State in Developing and Post-Colonial Societies

Two-thirds of the world’s states were created in the space of about three decades, out of empires that had spent a century building administrative machinery designed to control populations rather than represent them.

They inherited borders drawn elsewhere, bureaucracies stronger than any social class beneath them, economies specialised for someone else’s industry, and populations that had been governed but never consulted. Whatever the state is in these societies, it is not the state European political theory was written about — and the central methodological claim of this topic is that borrowing that theory wholesale produces confident conclusions about the wrong object.

Why the categories of the advanced capitalist state cannot be transposed

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• The founding proposition of post-colonial state theory is negative. The categories used to analyse the state in advanced capitalist societies cannot simply be transposed to developing societies, and attempts to do so have been criticised as mechanical, deterministic and reductionist.
• The reasons are structural rather than cultural.
  • The sequence was reversed. In Europe the state emerged alongside — and often behind — the classes that eventually captured it. In the colonies the state arrived first, fully formed and externally imposed, and society was reorganised around it.
  • The state’s relation to the economy is different. The post-colonial state directly commanded a very large share of the economic surplus and deployed it through bureaucratically directed activity, giving it an autonomous economic base with no parallel in the classical bourgeois state.
  • Civil society was deliberately underdeveloped. Colonial rule destroyed or hollowed out indigenous associations and made no provision for replacements, so the post-colonial state found itself without the dense associational life that European theories of state-society relations assume.
  • The tasks are cumulative rather than sequential. European states built nations, then industrialised, then democratised, then built welfare systems — over three centuries. Post-colonial states were expected to do all of it simultaneously, under electoral scrutiny, in a world economy they did not shape.
• This is a warning against transposition, not against comparison. The point is not that developing societies are incomparable, but that the concepts must be tested rather than assumed — which is exactly what the Eurocentrism debate at the end of this article takes up.
• The developing world is not a single regime type, and the map matters for every claim in this article.
  • Developing countries are overwhelmingly post-colonial societies, often grouped as the Global South, and despite real economic progress they continue to face poverty, malnutrition and deprivation alongside weak institutions, ethnic conflict, external dependence and problems of state capacity.
  • Many adopted democracy at independence and could not sustain it, being replaced by authoritarian regimes; a number adopted the communist model instead.
  • Since the 1990s most have shifted toward liberal democracy — with the standing exceptions of China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, the Gulf monarchies and pockets of Africa.
  • Even among those that shifted, democracy in many remains fragile and semi-authoritarian, with India the largest and most durable exception.
  • These states are not insulated from global trends. The decline of the liberal world order and the rise of both right and left have their own third-world versions, in the form of rightist parties and personalised authoritarian leaders.

The liberal view: modernisation and political development

The core belief

• The dominant liberal expectation was that the developing state, possessing an independent source of rationality and the ability to stand outside and above society, could initiate and pursue development for the benefit of the whole society, working through a modernising elite.
• Two things made this interventionist state seem natural at the time.
  • It was continuous with the colonial statist tradition — the same apparatus, redirected to new ends.
  • Because civil society was underdeveloped as a result of colonial intervention, the state necessarily assumed centrality in the new political formation. There was simply nothing else with comparable organisational capacity.
• The political development literature that grew from this — associated with Powell, Verba, Coleman, Pye, Eisenstadt and Binder, and carried forward by Huntington and Weiner — supplied the analytical categories: structural differentiation, cultural secularisation, capacity, equality, participation.
• The critique came quickly and from two directions at once. The model was attacked as Eurocentric — treating the Western trajectory as the universal path — and as an ideological cover concealing neo-colonial mechanisms of exploitation. Neo-Marxists and feminists made the charge independently and for different reasons.

Myrdal’s soft state

• The soft state describes a general societal indiscipline prevalent in South Asia and, by extension, much of the developing world — measured against the kind of modern state that had emerged in Europe.
• The concept is precisely specified, and it is a description of capacity, not of intentions.
  • Deficiencies in legislation, and more particularly in law observance and enforcement.
  • Widespread disobedience by public officials, often in collusion with the very powerful persons and groups whose conduct they are supposed to regulate.
  • Corruption belongs inside the concept, not alongside it.
• The causal account is historical rather than moralising, which is what makes it useful.
  • Colonial powers destroyed many traditional centres of local power and influence and failed to create viable alternatives, leaving authority without local roots.
  • Nationalist resistance made disobedience to authority a virtue — necessarily so, since the authority being resisted was foreign. That attitude persisted after independence, when the authority became the people’s own.
• The policy consequence is severe: soft states are unlikely to be capable of imposing the right development policies and unwilling to act against corruption at any level — because the officials who would have to act are themselves part of the arrangement.

