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34
America, these gang leaders thus exist apart from, but
connected to, the national political settlement, serving as a
mechanism of indirect rule.
Our research points to signs of related dynamics emerging in
Nepal – though perhaps only temporarily, given that country’s
constitutional flux. During the civil war, the Maoists taxed
illegal logging in areas of their operations – an illegal enterprise
they still directly engaged in after the civil war in areas around
cantonments that housed their ex-combatants. 63 Economic
necessity – namely, an alleged usurpation of the combatants’
salaries by the Maoist party headquarters 64 – may have driven
the illegal logging, while the broader local community had
few means to oppose the deforestation. Madhesi political
parties also cultivate particularly strong relations with criminal
groups in the troubled and neglected Terai region, w<strong>here</strong>
state presence is often minimal. Approximately half of Nepal’s
26 million people live in the Terai. Between 2005 and 2009,
many Madhesi armed groups proliferated in the region, and
at their peak in 2008 numbered over one hundred. 65 (Some of
the groups, however, only had membership in single digits. 66 )
After the end of Nepal’s civil war, the absence of strong political
party, campaign financing and asset declaration regulation
allowed political actors to exploit these relationships with local
criminal actors for electoral purposes. In order to demonstrate
street power via bandhs, political parties hire criminal groups
to recruit young men to staff the barricades. The squatter
and urban slum communities, in particular, represent prime
targets for such bandh recruitment by criminal groups, but
political parties also bus rural residents to strike areas for such
payoffs. Youth wings of political parties extort businesses for
“contributions” to the political parties, secure public tenders
(such as construction projects) for their network of clients
and party-supported contractors, and create an atmosp<strong>here</strong>
of threat and insecurity to obtain votes and decision-making
outcomes favorable to their interests. 67
Unlike the situation in Latin America, however, in Nepal
political parties, rather than local criminal actors, seem to be
the dominant actor in the political-criminal collaboration. In
both cases, however, political influence is extended to enclave
areas through cooperation with local criminal groups.
T<strong>here</strong> is a key difference between governance and
development within these enclaves themselves and
governance and development within many other modern,
developed states. That difference can be understood in
terms of the absence, within the enclaves, of the kind of
political deals that Charles Tilly and others have identified
as the basis for early modern European state development
– the deals that were cut between organized violence and
productive capital. 68 Criminal groups in enclaves live not
off the taxation of a productive economy based on stateprovided
public goods (such as justice, roads, education,
and healthcare), but often off the proceeds of organized
crime, especially its transnational version. As a result, they
do not always need to tax local populations, and in turn do
not need to construct an open-access system of protection,
or the state institutions and differentiated bureaucracies
that have historically characterized such arrangements. 69
Instead, the rulers of these enclaves can develop
governance arrangements that are less differentiated,
more personalized, more violent, and more arbitrarily-run
than a developed state’s governmental apparatus. 70 As
Vanda Felbab-Brown has shown, they offer just enough
justice, and just enough pay-offs, to maintain the political
support of the populations involved. 71 Though the actual
history of the development of particular modern European
states may not always hew entirely to the Tillyan scheme,
the analytical framework does seem to offer some insights
into understanding the relationship between productive
(legitimate) and criminal capital, on the one hand, and
coercion on the other.
63. Author’s interviews with a high-level Nepal officials in charge of the cantonment oversight
and Maoists integration into the Nepal Army, Kathmandu, May 12, 2012.
64. See, for example, International Crisis Group, Nepal’s Peace Process: The Endgame Nears.
65. For details on their emergence and growth, see Interdisciplinary Analysts, Nepal Madhesh
Foundation, Small Arms Survey, and Safer World, Armed Violence in the Terai, August 2011.
66. For a background on these armed groups, see International Crisis Group, Nepal’s Troubled
Terai Region, Asia Report No. 136, July 9, 2007.
67. Authors’s interviews with businessmen in Kathmandu, Bharatpur, Nepalganj, and Pokhara,
May 2012. See also, Carter <strong>Center</strong>, Clashes between Political Party Youth Wings Have Decreased
but YCL and UML Youth Force Continue to Seek Financial Gain, February 28, 2011, http://www.
cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/peace_publications/democracy/nepal-political-partyyouth-wings-022811-en.pdf.
68. Charles Tilly (1985), “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter Evans (ed.),
Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169-191; Tilly, Charles
(1992), Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1992, Cambridge MA and Oxford UK:
Blackwell.
69. Douglass North, John Wallis and Barry Weingast (2009), Violence and Social Orders: A
Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, New York: Cambridge University
Press.
70. Paul Jackson (2003), “Warlords as Alternative Forms of Governance,” in Small Wars &
Insurgencies, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 131-150; Marten, Kimberly (2006/07), “Warlordism in Comparative
Perspective,” in International Security, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 41-73.
71. Vanda Felbab-Brown (2009), Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs,
Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
NYU
CIC
Responding to the Impact of Organized Crime on Developing Countries