In differentiating state types, we presumed that each of the above described states fulfill the criteria of “state” defined in the beginning of the chapter. These criteria were (1) having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, which (2) the state is able to utilize to extract, manage and distribute resources within the borders of a certain territory [→ 2.2.1]. In the post-communist region, however, the transition period has seen several institutions that were nominally states but failed to fulfill either or both of the aforementioned attributes. Indeed, the stability of the state after the regime change was preserved without any break only in the Western-Christian historical region. For the formal-rational approach that appeared in the nature of the local communist systems was not in major contradiction with the ethos of Weberian professional bureaucracy [→ 1.4.2], and therefore such states could carry out a transition that never pushed them to the verge of failure. In the Islamic region, the dismantling of stateness could be prevented only when old communist structures themselves—especially the top levels of the party and secret service nomenklatura—turned directly into the “reformed” national centers of power, whereby the monopoly of violence did not slip out of the rulers’ hands.[1] Yet that region already featured state failure and civil wars, most notably in the case of Tajikistan (which nevertheless became a patronal autocracy afterwards).[2] Finally, in the Eastern-Orthodox historical region neither a complete transfer of previous power nor rational-bureaucratic foundations were present. In this region, it depended on the dynamics of competing patron-client networks whether state power could be solidified, and often it took years before a proper state emerged as the local monopolist of legitimate use of violence in the given country.[3]
The best example for an enduring period of state failure is Russia in the 1990s, as described by Vadim Volkov in his seminal work Violent Entrepreneurs.[4] As Volkov explains, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russian state lost its monopoly of the legitimate use of violence as competitors emerged—in large part from the organized underworld—who were treated as legitimate providers of information, security, enforcement, and dispute settlement by private actors of the economy (see Box 2.5). According to contemporary sources, even in 1998 twenty-five hundred banks and seventy-two thousand commercial organizations had their own security services in Russia.[5]
To be able to conceptualize such state of affairs, we need to create concepts for its three main elements: (1) the state, (2) the competitors of state in the market for protection, and (3) the polity which these entities comprise. As for the state, we may start from the notions of failed state and state fragility.[6] As scholars have noted, there are several different (combinations of) aspects in which a state can fail[7] and using the term “failed state” for all of them has resulted in conceptual stretching in the literature, for differently failing states constitute a heterogeneous set of cases in terms of causes, dynamics, and solutions.[8] To avoid this problem, we narrow down the definition of failed state to the aspect of the monopoly of violence:
- Failed state is an institution that is de jure a state but de facto fails to keep to monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. In other words, such a “state” degrades into a competitor on the market for violence.
This definition fits the nominal state in the situation described above. As Volkov writes, “[the] image of the state as one private protection company among others does more justice to the reality in question than a view of the state as the source of public power.”[9] Indeed, the state in this situation is more than one of the several violence-managing agencies, that is, an institutionalized set of actors who legitimately use violence in a polity.[10]
In the three polar types regimes we previously talked about—indeed, in all six ideal type regimes—the state is the only violence-managing agency. This is precisely what the “monopoly of the legitimate use of violence” means. In a regime featuring a failed state, however, the state faces competition from actors who may be called, following Volkov’s conceptualization, violent entrepreneurs:[11]
- Violent entrepreneur is a private actor who offers services on the market for violence. On this market, the offered services either include (1) protection, related to the institutional framework of economic and social functioning—such as information, security, enforcement, and dispute settlement—or (2) attacks against rivals or targets.
| 2.5. Box: Anarchic conditions in Russia in the 1990s. “The business of private protection that proliferated shortly after the establishment of formal property rights [in] Russia consists of producing a substitute for trust in a market economy where […] the state justice system is ignored. Russian organized crime, therefore, may be seen as a response to a certain institutional demand by the nascent market economy, namely, the need to protect property rights, a need not satisfied by public protection and enforcement agencies. […] The period between 1987 and 1992 entailed a rapid proliferation of racketeering gangs and informal protective associations of various kinds […]. To be sure, many criminal groups formed much earlier, but it was only in the later 1980s that protection rackets became the dominant business of organized crime. […] The years between 1992 and 1997 saw ferocious competition between violence-managing agencies for the expanding commercial opportunities. […] During this period, private protection and enforcement became institutionalized and a market for protection emerged. At the same time, the state lost its priority in the realm of protection, taxation, and adjudication.” “Since the actions of the state bureaucracy and of law enforcement remain arbitrary and the services provided by the state tend to have higher costs, private enforcers (read: the Mafia) outcompete the state and firmly establish themselves in its stead.” “[The] Russia of the 1990s was close to the state of nature, where anarchy rather than hierarchy prevails.” – Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism, 1 edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 18–26. |
Two distinctions must be made with respect to violent entrepreneurs. First, not everyone who uses violence is also a violent entrepreneur. A violent entrepreneur (1) not only uses violence, but also offers it to other actors as a service and (2) those other actors accept these offers as legitimate. Peter Pomerantsev captures this sensitively: “gangsters [in Russia after the regime change] didn’t just extort and steal. Businessmen called them in to guarantee deals (if one partner reneged, the gangsters would sort him out); people turned to them instead of the uninterested police to catch rapists and thieves. They became the establishment, the glue that holds everything together. In this new world no one knew quite how to behave: all the old Soviet role models had been made redundant, and the ‘West’ was just a story far away.”[12] Fulfilling such a social role, violent entrepreneurs contrast sharply to ordinary criminals or violent actors in non-failed states. For the latter are not regarded as legitimate, and therefore their presence does not disrupt the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. But the people choosing violent entrepreneurs over the de jure state makes it a failed state, deprived of its monopoly of legitimate violence. (Also, this is why we, when the services of a violent entrepreneur are offered not by a person but an organization, can speak about a violence-managing agency.)
