Authoritarian Forbearance? The Pakistani Military and Non-monopolization

• In Event: Authoritarian Consolidation and State Institutions

Abstract

At a bare minimum, according to Weber and most of modern political science, states are expected to
monopolize violence. From the time the British colonized much of South Asia through most of the
second decade of the 21 st century, the mountainous region that lies along Pakistan’s border with
Afghanistan was functionally autonomous—ruled at arm’s length, first by the British, and later by the
Pakistani state, in a loose bureaucratic authoritarian manner. When Pakistan started down the road to democratization at independence, in 1947, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (“FATA”) did not.

FATA’s exclusion continued the colonial approach of using the region as a strategic buffer zone —
intentionally undeveloped even as much of the subcontinent moved forward — and subjecting its tribal population to exceptional laws. It is easy to see this arrangement as one of state failure: the weak Pakistani state simply could not coercively control the tribal areas. But the Pakistani military is far from weak. It has substantial assets and it is very capable of using force to directly control particular areas or populations. Thus, something else must have been going on. This paper explores the circumstances under which states choose not to monopolize violence. I use a historical process-tracing approach, combined with an original data set of elite-level interviews with many of the key decision-makers in this process to try to understand the state’s longstanding forbearance in FATA, as well as its eventual consultative democratization of the area in 2018. I find that the absence of an external threat, strong social institutions, and the high perceived cost of monopolizing violence can lead a coercively capable state to allow non-state actors to wield violence.

Author

• Susan L Ostermann, University of Notre Dame