“Within the concept of the soft state belongs also corruption.” — Myrdal

Riggs’s prismatic society

• Riggs studied the interaction between public administration and its external environment — an ecological approach — and built three ideal types on the analogy of light passing through a prism.
  • Fused societies are functionally diffused: one structure performs many functions, as in pre-industrial societies where the family is simultaneously the economic, educational, religious and political unit.
  • Diffracted societies are functionally specific: each function has its own specialised structure, as in developed industrial societies.
  • Prismatic societies sit between the two, exhibiting features of both simultaneously — the light has entered the prism but not yet separated.
• Riggs was careful to say that all societies are generally prismatic and that no society is purely fused or diffracted. The types are analytical tools, not a ladder.

• The bazaar-canteen model deserves elaboration, because it is the most original element and the most often reduced to a slogan.
  • Prices for the same good vary enormously depending on who is buying and what their relationship with the seller or official is — the “canteen” price for insiders against the “bazaar” price for everyone else.
  • Market factors develop without a corresponding growth in capital, so businessmen seek to increase their influence over politics and administration for personal ends rather than to compete on productivity.
  • The consequences are exploitation, poverty and social injustice reproduced through the price mechanism itself.
• The concept’s continuing value is that it names a condition rather than a deficiency. Prismatic features are not failures of modernisation; they are what the coexistence of imported institutions and inherited social structures actually looks like from inside.

Huntington’s political decay

• Huntington broke with the optimism of the modernisation school on a single decisive point: social mobilisation and political institutionalisation do not advance together.
  • Urbanisation, literacy, media exposure and the spread of expectations raise participation faster than institutions can absorb it.
  • The result is political decay — instability, praetorianism, violence — not because societies are traditional, but because they are modernising too fast for their institutions.
• His conclusion inverted the liberal prescription. The primary problem is not liberty but the creation of a legitimate public order, and the priority is therefore institution-building, which may require restraining participation rather than expanding it.
• The argument is genuinely double-edged and both edges matter. It correctly identifies why rapid mobilisation destabilises weak institutions; it also supplies the standard intellectual justification for authoritarian developmentalism — order first, participation later — a bargain that has very often delivered the first without the second.
• Riggs’s “development trap” names a related pathology: states pursuing modernisation acquire the forms of modern administration without the underlying conditions that make those forms work, and become locked into arrangements that reproduce underdevelopment.

The neo-Marxist view: dependency and the peripheral state

• Frank, Wallerstein and Marini were among the first to theorise the political economy of the state in Latin America, with Amin, Shivji, Leys, Samoff and Mamdani subsequently developing the argument through African case studies. Their contribution was to underline the specificity of politics, which liberal political development theory had largely dissolved into sociology.
• The core claim is that capitalism is an international system, characterised by exchange between technically advanced and backward states through a single world market.
  • The technological and military superiority of metropolitan states produced the domination, exploitation and distortion — that is, the underdevelopment — of satellite states and regions.
  • Underdevelopment is not a starting condition but a produced outcome. This is the tradition’s decisive move: the periphery is not behind, it was made peripheral.
• Unequal exchange is the mechanism through which surplus is extracted, and it operates through several channels at once.
  • Repatriation of super-profits by metropolitan firms.
  • Deteriorating terms of trade for primary commodity exporters.
  • Monopoly rents for the use of metropolitan technologies.
  • Trade and traffic policies that deny the periphery control over its own or the global market.
• Decolonisation brought little change to the economy of the post-colonial state; the indirect political dominance of the metropolitan bourgeoisie continued.
• The dependency account of the state itself is distinctive and is what belongs in this topic.
  • The local bourgeoisie is weak but the dependent state is relatively strong — the inverse of the classical capitalist configuration.
  • Dependent states show a distinct tendency toward authoritarian forms.
  • Because the world system historically kept the local bourgeoisie weak, it cannot establish hegemony, and therefore cannot maintain power or guarantee foreign capital’s access to the economy through consent alone.
  • The strength of foreign capital, and metropolitan unwillingness to permit popular anti-imperialist control of democratic states, pushes the local bourgeoisie to back the military in establishing bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes dependent on foreign and local capital.
  • The form of the dependent state is therefore essentially a function of external capital and its need to extract surplus from peripheral societies.
• The standing criticism is serious and should be stated in full. By over-emphasising unequal exchange between core and periphery, dependency theorists erroneously equated social classes with geographical entities, converting a class analysis into a map. The result made useful class analysis of peripheral states extremely unlikely, because everyone inside the periphery became analytically identical.

