State Building in Putin's Russia

Brian D. Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Previously, he served as Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 and holds a Master's of Science from the London School of Economics and a BA from the University of Iowa. He is a 2011 Fulbright Scholar to Russia and was a Carnegie Scholar from 2002 to 2003. He was also a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689–2000, and his work has appeared in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Europe-Asia Studies, the International Studies Review, Survival, Millennium and the Journal of Cold War Studies.

“A lot of scholars write about the coercive capacity of the state, but very few have taken on the onerous tasks of identifying the dimensions of state capacity and evaluating the quality of the state-building project. In this important study of the power ministries in Russia since the early 1990s, Brian D. Taylor fills in these gaping holes in our understanding of what state capacity actually means—in theory and on the ground. He concludes that, Putin’s boasts to the contrary, Russian state performance is quite mixed, especially regarding the state’s ability to provide order, enforce property rights, establish rule of law, and build a civic-minded professional bureaucracy that inspires public confidence.” —Valerie Bunce, Cornell University

• 1. Bringing the gun back in: coercion and the state; 2. The power ministries and the siloviki; 3. Coercion and capacity: political order and the central state; 4. Coercion and capacity: centralization and federalism; 5. Coercion and quality: power ministry practices and personnel; 6. Coercion and quality: the state and society; 7. Coercion in the North Caucasus; 8. State capacity and quality reconsidered.