Second, a violent entrepreneur should not be understood as an economic actor who uses violence in market affairs. To be sure, he might coerce other people to accept his services—like in case of the mafia which, as a private violence-managing agency, provides protection and extorts protection money in exchange[13]—but this is not a necessary part of the profession. What is necessary is that the violent entrepreneur enters into a so-called enforcement partnership with other actors, meaning that he provides any of the above-mentioned services to them.[14] And, as the quote from Pomerantsev implied, some private actors are more than willing to contract with violent entrepreneurs if the state fails to provide the useful services related to violence, such as protection of property rights and contract enforcement. Furthermore, violent entrepreneurs can be hired to attack rivals as well, such as in case of reiderstvo (takeover of companies by the use of force [→ 5.5.3.1]).
Having defined the state and its competitors, the only element that is missing from the picture is the polity that is made up of these phenomena. Given the lack of monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, we may start from the notion of anarchy. Anarchy is generally defined as the absence of government, meaning there is no agency that meets the definition of state (the monopolist of the legitimate use of violence).[15] Yet “anarchy” as such is too broad a term from two respects. First, it is too broad because it covers cases (a) where there is a formal state but it is a failed one and also (b) where there is no formal state at all. Second, it is not specific enough because it does not say anything about the new power centers, that is, whether there are actors who are the chief hirers and controllers of violent entrepreneurs (and if so, who they are). Indeed, in Russia and in some other post-communist countries where similar situations prevailed, these power centers were occupied by so-called oligarchs [→ 3.4.1], wealthy businessmen who got particularly rich and influential after the privatization period [→ 5.5.2].[16] Oligarchs posed the primary demand for the services of violent entrepreneurs, including both protection and the attack of rival oligarchs and businessmen.
Therefore, the polity that Russia-like polities evolved into as a result of the regime change may be conceptualized, not simply as anarchy, but as oligarchic anarchy:
- Oligarchic anarchy is a regime which is characterized by a failed state and an oligopoly on the market for protection, featuring competing oligarchs as the new power centers (main hirers of violent entrepreneurs). While failed, the state still remains the largest political power center of the regime, but it is accompanied by other centers of legitimate use of violence.
It is an important feature of an oligarchic anarchy that none of the oligarchs become dominant, and therefore the polity remains multi-centered in terms of political power. Indeed, this situation resembles patronal democracy, which features a competition of patronal networks of roughly equal size, ensuring that none of them can become dominant [→ 4.4.2]. The main difference between them is, of course, the state. In a patronal democracy, the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is not questioned, and oligarchs may have access to violent services through the state only (and therefore they engage in state capture). In an oligarchic anarchy, violence management is handled in the private sphere by the oligarchs themselves.
[1] Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia.
[2] Hale, Patronal Politics, 153–55. Indeed, the only patronal democracy in the region in Kyrgyzstan [→ 7.4.1].
[3] For further discussion, see Melville, Stukal, and Mironyuk, “Trajectories of Regime Transformation and Types of Stateness in Post-Communist Countries.”
[4] Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs. The phenomenon is also discussed in Varese, The Russian Mafia.
[5] Quoted by Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works, 178.
[6] For an introduction to the literature, see Naudé, Santos-Paulino, and McGillivray, Fragile States.
[7] Grävingholt, Ziaja, and Kreibaum, “State Fragility.”
[8] Call, “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State.’”
[9] Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, 26.
[10] Volkov regards only private protection organizations as violence-managing agencies (see Volkov, 64–96.). However, as he himself argues that the state is to be understood as a de facto private protection agency, we find expanding the definition justified.
[11] Volkov, 27–63.
[12] Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, 27.
[13] Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia.
[14] Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs, 40–63.
[15] “Anarchy.”
[16] Granville, “‘ Dermokratizatsiya’ and” Prikhvatizatsiya”.” Also, violent entrepreneurs whose activity gets a legal form can themselves be regarded as oligarchs.