Alavi’s overdeveloped state

As dependency theory declined through the 1970s, space opened for approaches examining the relationship between class and state within developing societies rather than between them. Alavi’s account of South Asia is the pivotal contribution and remains the starting point for any treatment of the post-colonial state.

• The central contention is that the post-colonial state dominates both politics and civil society because of its overdeveloped superstructure.
  • The ideological and coercive apparatus of the post-colonial state, being overdeveloped, dominates all indigenous social forces.
  • The origin is the historical process of colonial capitalist development: the colonial state, equipped with a powerful military-bureaucratic apparatus and elaborate institutional practices, was built to regulate and control an entire indigenous social formation — a far heavier task than governing a metropolitan society whose classes had produced their own state.
  • Alavi traces a historical symmetry between the colonial and post-colonial state. In the absence of a properly developed capitalist class, bureaucratic-military oligarchy became a common phenomenon in post-colonial states.
• The post-colonial state is therefore not the instrument of a single class. It is relatively autonomous for two reasons.
  • The overdeveloped nature of the state apparatus itself.
  • Because it mediates between and acts on behalf of three dominant proprietary classes with competing interests:
    • The metropolitan bourgeoisie — foreign capital, retaining structural influence after formal independence.
    • The indigenous bourgeoisie — nationally based industrial and commercial capital, typically weak at independence.
    • The landed classes — territorially rooted, politically organised, and often the strongest of the three in the early years.
  • The state’s task is preserving a social order in which the interests of all three are embedded, which no one of them could accomplish alone.
• Two further factors complete the account of the state’s centrality.
  • The autonomous economic role. The post-colonial state directly appropriates a very large part of the economic surplus and deploys it in bureaucratically directed economic activity. The massive scale of public expenditure establishes an independent economic base for the state, unparalleled in the classical bourgeois state.
  • The special ideological function, identified by Alavi and Saul: the state must create territorial unity, legitimacy and a sense of nationhood where none pre-existed. It is the nation-builder, not the nation’s product.
• The consequence for who actually rules is the most quoted part of the theory.
  • Three classes — the metropolitan bourgeoisie, the indigenous bourgeoisie and the landed classes — are economically dominant.
  • But the state personnel, the bureaucratic and petty bourgeoisie, are the ruling or governing element, most active in the political process and holding the reins of government.
  • Economic dominance and political rule come apart — which is the theory’s distinctive claim.

Criticisms and refinements

• Neera Chandhoke’s objection is the most important and applies to dependency theory equally: post-colonial state theory failed to take account of the distinctive colonial experiences of different countries.
  • Countries experienced different kinds of anti-colonial struggle, based on specific experiences of colonialism, their own histories and traditions of protest, and distinctive political ideologies.
  • After independence they embarked on different paths of institution-building, legitimising ideology, political mobilisation and nation-state projects.
  • A single “post-colonial state” therefore over-generalises from a small number of cases.
• The specific objection to Alavi is that his model is drawn from Pakistan’s military-bureaucratic experience and travels poorly to India, where an elected political class has consistently subordinated both bureaucracy and army. The Indian case requires a different account.
• Bardhan supplied it. India’s version is three dominant proprietary classes — industrial capitalists, rich farmers, and the professional and bureaucratic elite — none strong enough to dominate the others.
  • The state’s relative autonomy is real, but its effect is stalemate rather than direction.
  • Surplus is dissipated in subsidies bought by each class rather than invested, because no coalition can be assembled to impose a sacrifice on any of them.
  • This is the standard explanation of why Indian planning consistently underperformed its ambitions — not incapacity, but a distributive deadlock between organised claimants.
• Chatterjee adds the conceptual move with the widest application. He distinguishes:
  • Civil society — the domain of proper citizens with enforceable legal rights, in practice a relatively small minority.
  • Political society — the domain in which the great majority negotiates with the state through claims that are not strictly legal at all: encroached land regularised, unauthorised connections tolerated, benefits secured through the language of need and political brokerage.
  • This is not a failure of citizenship but a distinct mode of politics, and it explains a great deal about urban governance, slum policy and welfare delivery that a rights-based framework simply cannot see.
• Kaviraj supplies the accompanying argument: the Indian state’s modernity is a grafted, elite project encountering a society organised on entirely different principles, producing a persistent gap between the state’s formal categories and how people actually live under them.

