A hotly debated policy prescription for states facing separatist challengers is decentralized governance granting minority groups a degree of self-rule. Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles examines the conditions under which such institutions can help preserve peace. I welcome the opportunity to engage in this “critical dialogue” with Luis De la Calle. Indeed, there are many synergies between our books. Both, for example, highlight the role of political ties between central and regional elites in mitigating or exacerbating self-determination struggles.
Let me address De la Calle’s comments. With respect to scope conditions, the book is not about whether decentralized states are better able than centralized states in maintaining peace within their borders. Rather, as outlined in Chapter 1, the motivating puzzle is the variation in conflict we observe across and within decentralized states, suggesting that we should refrain from making blanket statements about decentralization as either “good” or “bad”. Hence, the focus is on decentralized states, though across and within these states there is variation in policy, fiscal, and political decentralization.
De la Calle observes that in some of the cases discussed, there are differences in violence despite “somehow similar levels of decentralization.” Central to the book’s argument is that similar institutions can have different effects on a state or region’s conflict propensity pending on the economic and ethnic traits of that state or region. The effect of fiscal decentralization, for example, is conditional on wealth. A relatively poor region, such as Chechnya (notably, as Chapter 3 shows, poor despite its potential for oil-generated wealth), would need significant central transfers to help appease self-determination demands. A relatively rich region is likely to prefer fiscal autonomy. That is, there is no expectation that there is any one level of decentralization that will have the same effect across different societies.
The argument distinguishes between conflicts that do and do not turn violent, though I take the point that the trajectory from self-determination demands to mobilization around such demands and violence can be better developed. The book argues that whereas policy and fiscal decentralization, pending on the society’s ethnic and economic make-up, is likely to shape support for self-determination demands, it is not a given that such mobilization turns violent. This is where political decentralization, in the form of the presence (or absence) of political ties between central and regional elites, is key, shaping the bargaining process and likelihood of violence—which resonates with De la Calle’s Nationalist Violence.
As De la Calle rightly indicates, there are also other variables affecting states’ abilities to maintain peace within their borders (key usual suspects, including state capacity, are considered in the statistical analysis in Chapter 2). As the case studies reveal, and which again resonates with Nationalist Violence (and the burgeoning literature on fragmentation), intraregional divisions shape both conflict dynamics and the ability of decentralized institutions to contain self-determination struggles. The book emphasizes how the effect of decentralized institutions are shaped by regions’ economic and ethnic traits, but there is room to further explore how these institutions interact with local politics.
