Projection of State Power: State-making in the Dryland Periphery of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the governments of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda have embarked upon rapid and far-reaching expansion of their presence and power in the long-neglected dryland region that straddles the three countries’ borders. Such efforts to project the power of states across their territories are an essential aspect of state-making but have attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Extension of state power in the drylands raises an important question: why, how, and with what consequences do states project their power? The region’s transformation also presents an empirical puzzle: while the political order has been altered throughout the drylands, its key components, including the capacity of newly constructed state apparatuses and their responsiveness to popular demands, vary considerably not only across the three countries’ sections of the region, but also within them. This puzzle has broader theoretical implications that scholars have not adequately addressed: what explains the heterogeneity of state-making processes? To solve the puzzle and answer the research questions, I develop a causal model that assesses the effects of agentic and structural causal mechanisms present at two levels—central and local—of state-making. I argue that both the variability of state-making and the incidence, dynamics, and impacts of projection of state power reflect the dynamic interplay and relative strength of the model components in specific countries and, crucially, sub-national areas. To test this argument, I make use of a research design that takes the form of a natural experiment made possible by the distribution of the ethnic groups in the drylands, several methodological tools—a survey, conjoint experiments, and elite interviewing—and twelve months of fieldwork in sixty-eight research sites in seven areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. Analysis of the collected data reveals that extension of state power in the drylands and the observed inter- and intra-country variation can only be explained through specification of causal chains comprised of different configurations of all (central- and local-level, agentic and structural) model components. These results provide much-needed empirical evidence on projection of state power and draw attention to the underappreciated importance of the agentic and local-level drivers of state-making.Ph.D