The post-colonial state was not captured by a ruling class. It was handed to a bureaucracy that had never had one above it.

Three further comparative features

Three concepts developed outside the South Asian literature complete the comparative picture and are routinely under-used.

• O’Donnell’s brown areas. Regions within a state’s formal territory where its writ is thin and local powers effectively govern.
  • The state’s legal reach is presented on maps as uniform; its actual reach is patchy, and the patches are where most violence occurs.
  • The concept applies to large parts of Latin America and Africa, and in India to the left-wing extremism belt and parts of the North-East.
  • It reframes the question from how much power the state has to where its power actually operates — a far better guide to state capacity than aggregate measures.
• Neo-patrimonialism. A formal-legal apparatus operating on personalised, clientelist lines, so that public office is used as a resource for distributing patronage.
  • Developed in African studies but applicable far more widely, including to Indian state politics.
  • It is not the absence of a modern state but a modern state form running on a pre-modern logic — which is Riggs’s formalism restated in the vocabulary of political sociology.
• Rentier states. Where revenue derives from natural resources or external transfers rather than from taxing citizens, the fiscal link between state and society is broken.
  • The standard finding is weaker accountability: no representation is demanded where no taxation is levied.
  • It explains the durability of Gulf monarchies, and the political trajectory of resource-dependent states from Venezuela to Nigeria — including, in the Bolivian case, the fiscal collapse that follows when the rent declines faster than the commitments it funded.

The developmental state

The developmental state is the standing counter-example to every account above, and its importance is that it shows the post-colonial state’s weakness was not inevitable.

• Johnson identified a distinct type in his study of Japanese industrial policy, and the classification is the heart of the argument.
  • The plan-ideological state — the socialist model, where planning serves an ideological blueprint.
  • The market-rational state — the Anglo-American regulatory model, concerned with the rules of economic competition rather than its outcomes.
  • The plan-rational state — concerned with substantive social and economic goals, using the market as an instrument rather than an end.
• Its institutional features are specific and must be named individually, because “state intervention” alone describes nothing.
  • A small, elite, meritocratic and insulated economic bureaucracy, recruited from the top of the education system and shielded from day-to-day political pressure.
  • A pilot agency with authority over industrial strategy across ministries.
  • State control of finance to direct credit — the single most powerful instrument, because it determines which firms can grow.
  • Performance-based support: firms receiving protection had to meet export targets. Protection was conditional and time-bound, and failure meant withdrawal.
  • Embedded autonomy, in Evans’s formulation: close enough ties to business to know the industry, sufficient independence to discipline it. Either alone fails — autonomy without embeddedness produces ignorant planning, embeddedness without autonomy produces capture.
• Amsden added the point that the East Asian states succeeded by deliberately getting relative prices “wrong” — subsidising, protecting and directing against market signals — which is the exact opposite of the prescription the same countries were later offered.
• The theoretical significance is that it breaks the state-versus-market dichotomy. These states were interventionist and market-conforming at the same time, which neither neoliberal nor dependency theory has an easy place for.
• The limits are equally important and are what make the model hard to replicate.
  • It depended on specific Cold War conditions, including privileged access to the American market and generous tolerance of protection.
  • It required an unusually competent and cohesive bureaucracy with a long recruitment tradition.
  • It required the political ability to discipline capital — to let a favoured firm fail — which most developing states do not have.
  • India is the standard contrast: comparable ambition, weaker discipline, and no export test attached to protection. Indian firms received the protection without the performance condition, which is why import substitution produced neither competitiveness nor exit.
• Whether the model is being revived is a live question.
  • Contemporary industrial policy across the Global South — production-linked incentives, green manufacturing subsidies, semiconductor programmes — has borrowed the instruments.
  • What is far less clear is whether it has borrowed the conditionality and the willingness to withdraw support, without which industrial policy becomes ordinary protection with a modern name.

