The unmaking of public authority: a new article by Rebecca Tapscott

Theory on state formation and subnational governance generally focuses on ordering—how rulers organize people and space to maximize control and extraction. Indeed, a new literature on “public authority” has recently contributed to the ways in which such order is produced. These theories rest on the assumption that the world is divided into “public” spaces, where the state directly extracts resources and enforces rules and bargains; and “private” spaces, out of reach of the state’s long arms. It is this stable and socially accepted division between “public” and “private” that allows for predictable terms of exchange, based on which citizens can maximize their returns under given constraints (for example, using forum shopping in response to limited institutional penetration or relevance of the state) and make claims on the state (for example, for the provision of services in exchange for taxation).