications for political order in developing countries, as their presence can be used to directly support and consolidate regimes, or can oppose or limit national power. This has important implications for the use of violence throughout a state. The poles of subnational authority defined by the relationship to the regime are fairly straightforward.

Agents support the means and ends of the national regime, and they do so through the explicit and implicit use of force against those opposing the state. Rivals, meanwhile, are defined by their

66 Schmitter and Karl 1991. 67 Baldwin 2016.

29 actions against regime power and stability, and so actively operate to undermine it using coercion and violence.

The relationship between bosses and conflict is more ambiguous, because of their ambivalent relationships to central regimes. They support the stability of the regime to the extent that it supports their own local hold on power, determined in part by the magnitude of leverage the regime brings to bear in transactions over resources and legitimacy. Bosses are thus not steadfast allies: they represent conditional support in specific regions, and they require regular side-payments and / or non-intervention in their affairs by national authorities. As a result, bosses might not use overt violence, but might quietly employ targeted conflict to meet their own ends, particularly when side-payments are being renegotiated or intervention is threatened. In Sub-

Saharan African countries, bosses mobilize militias to undertake their security and enact violence on behalf of local clients.68 These militias can be employed in pursuit of the interests of the central regime, but not exclusively or reliably.

Finally, chieftains alone are unable to upset regime stability in any significant way. Yet their acquiescence and participation in governance activities is crucial for local power structures imbued with traditional authority. Insofar as political order in peripheries with little state capacity are crucial to regime stability, traditional authorities are vital for support in these areas.

However, implicit entrenched systems of violence and exclusion by customary authorities may be met with impunity, if it benefits the state.

The forms of subnational authority present within national borders can therefore tell us about the risks, form and targets of political violence. Naseemullah has developed a categorization of political violence that proves useful here in how to distinguish the aims and

68 Raleigh 2016.

30 actions of violence as sovereignty-challenging – that is, violent actions explicitly over the fact of the legitimacy of the central regime – and sovereignty-neutral, which refers to violence targeted to change the distribution of resources or power within existing frameworks of sovereignty and authority.69 Agents and rivals are engaged over sovereignty-challenging violence; the former challenges sovereign power, the latter counters that challenge with the deployment of violence, and thus creates the dynamics of insurgent and counterinsurgent conflict. Agents can also engage violently with a range of groups and interests that the regime may consider threatening, which can include non-violent protestors or workers in the informal sector; the extent of this violence, as Resnick argues in African cities, may depend on formal institutions of federalism and jurisdiction as well as the state’s mandates or the importance of marginal populations to electoral constituencies.70

By contrast, bosses and chieftains rarely engage violently with the state, because the difference in coercive capabilities is substantial, and both require relationships with the central regime to continue. Instead, when bosses and chieftains engage in violence, it is contained, focused on targets other than the state and therefore, “sovereignty-neutral.” Such violence often concerns the means through which these individuals sustain their power, through the control over land and resources, repression of local challengers – from the political opposition to civil society

– and defending their clients and allies from usurpers. These dynamics show how regimes and violence correlate, but are also endogenous to the forms, interests and capacities of subnational authorities.

69 Naseemullah 2018. 70 Resnick forthcoming.

31 Too often, however, such specificities are submerged under the blanket characterization of ineffective or failing states. In reality, many regimes maintain persistent if tenuous management of their multiple forms of subnational authority. A survey of examples in two important developing countries, in different regions, may serve to illustrate these strategies.

In Nigeria, agents of the state, including the substantial military forces, are present across the country, and deploy violent repression to occupy areas of active insurgent challenge. Yet rivals like Boko Haram actively operate against the state and have sought to establish alternative governance structures, including local monopolies of coercion, in the North West since 2009.71

Several governors in this federal state operate as bosses or ‘godfathers’ in Nigerian political parlance, such as Lamidi Adedibu in Oyo state, who use targeted social violence against challengers.72 Traditional authorities and religious powers “govern” in both Sharia areas of the

North, but also in the Middle Belt, where the state has had difficulty in curbing a rash of inter- communal violence related to the changing of traditional authority due to land tenure policy.73

National level political struggles influence the aims and intentions of local actors in urban and rural settings;74 but while the regime cannot control those local actors, it remains the strongest agent amongst many others. While the position of the Nigerian regime looks fragile, it is not due to a single fundamental challenge, but the difficulty in navigating a complicated and variegated landscape of violence and political authority.75

71 Campbell 2014. 72 Martins 2016. 73 The dynamics between land tenure and violence in the African context are explicated by Boone (2015). 74 LeBas 2013. 75 Raleigh and Dowd 2018.