The changing nature of the state in developing societies

The state’s role in developing societies has passed through recognisable phases, and the sequence is the analytical spine of this part of the topic.

The developmental phase and its end

• In the early post-colonial period the state was expected to lead nation-building and development simultaneously, and it built accordingly: public sector industries, dams, universities, scientific institutions and welfare schemes.
• Import substitution industrialisation was the standard strategy, and its logic was anti-colonial before it was economic.
  • The colonial relationship had involved importing raw materials from the colony and exporting manufactures back to it; the cycle would be broken if the colony used its own raw materials to manufacture its own goods.
  • The premise was compelling politically and costly economically. New manufacturing industries were relatively inefficient and required high protection, and behind those barriers had no incentive to become efficient.
  • It produced initial growth followed by stagnation across much of Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Several South-East Asian states switched early to export promotion, concentrating on goods with high world demand, labour-intensive production and economies of scale.
• The debt crisis ended the phase. Oil shocks recycled petrodollars into developing-country borrowing; a sharp tightening of monetary policy in the United States then raised debt service just as recession cut export earnings. Countries defaulted or entered restructuring programmes with stringent austerity conditions, and the 1980s became Latin America’s lost decade.

Liberalisation and its incompleteness

• From the 1980s and 1990s the state withdrew from direct production in many sectors and became a facilitator of market-led growth.
• The minimal state did not fully arrive, and the reason is structural rather than ideological: poverty, inequality and social conflict required state intervention that markets did not supply and could not be expected to.
• What emerged was a restructured rather than a smaller state — less production, more regulation, more targeting, and a far heavier administrative apparatus for delivering benefits than for owning factories.

The inclusive growth state

• In the twenty-first century the developing state has become an inclusive growth state, combining market-led growth with a substantial architecture of entitlement: food security, health insurance, financial inclusion, education, pensions and income support.
• The scale of the remaining problem is what justifies the state’s continued centrality, and the numbers have recently been revised in an important way.
  • The World Bank raised the international poverty line to $3.00 a day in 2021 purchasing power parity in June 2025, replacing the $2.15 line, with the middle-income lines rising correspondingly.
  • The effect of the revision was arithmetic, not empirical: the global extreme-poverty count for 2022 rose from 713 million to 838 million, and roughly 831 million people are currently counted as living in extreme poverty.
  • On the older line, the standard projection was that around 622 million people would still live in extreme poverty in 2030, and roughly 3.4 billion below $6.85 a day — with the estimate that eradicating extreme poverty would take decades and lifting people above the higher line more than a century.
  • Multidimensional poverty — which measures deprivation in health, education and living standards rather than income — affects around 1.1 billion people, 18.3% of the population of 109 countries. Roughly 80% of the world’s poor live in areas exposed to climate hazards.
• The current outlook is worse than the trend suggests. Global growth is projected at 2.5% in 2026, and the World Bank’s assessment is that virtually half of all developing economies have failed since 2019 to narrow the income gap with the most prosperous economies — a failure of convergence, not merely of growth.
• Debt is the binding constraint on the inclusive growth state, and this is where the argument becomes concrete.
  • Of 67 low-income countries assessed, 9 are in debt distress and 24 at high risk — roughly half in or near distress.
  • Developing-country public debt stands at around $31 trillion, with net interest payments of $921 billion in a single year.
  • Forty-six developing countries spend more on interest than on education or health, and 3.4 billion people live in those countries.
  • This is the mechanism by which external financial structure translates into domestic state incapacity — a dependency-theory claim now supported by conventional multilateral data.
  • The Sevilla financing conference in 2025 framed a $4 trillion annual SDG financing gap and produced an outcome document organised around catalysing investment, addressing debt and reforming the international financial architecture.

