There is no shortage of books on Afghanistan and the wars that have ravaged that country for more than four decades. Thus, some might be hesitant to pick one on a topic—legal titling and property rights to land—that they might consider quite narrow and technical. This would be a mistake. Among the mountains of volumes on Afghanistan that have been published in the past 20 years, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili’s new book truly stands out. It is a must-read for all students of Afghan politics. Innovative and ambitious, Land, the State, and War is not solely about legal titling and property rights: It is also about institutions, political order, informal governance, and more.

Legal titling, “the creation of property rights through a formal judicial process” (p. 4), is often considered by economists and foreign aid donors as one of the key causes of economic prosperty and peaceful coexistence. Why, then, does it constantly fail to deliver on its promise in conflict-affected states? To answer this question, Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili develop an institutionalist theory of property rights that focuses specifically on the political challenges to establishing and implementing legal rights to land. Bringing institutional analysis to the study of Afghanistan is in fact one of the key contributions of this book (p. 6).

The book is intricate but its main argument is relatively straightforward: Meaningful progress in establishing (and implementing) property rights “requires a monopoly on coercion, high state capacity, strong political constraints on rulers, and inclusive political and legal institutions” (p. 65). In turn, attempts at legal titling undertaken by a state that is not sufficiently capable and democratic (such as in Afghanistan) fail to improve property security and can even undermine it. This argument is quite reminiscent of the work on liberal peacebuilding that warned us, almost 20 years ago, of the dangers of rushed economic and political liberalization in conflict-affected societies—see, for instance, Roland Paris’s At War’s End (2004). It should invite policy makers and practitioners to exercise the same caution. State-building efforts, as currently conceived, are no panacea. They can be extremely damaging to the societies they target, especially when aiming to reproduce the outcomes of long-term historical processes.

The first few chapters of the book are devoted to developing and testing the theory. Chapter 2 forms the bedrock of the book in which, drawing on existing economic and political theory, the authors offer their own argument. They then use historical analysis to test their theory. Chapter 3 covers the earlier history of the Afghan state, starting from its creation in 1747 up to the end of the nineteenth century. Most interestingly and counterintuitively, Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili show how the country’s emergent institutions were weakened by its “best-known, and most violent, state-builder” (p. 49), Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901). The so-called Iron Amir, they argue, ended up dismantling existing political constraints while consolidating state capacity, hence increasing property insecurity. Chapter 4 covers the whole twentieth century and, given the infamous performance of the Afghan state during that period, this only confirms the theory.

Here, however, the authors cannot escape issues of case selection and research design, preventing them from conducting a truly systematic comparative analysis to test their theory. Not only is the number of existing cases extremely limited but also Afghan regimes have historically fallen short on most if not all the dimensions identified in the theory (stability, administrative capacity, political constraints, and inclusiveness), making it almost impossible to test necessary and sufficient conditions systematically. It might in fact be more useful to see Afghanistan as a theory-generating case to be compared to other fragile states undergoing reconstruction—though the scope of the theory is never clearly defined. Yet, these are mere quibbles that should not distract the reader from a very convincing argument supported by truly fascinating historical analysis.

The book does more. “Our theory,” state Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili, “is at its core a comparative institutional analysis of formal organizations (such as a state) and informal organizations (such as a tribe, village, or gang)” (p. 5). In line with much of the authors’ previous work, the second part of the book focuses a great deal on self-governance, the success of which it aims to explain (p. 14)—most notably using impressive fieldwork data collected by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili for her Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan (2016). Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili indeed presume “the Hobbesian account of the world, in which there can be no sense of justice and no concept of property without a state [to be] mistaken” (p. 91). In doing so, they clearly locate themselves within an extensive literature on nonstate governance, though, one might regret, they do not fully engage with it.

In Chapter 5, the authors show how customary organizations often fit the conditions developed in the theory better than the state and hence “substitute for the state as a source of property rights” (p. 91). In situations in which the state does not meet the criteria for efficient legal titling, other solutions, such as community-based recording of landownership, might indeed be more likely to foster property security (see Chapter 7 for examples of successful, donor-assisted, community-initiated programs). Chapter 6 zooms in on a related, but slightly different issue, the governance of common-pool resources (water and forests in particular). This chapter, beyond the captivating micro-analysis, might well contain one of the book’s most important theoretical implications: Communities can organize themselves effectively, as long as the state is functional enough to invest in infrastructure and provide security (hence foreseeing the possibility of polycentric governance).

Chapter 6 is also where the authors might meet the most resistance from scholars and observers of Afghan politics. Though they admit that Afghanistan’s forms of informal governance are far from perfect (p. 169), they tend to present a rather rosy vision of them. Not everyone will agree with their overall praise of the quality, inclusivity, and strength of self-governance. The claim that it has (arguably) strengthened in the past 45 years (p. 119), for instance, is clearly subject to contestation. After four decades of war, so is the argument that customary authorities bide their time and dissimulate when local politics are dominated by strongmen and warlords (p. 129). The authors are right to question “the presumption that customary governance is dominated by tribal chiefs or headmen who are by their nature unaccountable to members of the community” (p. 117), especially in comparison to the centralized state (p. 168). Yet, one should also refrain from assuming that these leaders are necessarily, almost by definition, legitimate, and that these can and should be identified by aid donors and foreign militaries in search of “good” leaders.

Where Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili are definitely right is that “customary institutions can be more inclusive than the formal political system” and that they will not go away (p. 169), despite any ongoing or future Taliban state-building project—the book went to press before the Taliban takeover of August 2021. As the authors conclude, “there are no nirvanas” (p. 168). Thus, foreign policy makers and domestic state builders alike might be well advised to conceive of more inclusive, polycentric modes of governance, building on real-world institutions rather than on some hypothetical, ideal ones (p. 169). Land, the State, and War is an important book. In the end, it warns against the hubris of centralizing state-building projects and reminds us that it is for the people of Afghanistan, in their own communities, to decide what is best for them.