32 A similar variation in the management of political order is found in Pakistan. Significant territory in the west and northwest is under the de facto control of the military, as a result of first insurgent control and then brutal counterinsurgent actions. From the mid-2000s, the Tehreek-e-

Taliban Pakistan established control over large swaths of the Federally Administered Tribal

Areas and the Swat Valley. Relatively successful counterinsurgent campaigns have stripped insurgents of significant territory, but military and paramilitary forces have remained with significant governance capabilities. In the western province of Balochistan, senior military officers have a tutelary relationship over the regional government, and the presence of a huge garrison and significant paramilitary deployment have brought about de facto occupation, along with brutal repression and counterinsurgent conflict, over the province.76 Thus, in Pakistan’s western and northwestern peripheries, insurgency and then counterinsurgent campaigns have weakened – in some cases, destroyed – the extant power of traditional authorities, which managed political order in the state’s behalf since before independence.77 For other Pakistanis, in the populous and more developed provinces of Sindh and Punjab, political bosses, often locked in competition with one another over control over the state’s resources, manage a chaotic system of patronage and electoral mobilization.78 This competition can be violent, either through poll- based riots or the strategic non-intervention against militant groups as a means to target the opposition or polarize voters.79 And in the metropolis of Karachi, waves of urban insurgency engage with the deployment of paramilitary, along with a complicated patchwork of mafias and

76 Khan 2009. 77 Naseemullah 2014. 78 Wilder 1999; Mohmand forthcoming. 79 Nellis and Siddiqui 2018.

33 protection rackets that represent islands of stability at their core and avenues of conflict at borders between one another.80

As a result, in Pakistan, Nigeria and many other developing countries, national territories contain not only several forms of subnational authority, but multiple agents, rivals, bosses and/or traditional authorities co-occur in what may seem like a chaotic and disordered system. But the patterns of authority and governance are a function of the specificities of subnational politics in developing countries, and the strategies of central governments try to maintain political order given this multiplicity. This level of transactional activity and management occupies a massive amount of time, money and energy of the national regime. Corruption, weak implementation of policy and outbreaks of violence are the outward signs that the regime has become a broker of various, discrete subnational interests rather than relying on institutionalized structures.

Conclusion

An increasingly vital area of research in political science, the study of sub-national politics is dominated by an interplay of a single ideal type – that of functional and stable democratic federalism – with explanations of aberration from that ideal type. Such an approach has been usefully deployed in specific studies explaining the presence of asymmetric federalism, subnational undemocratic regimes and failing and fragile states. While comparison with ideal types is often seen as a crucial starting point for systematic social enquiry, it is nonetheless less helpful for understanding the complex and uneven nature of subnational politics in the developing world, in which exceptions to this ideal are in fact the norm. In this article, we have proposed a different, more inductive approach, defining the nature and interests of different types of political authority, and how they might interact with the central government and each other.

80 Grare 2016.

34 Bosses, chieftains, agents and rivals represent forms of subnational authority that are present in most developing countries and drive different kinds of subnational politics even within the same national boundaries. A focus on the nature, interests, power-resources and dynamic interaction of these forms thus provides us with a new and, in our view, useful way of understanding important outcomes in developing countries, from the internal dynamic of hybrid regimes to the patterns of political violence.

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41 Figure Click here to download Figure Sub-National Authority_fig 1.docx

Figure 1. Typology of Subnational Authority

Power of NatureThe

Bosses

Agents Rivals

- Resources

Chieftains

Relationship to Central Regime

Author Bio

Adnan Naseemullah Assistant Professor at King’s College London Specialization in South Asian politics, subnational authorities, industrialization across India and Pakistan. PhD University of California-Berkeley

Clionadh Raleigh Professor of Political Violence and Geography at the University of Sussex Specialization in conflict processes and data, political geography, African politics and subnational authorities. PhD University of Colorado-Boulder