Does the sequence of land reform and political reform matter? Evidence from state-building in Afghanistan

Abstract

Property insecurity is associated with terrorism, insurgency and economic underdevelopment. For this reason, land reform is often implemented alongside political reform in post-conflict settings. In contrast, this article argues that political reform should be sequenced prior to land reform during state-building. Evidence from Afghanistan shows how land redistribution, legal titling, decentralisation of state-owned land and provision of legal services to resolve land disputes are unlikely to alleviate political violence or facilitate economic development without establishing or substantially improving political capacity, political constraints and inclusive political institutions at the local level. These findings suggest the importance of sequence in the process of land reform and political reform. More generally, political reform is a prerequisite for land reform to reduce violence and improve development prospects in post-conflict settings.

Keywords:

• Land reform
• land redistribution
• legal titling
• state-building
• Afghanistan
• violence
• economic development

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge generous support for this research from the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) who provided support for field research and Democracy International/United States Agency for International Development for support developing the survey. The anonymous reviewers provided exceptionally useful and constructive feedback. We are grateful to the editors for providing very useful suggestions that improved the article.

Notes

1. Fund for Peace, ‘Fragile States Index’.

2. We refer to such efforts as ‘state-building’ rather than ‘post-conflict reconstruction’ because many of these efforts aim less at reconstruction of the state than in building new capacities. On the importance of understanding the historical attenuation of fragile states, and how many have never enjoyed much in the way of state capacity, see Bromley and Anderson, Vulnerable People, Vulnerable States; and Herbst, States and Power in Africa. For an explanation why state-building in Afghanistan is more aptly described as establishing new powers of the state than reconstructing a previously capable state, see Suhrke, When More Is Less; and Murtazashvili, ‘Bad Medicine’.

3. Fukuyama, State Building.

4. For a similar concept of violence, see North et al., Violence and Social Orders.

5. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 375.

6. Ibid.

7. Albertus and Kaplan, ‘Land Reform as a Counterinsurgency Policy’; Steele, ‘Electing Displacement’; Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa; and Fearon and Laitin, ‘Sons of the Soil’.

8. De Soto, The Other Path; De Soto, The Mystery of Capital.

9. In economic studies of property rights and violence, individuals choose between predation (violence to establish control of property) and production. When property rights are incomplete, individuals must devote resources to protection of their possessions, which takes away resources from productive investments. Incomplete property rights may also lead to the emergence of specialists in predation, which is also an economically inefficient use of resources. On the theoretical link between property rights, conflict and production, see Hafer, ‘On the Origins of Property Rights’; Grossman and Kim, ‘Swords or Plowshares?’; and Grossman, ‘Production, Appropriation, and Land Reform’.

10. Bromley, ‘Formalising Property Relations’; Deininger and Feder, ‘Land Registration, Governance, and Development’.

11. Terrorism and insurgency are but two of many tactics used by rebel groups. We do not address the choice of tactics because the return to each type of political violence is expected to increase with property insecurity. For a nuanced discussion of the choice of rebel tactics, see De Mesquita, ‘Rebel Tactics’.

12. De Soto, The Other Path, viii.

13. In this paper, ‘political order’ refers to the absence of violence, where violence is defined as in the text.

14. Suhrke, When More Is Less.

15. Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili, ‘Anarchy, Self-Governance, and Legal Titling’.

16. Hodge, ‘Afghan Land Tangle’.

17. Ahmed, ‘The Hardest (and Most Important) Job’; Tolo News, ‘20 People Injured in Balkh Clashes’, 19 April 2015.

18. Alden Wily, ‘Looking for Peace on the Pastures’; Stanfield et al., ‘Rangeland Administration in (post) Conflict Conditions’; Stanfield et al., ‘Community Documentation of Land Tenure’.

19. Sexton, ‘Natural Resources and Conflict’; UNEP, ‘Natural Resource Management and Peacebuilding’.

20. Alden Wily, ‘Land, People, and the State’; Rubin, ‘The Political Economy of War and Peace’; Goodhand, ‘Frontiers and Wars’; Foley, ‘Housing, Land, and Property Restitution’; Deschamps and Roe, ‘Land Conflict in Afghanistan’.

21. Dayee and Siddique, ‘Land Disputes Overwhelm Government Machinery’.

22. Sedra, ‘Security Sector Reform in Afghanistan’; Sedra, ‘The Hollowing-out of the Liberal Peace Project’.

23. Cramer and Goodhand, ‘Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better?’.

24. Suhrke, ‘Statebuilding in Afghanistan’; Suhrke, When More Is Less; Suhrke, ‘Reconstruction as Modernisation’; Murtazashvili, ‘Bad Medicine’; Murtazashvili, Informal Order and the State.

