Authoritarian Aid and Regime Durability: Soviet Aid to the Developing World and Donor–Recipient Institutional Complementarity and Capacity

How does authoritarian aid influence the durability of dictatorships? Western aid is thought to facilitate authoritarian durability because it can provide patronage. Authoritarian aid, by contrast, has received far less attention. This article examines both Soviet economic and military assistance, developing a theory of donor–recipient institutional complementarity to explain the impact of Soviet aid during the Cold War. The argument is developed through case studies of Vietnam and Ghana and a cross-national statistical analysis of Soviet economic aid and military assistance to developing countries from 1955 to 1991. Soviet economic aid was tied to the purchase of Soviet industrial equipment. When recipient states shared the Soviet Union's centrally planned economy, economic aid strengthened state infrastructural power by (1) enhancing fiscal capacity and (2) cultivating the dependency of the population on the state. Aid flows helped consolidate and maintain authoritarian institutions, promoting authoritarian durability. By contrast, while Soviet economic aid to noncommunist regimes provided some opportunities for patronage through employment in SOEs, the lack of institutional complementarity in planning institutions and overall lack of capacity of these institutions caused Soviet aid to contribute to inflation and fiscal crises. Economic problems, in turn, increased the vulnerability of noncommunist regimes to military coups, particularly when ideological splits emerged between pro-Soviet rulers and pro-Western militaries that undermined elite cohesion. The institutional subordination of the military to communist parties insulated communist regimes from the risk of coups.

Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi

In Indian cities, a variety of state and non-state political actors and institutions play a role in regulating infrastructures in the everyday. Anthropological approaches to the everyday state have demonstrated how residents experience and discursively construct the state in relation to key services and amenities. However, less is known and theorized regarding how city-dwellers and public authorities understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructure that includes a variety of actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. This article partially addresses this lacuna through ethnographic research on (1) residents’ experiences and narrations of the everyday infrastructural governance of water and (2) the practices of key political actors who engage in regulating urban water infrastructures in Delhi’s neighborhoods. This research demonstrates that political actors’ and residents’ narratives and practices related to the infrastructural governance of water sharply contest both singular and dichotomous (state/non-state) readings of state power, instead revealing nuanced and situated understandings of hybrid and negotiated forms of “infrastructural power.” In particular, the practices and narratives of both residents and political authorities bring attention to the ways social and political power is decentered in the everyday and the porosity of the institutions of everyday infrastructural governance. My findings show the complex ways that infrastructures are tied to differing experiences, understandings, and articulations of power in relation to urban environments.

The Indigenous Inheritance: Critical Antecedents and State Building in Latin America and Southeast Asia

In comparative-historical analysis, countries are always different places before critical junctures set them on divergent pathways. By comparing the legacies of politicized ethnic diversity for the construction of state infrastructural power in Latin America and Southeast Asia, we elaborate the methodological and substantive importance of these “critical antecedents.” The critical antecedent in each region was the inheritance at independence of a sharp indigenous cleavage. This indigenous inheritance shaped threat perceptions and state-society coalitions in both regions in similarly powerful path-dependent ways—yet in intriguingly divergent directions. A salient indigenous cleavage hindered but did not preclude state building in nineteenth-century Peru, while fostering but not predestining state building in post–World War II Malaysia. Divergent levels of postcolonial state infrastructural power thus exhibit deep if indirect foundations in the identity cleavages inherited from preindependence eras. This cross-region comparative exploration highlights the analytical leverage gained from systematically incorporating preexisting cross-case differences into critical juncture accounts.