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State Fragmentation: Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Territorial Power of the State*
In existing theories of revolution, the state is narrowly defined as an administrative entity, and state breakdown simply refers to the disintegration of a given political regime. But this narrow definition cannot deal with this question: Why, in a revolutionary situation, do some states become fragmented and others remain unified? I would therefore argue for the broadening of the concept of state breakdown to include the territorial power of the state and to treat the latter as a key analytical dimension in the study of state fragmentation. The dynamics of territorial state power involve the control of critical territories and valuable resources associated with the spatial position of a given state in the interstate system. A strong territorial state is able to maintain its organizational coerciveness and territorial integrity, whereas a weak territorial state is vulnerable to fragmentation. The overall state crisis derives from the accumulated effects of geopolitical strain by which territorial fragmentation unfolds.
In the world as we have known it until now, nothing about states has been more apparent than the instability of their territorial boundaries. Change in the size and shape of individual states has always been associated with the rise and fall of state powers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event that surprised most social scientists, questions about how the state relinquishes control over territory have generated a new round of intellectual searching for further explanations of state breakdown.
When we examine the case of the Soviet Union (1991) and compare it with the case of the Iranian revolution against the Pahlavi regime (1979), which also surprised area specialists, we can find the unfolding of two patterns that distinguish state breakdown. First, the change in Iran represented the transfer of governing power between elite groups, but Iran's territorial sovereignty remained fixed; second, the change in the Soviet Union involved not only a collapse of the incumbent government, but also the disintegration of state territory into multiple sovereign states. In addition, there were other events of the 1990s that raised interesting theoretical questions: Why did Yugoslavia become dismembered, contradicting the popular assumption that a federation, or decentralized system, would inhibit the nation-state's disintegration?1...