25. Beath et al., ‘The National Solidarity Programme’.

26. Sened, The Political Institution of Private Property; Bromley, Sufficient Reason.

27. For a critique of legal titling in the developing world, see Bromley, ‘Formalising Property Relations’; Toulmin, ‘Securing Land and Property Rights’.

28. North, Institutions, Institutional Change; Ostrom, Governing the Commons.

29. Barzel, Economic Analysis of Property Rights.

30. North et al., Violence and Social Orders.

31. International Federation of Surveyors, ‘The FIG Statement’.

32. Lipton, Land Reform in Developing Countries.

33. Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States; Fukuyama, State Building.

34. Bardhan, ‘Size, Productivity, and Returns to Scale’; Sen, Development as Freedom.

35. Allen and Lueck, ‘The Nature of the Farm’.

36. Foster and Rosenzweig, ‘Agricultural Productivity Growth’.

37. Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’; Berman et al., ‘Do Working Men Rebel?’.

38. Fearon and Laitin, ‘Sons of the Soil’.

39. Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution.

40. Weimer, The Political Economy of Property Rights; Riker and Weimer, ‘The Economic and Political Liberalization’.

41. Haber et al., The Politics of Property Rights; North and Weingast, ‘Constitutions and Commitment’; Weingast, ‘The Political Foundations of Democracy’.

42. Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity; Ostrom et al., ‘Going beyond Panaceas’.

43. McGinnis, Polycentric Governance and Development.

44. Inclusive political institutions are by no means necessary for efficiency-enhancing land redistribution. There are many examples of land redistribution that is efficient in an autocratic regime, such as historical campaigns to redistribute land in Japan and Taiwan. See Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution. Our contention is that land redistribution is more likely to be efficient, or at least be tailored to local conditions, when political institutions are inclusive at the local level.

45. Galiani and Schargrodsky, ‘Property Rights for the Poor’.

46. Field, ‘Property Rights and Investment’; Field, ‘Entitled to Work’.

47. De Soto, The Other Path.

48. Toulmin, ‘Securing Land and Property Rights’; Arruñada, Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange; Arruñada, ‘Registries’.

49. Bromley, Sufficient Reason; Bromley, ‘Volitional Pragmatism’.

50. Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili, ‘The Origins of Property Rights’; Blattman et al., ‘How to Promote Order’.

51. North and Weingast, ‘Constitutions and Commitment’; Weimer, The Political Economy of Property Rights.

52. Batson, ‘Snow Leopards and Cadastres’.

53. Coyne and Boettke, ‘The Problem of Credible Commitment’; Flores and Nooruddin, ‘The Effect of Elections’.

54. The more general implication is that in situations of state weakness, anarchy—the absence of state intervention in economic, political and social life—may be efficient in the sense that the costs of state intervention exceed its costs. On the conditions when anarchy is a better option in state intervention, see especially Leeson, Anarchy Unbound; Leeson, ‘Better Off Stateless’; and Leeson, ‘Efficient Anarchy’.

55. Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili, ‘Anarchy, Self-Governance, and Legal Titling’.

56. Benjaminsen et al., ‘Formalisation of Land Rights’; Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa; Meinzen-Dick and Mwangi, ‘Cutting the Web of Interests’; Sjaastad and Bromley, ‘Indigenous Land Rights’; Tripp, Changing the Rules; Tripp, ‘Women’s Movements’.

57. Ostrom, Governing the Commons; Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity.

58. Ho, Institutions in Transition; Liu et al., ‘Dimensions and Diversity’.

59. Generally, there are few reasons to expect that the process of institutional change will be motivated by the desire to improve economic efficiency. Rather, political interests, ideology and the demands of powerful groups are more likely to explain why institutions change. See North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change; Acemoglu, ‘Why Not a Political Coase Theorem?’; Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict.

60. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State.

61. Ostrom, Governing the Commons.

62. An open access situation refers to the absence of property rights. The tragedy of the commons, which refers to situations when individual users of a resource extract too much of it due to lack of clearly delineated property rights, is the main problem associated with open access situations. On the institutional foundations of the tragedy of the commons, see Cole et al., ‘Digging Deeper into Hardin’s Pasture’. On the conceptual foundations of open access situations, see Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop, ‘Common Property as a Concept’; Schlager and Ostrom, ‘Property-Rights Regimes’.

