The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States

The phenomenon of failed states might be expected to lead to the development of mass–based social movements to address the typically ensuing social problems. This article explores the general failure of reformist insurgencies to develop in failed states, using analyses of Nigeria’s Bakassi Boys and Oodua People’s Congress, and references to other armed groups. The cause of this failure is found in the legacy of patronage politics, especially the strategies of rulers who monopolized economic opportunities as a way of controlling people. As centralized patronage networks fragment, popular movements develop to challenge this control. Local political entrepreneurs, however, continue to dominate local markets, including clandestine ones, and use this social domination to buy off members of mass movements. As their new patrons give them access to weapons and protection against rivals, the organizational position of members who pursue individual economic interests is enhanced, while the people with more overt ideological agendas are marginalized.     

On the Rank-Size Distribution for Human Settlements

An explanation for the rank-size distribution for human settlements based on simple stochastic models of settlement formation and growth is presented. Not only does the analysis of the model explain the rank-size phenomenon in the upper tail, it also predicts a reverse rank-size phenomenon in the lower tail. Furthermore it yields a parametric form (the double Pareto-lognormal distribution) for the complete distribution of settlement sizes. Settlement-size data for four regions (two in Spain and two in the U.S.) are used as examples. For these regions the lower tail rank-size property is seen to hold and the double Pareto-lognormal distribution shown to provide an excellent fit, lending support to the model and to the explanation for the rank-size law.