Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America
Undermining the State from Within pulls back the curtain on the counterinsurgent state to better understand how conflict dynamics affect state institutions and continue to shape political and economic development in the postwar period. Drawing on unique archival and interview data from war and postwar Central America, this book illuminates how counterinsurgent actors, under the pretext of combatting an insurgent threat, introduce alternative rules within state institutions, which undermine core activities like tax collection, public security provision, and property administration. Moreover, it uncovers how the counterinsurgent elite outmaneuvers governance reforms during democratic transition and peacebuilding to preserve the predatory wartime status quo. In so doing, this book rethinks the relationship between war and state formation, challenges existing scholarly and policy approaches to peacebuilding and post-conflict institutional reform and contributes a new understanding of what civil war leaves behind in an institutional sense.
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Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America
Undermining the State from Within pulls back the curtain on the counterinsurgent state to better understand how conflict dynamics affect state institutions and continue to shape political and economic development in the postwar period. Drawing on unique archival and interview data from war and postwar Central America, this book illuminates how counterinsurgent actors, under the pretext of combatting an insurgent threat, introduce alternative rules within state institutions, which undermine core activities like tax collection, public security provision, and property administration. Moreover, it uncovers how the counterinsurgent elite outmaneuvers governance reforms during democratic transition and peacebuilding to preserve the predatory wartime status quo. In so doing, this book rethinks the relationship between war and state formation, challenges existing scholarly and policy approaches to peacebuilding and post-conflict institutional reform and contributes a new understanding of what civil war leaves behind in an institutional sense.
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Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America

Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America

by Rachel A. Schwartz
Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America

Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America

by Rachel A. Schwartz

Hardcover

$117.00 
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Overview

Undermining the State from Within pulls back the curtain on the counterinsurgent state to better understand how conflict dynamics affect state institutions and continue to shape political and economic development in the postwar period. Drawing on unique archival and interview data from war and postwar Central America, this book illuminates how counterinsurgent actors, under the pretext of combatting an insurgent threat, introduce alternative rules within state institutions, which undermine core activities like tax collection, public security provision, and property administration. Moreover, it uncovers how the counterinsurgent elite outmaneuvers governance reforms during democratic transition and peacebuilding to preserve the predatory wartime status quo. In so doing, this book rethinks the relationship between war and state formation, challenges existing scholarly and policy approaches to peacebuilding and post-conflict institutional reform and contributes a new understanding of what civil war leaves behind in an institutional sense.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781009219938
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication date: 03/02/2023
Pages: 300
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Rachel A. Schwartz is Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

Part I. Foundations: 1. Introduction: undermining the state in civil war; 2. Theorizing wartime institutional change and survival; Part II. Institutional Origins: 3. Civil war in Central America; 4. The wartime institutionalization of customs fraud in Guatemala; 5. Ordering police violence: extrajudicial Killing in wartime Guatemala; 6. Land and counterinsurgency: rewriting the rules of agrarian reform in Nicaragua; Part III. Institutional Persistence: 7. Transition, peace, and postwar power in Central America; 8. Guatemala: the persistence of customs fraud; 9. Guatemala: the persistence of extrajudicial killing; 10. Nicaragua: chronic instability in postwar institutions; 11. Conclusion: the institutional legacies of civil war; Bibliography; Appendix: list of interviews and archival collections.
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