63. Borras Jr et al., ‘Towards a Better Understanding’; Deininger, ‘Challenges Posed by the New Wave’; Deininger and Byerlee, Rising Global Interest; Deininger and Byerlee, ‘The Rise of Large Farms’; Arezki et al., ‘What Drives the Global?’.

64. On the theoretical link between land grabs and legitimacy, see Hoff and Stiglitz, ‘The Creation of the Rule of Law’. Land grabbing is also an important part of the history of the United States, where squatters attempted to take government land; see De Soto, The Mystery of Capital. However, the development of property rights on the frontier can better be described as a large-scale land grab by small-scale capitalists interested in acquiring land for a minimum price, one that undermined an important revenue source for the federal government. In US economic history, land grabbing thus had the effect of eroding federal power in an environment when the state was very weak. On these dynamics in US economic history, see Murtazashvili, The Political Economy of the American Frontier.

65. Wolford et al., ‘Governing Global Land Deals’.

66. Murtazashvili, The Political Economy of the American Frontier.

67. Sjaastad and Cousins, ‘Formalisation of Land Rights’.

68. Hajj, ‘Institutional Formation in Transitional Settings’; Arjona, ‘Wartime Institutions’; Arjona et al., Rebel Governance.

69. For a review of the tactics of terrorist groups, see Enders and Sandler, The Political Economy of Terrorism.

70. Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors and State Building.

71. Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan, ‘Legal Pluralism and Dynamic Property Rights’.

72. Murtazashvili, The Political Economy of the American Frontier; Leeson and Coyne, ‘Sassywood’.

73. Ostrom, Governing the Commons; Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity; Leeson and Coyne, ‘Sassywood’.

74. Blattman et al., ‘How to Promote Order’.

75. It may be possible for foreign aid to close the governance gap on behalf of the state. See ibid.

76. Households were randomly selected to participate in the survey. Several statistical techniques were used to ensure the survey was representative in terms of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, as well as balanced in terms of gender of the respondents. In addition, around five per cent of the survey responses were back checked to ensure quality control.

77. We do not provide a similar history of legal titling in Afghanistan because the country has hardly any history of legal titling programmes prior to 2001.

78. Khalq is translated literally as ‘people’ or ‘masses’. The Khalq were the more extreme faction of the PDPA. The other, more moderate faction, of the PDPA is the Parcham (literally, ‘flag’ or ‘banner’).

79. Barfield, Afghanistan; Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan.

80. Kabul Times, ‘Decree No. 6 Frees Peasants’, 26 July 1978.

81. Kabul Times, ‘Decree No. 8 Gives a Stunning Blow to Feudalism’, 10 December 1978.

82. Kabul Times, ‘1089 Plots given to Landless’, 25 January 1979; Kabul Times, ‘Land Reforms Going Smoothly’, 18 February 1979.

83. Ansary, Games without Rules, 181.

84. Dupree, ‘Post-Withdrawal Afghanistan’.

85. Zaeff, My Life with the Taliban.

86. Ansary, Games without Rules, 182.

87. Edwards, Before Taliban.

88. Gebremedhin, ‘Land Tenure and Administration’.

89. Batson, ‘Snow Leopards and Cadastres’.

90. Urban, War in Afghanistan.

91. Rubin, ‘Redistribution and the State’; Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan.

92. Edwards, Before Taliban.

93. Anderson, ‘There Are No Khāns Anymore’; Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan.

94. Ansary, Games without Rules, 182.

95. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan.

96. Murtazashvili, Informal Order and the State.

97. The rural subsample of the survey has 6,450 observations.

98. In fact, in only two interviews out of hundreds did informants suggest that there were large landowners who dominated local politics.

99. For examples of work depicting village governance as dominated by large landholders, see Beath et al., ‘Empowering Women’; Abdullayev et al., ‘Water, War and Reconstruction’.

100. Pain and Sturge, ‘Mapping Village Variability’; Kantor and Pain, ‘Social Relationships and Rural Livelihood’.

101. Rubin, ‘The Political Economy of War and Peace’.

102. Fishstein, ‘Despair or Hope’; Goodhand, ‘Frontiers and Wars’.

103. On the ties between the Taliban and poppy cultivation, see Peters, Seeds of Terror.

104. Barfield et al., ‘The Clash of Two Goods’; Barfield, Afghanistan; Coburn and Dempsey, Informal Dispute Resolution.

105. Stanfield et al., ‘Community Documentation of Land Tenure’.

106. Alden Wily, ‘Land, People, and the State’; Gaston and Dang, ‘Addressing Land Conflict in Afghanistan’.

107. Murtazashvili, ‘Bad Medicine’.

108. Field Interview, District Security Commander, Herat Province, August 2007.

109. There are many names for customary representatives in Afghan villages. This survey question asked respondents about their ‘village representative’, while noting in the survey that this official is variously referred to as a malik, arbab, khan, qaryadar or namayenda in different parts of the country. The survey would have underreported the extent of village representatives had it used region-specific language in the survey, such as asking about the village ‘malik’, rather than the more general term of ‘representative’.

