The question

The canonical answer to "where does state capacity come from" runs through prerequisites: a fiscal base, a professional bureaucracy, rules applied consistently to cases defined in advance. Most of the places I study never had those prerequisites in deployable form, and some had them destroyed. Yet several of them govern. My program is an attempt to describe how, without either apologizing for what that governing costs or pretending that the canonical account was ever available to them.

1. Convergent impossibility

Four literatures each describe a genesis problem: you need resources to build capacity and capacity to raise resources; legitimacy to extract and extraction to earn legitimacy; institutions to constrain leaders and leaders to build institutions; trust to make peace and peace to grow trust. Read together, these are not four correlated risks but one structure, in which the crises constitute each other and no dimension can be addressed first. I call this convergent impossibility. It explains a specific failure pattern: well-designed sequential interventions that fail in the same places, repeatedly, because the problem is simultaneous.

Tested in: After the Catastrophe (2026), chapter 2, with Somalia as the case where the structure was not broken and the eastern Congo as the case where sequential programs keep meeting it.

2. Paradox-breaking mechanisms

Where convergent impossibility is broken, it is broken by institutions that generate capacity through their own operation rather than requiring it in advance. The Rwandan cases share three features: they act on several paradoxes at once, they substitute what is available for what is missing (community knowledge for legal expertise, mandatory labor for a tax base, cultural idiom for bureaucratic audit), and they reinforce themselves, each round of operation producing the capacity that allows the next round to expand.

Tested in: After the Catastrophe, chapter 4, on gacaca, umuganda, imihigo, and ingando as one interlocking system rather than four programs.

3. Negotiation-based capacity

What these mechanisms produce is not rule-based capacity arriving late. It is a different mode of governing, which I call negotiation-based capacity. Its authority is performative rather than procedural: it is earned by results, not by process. Compliance is negotiated rather than commanded; citizens read ambiguous signals and calibrate how much to give. Its information structure is asymmetric and recursive. And it is built sequentially, by disjointed increments, rather than specified in advance. The concept lets me describe as a positive institutional form something the dominant paradigm can only see as a deficit.

Tested in: After the Catastrophe, chapter 4. The comparative claim, that other developmental states exhibit the same mode, is a program for future work, not a finding.

4. Constitutive ambiguity

The single finding that organizes the thesis: in one ethnographic survey, over seventy percent of gacaca participants said people lied in proceedings, while over ninety percent said gacaca would bring peace. Read as contradiction, this is a failed institution. Read as signature, it is how the institution worked. Lies compelled counter-narratives that produced information; silence revealed what communities knew but would not say; performed compliance kept the framework standing inside which real accountability, however partial, could happen. The ambiguity was not a residue to be cleaned up by better design. It was the medium.

Tested in: After the Catastrophe, chapter 4, section by section across the four mechanisms; the thesis's original analytical contribution.

5. The bidirectionality condition

If ambiguity is the medium of governance, what separates it from the medium of predation? Somalia under Barre was not short of ambiguity. The difference is direction. Rwanda's gray zones extracted and delivered: labor for infrastructure, confession for release, performed allegiance for civic standing. Somalia's extracted only. Ambiguity sustains governance when the gray zone delivers to both parties and becomes predation when it delivers to one. This is the framework's falsification standard and its most portable tool: for any institution operating through strategic underspecification, ask who is getting anything out of it.

Tested in: After the Catastrophe, chapter 4, through the Rwanda–Somalia comparison; the gendered version of the question is stated there as open.

6. The substitution trap

Each mechanism succeeded by substituting, and each substitution consumed the space its replacement would need. Community courts occupied the ground where an independent judiciary would have grown. Mandatory labor occupied the ground of voluntary civic association. Personalized, upward accountability occupied the ground of procedural audit. This is not a prediction of collapse. It is the identification of a structural condition: the more completely a paradox-breaking mechanism works, the harder it becomes to leave. I take this to be the thesis's most consequential move, because it turns the sustainability question from a matter of opinion about a regime into a matter of institutional sequence.

Tested in: After the Catastrophe, chapter 5, alongside two further tensions: the generational erosion of emergency legitimacy, and the dependence of institutional maturation on the conditions that also obstruct it.

7. Beyond Rwanda: attributive ambiguity

A framework that only works on its home case is a description, not a theory. The first test away from home is disaster governance. When a flood or a dam failure can be read either as a climatic extreme or as a governance failure, the reading is decided after the fact, and states know this in advance. Anticipated deniability changes what they build: visible response capacity grows, because it is credited; quiet prevention lags, because it is not. I call this attributive ambiguity, and the deformation it produces "deformed specialization." It belongs to the same family as constitutive ambiguity, but the actor is now anticipating an attribution rather than negotiating a gray zone.

Tested in: "Attributive Ambiguity: How Anticipated Deniability Deforms State Disaster Capacity," solo-authored, prepared for the AAG Annual Meeting, New York, February 2027. Cases: Chamoli (2021) and South Lhonak (2023) in the Himalaya; Derna (2023) as a scope-condition probe.

8. Beyond Rwanda: unchecked rules

The second test is a rule that exists on paper and is never verified. Brazil's EIRELI legal form required a minimum capital that no registry checked. A rule-based account predicts it does nothing. Using 69.1 million firm registrations, I ask who nonetheless failed the filter, and how its incidence varied with firm size and with the verification the state never performed. The premise is that an unverified rule still allocates; it allocates through the same underspecification that, in Rwanda, was the medium of governance.

Tested in: "Who Fails the Filter? Size, Verification and the Incidence of an Unchecked Minimum Capital Requirement," solo-authored, under review at the European Journal of Law and Economics; SSRN working paper, 2026.

What comes next

The thesis closed on a record: the gacaca courts left behind the most granular map of local social relations any African state has produced, and that archive reaches its declared completion date in 2026 after a decade of delays and a live custody dispute. Who keeps the record of negotiation is a question the framework can ask directly. If capacity built through negotiation is now being cited to end the negotiation, the substitution trap has a second act, and the archive is where it can be read. This is my current project in Yale's Genocide Studies Program, and the bridge from an institutional to an ethnographic reading of the same material.

Thesis: After the Catastrophe: Rwanda's Transformation, Macalester College, 2026, advised by Ahmed Samatar, David Chioni Moore, and Kathryn Linn Geurts. Last updated August 2026.

Where the capacity to govern comes from