Decentralization is usually seen as an institutional device to halt the demands voiced by territorially concentrated groups who represent a large portion of the population living in the contested region. Conventional wisdom tells us that decentralization works because it legally grants these groups tools to bring policies closer to their preferences, instead of being overpowered by the median legislator in Congress. Decentralization may have collateral effects, as outbidding dynamics in which most regions increase their demands for more transfers and power; but broadly speaking, decentralization is thought to prevent subnational conflicts from spiraling into violent rebellion.
Kristin Bakke’s insightful Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles warns us against taking this conventional wisdom at face value. For instance, decentralization could be counterproductive in settings where subnational challengers inhabit poorer than average regions, as granting economic powers to those regions could aggravate inter-regional inequalities and encourage nationalists to take more militant steps. Bakke deals with these and other puzzles in her book by unpacking decentralization and investigating how its effects are mediated by regional characteristics such as ethnicity and wealth. In this sense, the book offers a more nuanced view of the relationship between institutions and intrastate conflict, as it avoids one-fits-all solutions that may backfire and produce more harm than good. Although nuanced recommendations are not the kind of advice that pundits and politicians usually look for, readers will appreciate the author’s efforts to bring some theoretical order to the issue.
The book’s argument is straightforward: self-determination conflicts will be defused only as long as decentralization policies are in line with nationalists’ characteristics. Bakke distinguishes three dimensions of decentralization: cultural policies, financial policies, and political ties between statewide and regional officeholders. These three dimensions of decentralization do not secure nationalist containment unless they are strategically used in the presence of specific subnational features. To begin with, cultural accommodating policies will only succeed as long as the subnational challenger’s main constituency carries a majority in the contested region. If the aggrieved group represents a minority of the regional population, cultural concessions may be of no help. Actually, cultural concessions may become insufficient when the subnational challenger feels so threatened by the state that nothing short of full decentralization could balance the group’s fears of being exterminated.
Second, fiscal accommodating policies will only succeed as long as they take into account the wealth balance between the region and the state. If the region is richer than average, fiscal decentralization should encourage regional institutions to levy and spend their own taxes; however, if the region is poorer than average, fiscal decentralization should go hand in hand with large transfers from the state to the regions to alleviate inter-regional inequality. In other words, it is of no use to grant taxation powers to poor regions, because they will end up being actually poorer and more aggrieved.
Finally, Bakke’s argument also considers central rulers’ strategic dilemmas when dealing with subnational challengers. On the one hand, they would rather have friendly ties to regional elites and reach peace-preserving devolution deals short of secession. On the other hand, those same deals may jeopardize rulers’ support in regions without challengers, more so if the latter will be economically and/or culturally affected by decentralization. Central decision makers will have more leverage to deliver concessions when the country is made up of ethnic minorities interested in gaining some cultural recognition and when levels of interregional economic inequality are relatively low, so that the losers of decentralization will still gain more from being loyal to the central incumbent than from switching to parties opposed to concessions. On top of that, central rulers will also have incentives to deliver when they command a large number of voters from contested regions or when they hold government links with strong parties in those regions.
The book’s research design combines a statistical analysis of self-determination conflicts at the country level with three in-depth case studies of subnational challengers in Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec. Both enterprises complement each other. The statistical analysis includes a sample of federal states and investigates the conditions under which these countries experience ethnic mobilization or violence. The narrative chapters, in turn, focus more on the challenger’s side. In Chechnya, locals envisioned that the only way to prevent Russia from slaughtering them again was to amass as much regional power as possible, even calling for independence. The Russian government’s own political calculations did not help in redressing Chechens’ fears, and civil war broke out. In Punjab, Sikh nationalists were able to extract early concessions because the Indian National Congress received large electoral support both regional and countrywide. Still, fresh nationalist unrest in the late 1970s was no longer met with concessions and it escalated into militant violence. Finally, in Canada, Liberal Party control of both regional and federal governments helped implement a Québec-friendly devolution package. Although nationalists took power at a later date and were disappointed with the will of the federal governments to deliver more concessions, early decentralization seemed enough to defuse the risk of nationalist terrorism.
Overall, the findings nail down the point that the dynamics of nationalist mobilization and militancy are a function of the interaction between state decision makers and regional leaders. Besides, the book also shows that accommodation will not work unless the type of decentralization implemented considers the demographic and economic characteristics of the challengers. In both ways, this book contributes toward proving that nationalist conflicts are as much about center-periphery contests as about intraregional struggles between different actors speaking on behalf of the regional constituency. That said, there are some aspects of the argument that are not rightly tackled yet.
First, the author says little about the scope conditions of the argument. On the one hand, although the three case studies receive the same analytical treatment, they endured very different episodes of violence—for instance, it took a few victims in Québec and thousands in Punjab, despite the fact that the two regions experienced somewhat similar levels of decentralization. Do differences in state capacity not introduce any systematic variation on the outcomes of mobilization and violence? And on the other hand, the three case studies deal with countries that in their recent incarnations were built as federal. But should we expect to see similar dynamics at work in centralized countries with territorially concentrated minorities? Surely the answer is positive, but then it is not clear why the book is only about already decentralized countries.
Second, the book focuses on containment, but this concept turns elusive. “Containment” signals the success of the state in halting nationalist demands, but this takes on different meanings throughout the work. Sometimes it would seem that containment refers to absence of violence; sometimes it seems that containment relates to lack of self-determination demands, so that nationalists stopped short of calling for secession; and other times it seems to gauge the popular support for nationalist parties and goals. This conceptual caveat is better portrayed in the cross-country empirical analysis, where the author discusses both lack of nationalist mobilization and nationalist violence as correlates of containment, without really teasing out how these two outcomes should fare in the absence or presence of decentralization policies.
Third, and relatedly, the book rightly describes the preferences and interests of state actors, but nationalists, in contrast, are presented as a bloc made up of moderates and radicals, and it is not clear which one should be contained by state policies. If it is moderates, then one could claim that they never crossed the line of violence—with the exception of Chechen nationalists in government; but if it is radicals, then state policies would look less successful, as in all three cases radicals took up weapons against the state. Perhaps a more detailed investigation of the electoral dynamics within each region would have helped solve this caveat by analyzing the potential regional constituencies for each group—moderates and radicals within the nationalist bloc, pro-devolution and against-devolution federalists—and how their interactions prompted citizens to shift loyalties.
Finally, the author recognizes that cultural and fiscal policies of decentralization do not always achieve their goal of containment, even when the right ethnic characteristics are in place. For instance, Chechnya and Punjab alike seem to be rich regions—the first one with oil reserves, the second with commercial farming—but the risk of violence was not abated with fiscal concessions. As for cultural policies, they did not seem to prevent escalation either, as the Québec case attests. Thus, we are left with the hypothesis emphasizing the links between central and regional elites as the most promising one, even if political ties are sometimes underspecified. However, we still need to figure out how these ties interact with decentralization policies and regional characteristics to fully grasp the dynamics of nationalist mobilization and violence.
Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles is an excellent starting point for actualizing the debate about devolution policies as it extracts interesting insights from three in-depth case studies—Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec—plus a large-n statistical analysis. In all, it convincingly argues that interactions between state and regional actors are much to blame for the different outcomes discussed. Future scholars should definitively keep investigating these intrastate dynamics of competition and collaboration among state actors, regional elites, and nationalist challengers.