110. See, e.g., Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser.

111. Jochem et al., ‘Establishing Local Government’.

112. These councils have different names in different locations, such as jirga or rish-i safidan (lit. white beards). Often, they were just referred to as elders or white beards, although they are not necessarily older men; rather, the notion of an ‘elder’ is one who is respected.

113. The nomenclature for village representatives differed in several regions, and are known variously as malik, arbab, khan, and qaryadar.

114. Field interview, female informant, Anjil District, Herat Province, August 2007.

115. Field interview, male informant, Pashtun Zarghun District, Herat Province, September 2007.

116. Field interview, male informant, Deh Sayedebad District, Bamiyan Province, August 2007.

117. Deschamps and Roe, ‘Land Conflict in Afghanistan’; Barfield et al., ‘The Clash of Two Goods’.

118. USAID, ‘LTERA Project Completion Report’; USAID/LTERA, ‘Restoring Legal Documentation’.

119. MOUD, ‘White Paper on Tenure Security’; Gebremedhin, ‘Legal Issues in Afghanistan’.

120. Gaston and Dang, ‘Addressing Land Conflict in Afghanistan’.

121. De Soto, The Other Path; De Soto, The Mystery of Capital.

122. Alden Wily, ‘Land, People, and the State’; Alden Wily, ‘Looking for Peace on the Pastures’; Stanfield et al., ‘Rangeland Administration in (post) Conflict Conditions’; Stanfield et al., ‘Community Documentation of Land Tenure’.

123. Barfield, The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan; Dupree, Afghanistan.

124. Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats.

125. Barfield, Afghanistan. Hazaras are one of the largest non-Pashtun ethnic groups in the country.

126. Ibid.

127. The term Kuchi has its origins in the Persian verb ‘kuchidan,’ which translates as ‘to move’. For a discussion of nomadic pastoralism in Afghanistan and their importance to economy and society, see Barfield, The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan; and Dupree, Afghanistan. On the role of nomads in state-building more generally, see Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats.

128. Alden Wily, ‘Looking for Peace on the Pastures’; Stanfield et al., ‘Rangeland Administration in (post) Conflict Conditions’.

129. Stanfield et al., ‘Community Documentation of Land Tenure’; Stanfield et al., ‘Rangeland Administration in (post) Conflict Conditions’; Alden Wily, ‘Looking for Peace on the Pastures’.

130. The Afghanistan PEACE project has documented many of the conflicts between farmers and herders: http://afghanpeace.org/. The Afghan government has also established an agency to deal with these issues, called the Independent Department of Kuchi (IDK).

131. Field interview, District Governor, Panjab District, Bamiyan Province, July 2007.

132. Field interview, female informant, Panjab District, Bamiyan Province, August 2007.

133. Field interview, female informant, Panjab District, Bamiyan Province, August 2007.

134. See Afghanistan Independent Land Authority: http://www.arazi.gov.af/.

135. Stanfield et al., ‘Rangeland Administration in (post) Conflict Conditions’; Stanfield et al., ‘Community Documentation of Land Tenure’.

136. USAID, ‘Afghanistan PEACE Project’.

137. Foschini, ‘Land Grabs in Afghanistan’.

138. Alden Wily, ‘Land, People, and the State in Afghanistan’; Deschamps and Roe, ‘Land Conflict in Afghanistan’; Stanfield et al., ‘Community Documentation of Land Tenure’.

139. Giustozzi et al., ‘Shadow Justice’.

140. Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser.

141. Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors and State-building.

142. Coburn and Dempsey, Informal Dispute Resolution; Barfield et al., ‘The Clash of Two Goods; Coburn, Informal Justice and the International Community.

143. Deschamps and Roe, ‘Land Conflict in Afghanistan’.

144. Murtazashvili, ‘Informal Federalism’; Murtazashvili, Informal Order and the State.

145. Murtazashvili and Murtazashvili, ‘The Origins of Property Rights’.

146. Murtazashvili, Informal Order and the State.