The digital and climate state

• The developing state is now also a digital state and a climate state, and these are not add-ons but new core functions.
  • Digital public infrastructure — identity, payments, data exchange — has become a delivery platform and, in India’s case, an export.
  • Data governance, artificial intelligence regulation and cyber-security are now sovereignty questions, not technical ones.
  • Climate adaptation falls disproportionately on states whose historical emissions are smallest and whose exposure is greatest, which is why the finance question and the sovereignty question are the same question.

India as the inclusive growth state

India is the largest single instance of every process described above, and the recent record contains one change that alters the analysis materially.

• The architecture of entitlement is genuinely large.
  • Free foodgrains under the national food security framework cover around 81.35 crore beneficiaries, extended for five years from January 2024, at 75% rural and 50% urban coverage.
  • Public health insurance covers roughly 55 crore individuals, with the 70-and-over expansion in October 2024 extending cover irrespective of income — a shift from targeting to universalism for one age group.
  • Financial inclusion accounts number over 56 crore, with 55.7% held by women and two-thirds in rural and semi-urban areas.
  • The direct benefit transfer architecture, built on biometric identity and universal bank accounts, is the delivery mechanism for all of it.
• The critical case against the architecture is as important as the achievement, and three lines of attack are worth holding.
  • Exclusion error. Biometric authentication fails at a non-trivial rate — in one state’s data roughly one authentication in four failed — and every failure is a household denied an entitlement it is legally owed.
  • Measurement. Claims that around 24.8 crore people escaped multidimensional poverty rest on estimates for years in which no survey was conducted.
    • Critics argue that multidimensional indices measure access to facilities rather than purchasing power, and should complement rather than replace consumption surveys.
  • Savings claims. Widely cited figures for savings from direct transfers derive from a privately produced study rather than an audit, and deserve the caution that distinction implies.
• The most consequential recent change is the replacement of the rural employment guarantee. The employment guarantee act of 2005 has been repealed and replaced by new legislation, and the substitution alters the character of the entitlement.
  • The statutory guarantee was raised from 100 to 125 days per rural household, and the unemployment allowance retained.
  • Funding shifted to 60:40 between Centre and states, where the Centre had previously borne the entire unskilled wage bill.
  • Permissible works were restricted to four domains drawn from village-level plans, in place of the earlier open list.
  • States may suspend the scheme for up to sixty days a year during peak agricultural seasons.
  • The critical reading is that this converts a demand-driven justiciable right into a budget-capped, allocation-driven scheme, with a central power to determine where and when it operates.
  • This is the sharpest available Indian instance of the state hardening delivery while softening the right — and it cuts directly against the assumption that the inclusive growth state moves in only one direction.
• The aggregate-versus-capability distinction is worth stating plainly, because Indian public discussion frequently collapses it.
  • Following a GDP base-year revision and currency depreciation, India’s nominal GDP was assessed at around $4.15 trillion and sixth in the world — behind, rather than ahead of, economies it had recently been reported as overtaking.
  • Per capita, India ranks around 149th nominally and 119th at purchasing power parity.
  • Inequality reduces India’s Human Development Index score by around 30.7%, among the largest such losses in the region.
  • Aggregate size and developmental capability are different variables, and a state’s classification in this topic turns on the second.
• Premature deindustrialisation is the structural problem underneath.
  • Manufacturing’s share of Indian GDP moved from around 16.7% in 2013-14 to roughly 14.1% in 2023-24, against a policy target of 25%.
  • Rodrik’s argument is that developing countries now lose manufacturing share before becoming rich, foreclosing the route every earlier industrialiser took.
  • His recent work therefore turns to upgrading labour-absorbing services as the alternative route.

The minimal state and its limits

• The minimal state is associated with classical liberalism and libertarianism, and means a state confined to a short list of protective functions: life, liberty, property, contract, and internal and external security. It is the night-watchman conception.
• Nozick provides its most rigorous modern defence.
  • The state should not pursue a large welfare agenda because taxation for redistribution violates self-ownership, appropriating the product of hours a person did not choose to work for others — which he argues is on a par with forced labour.
  • On this view the minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified, and anything more extensive violates rights.
• Two supporting arguments come from adjacent directions. Hayek argues that the state cannot possess the dispersed knowledge planning requires. Buchanan argues that political actors maximise their own utility, so government grows to serve those inside it, and only constitutional constraint can stop it.

The case for and against

• The case for the minimal state is that it protects individual freedom, limits bureaucracy, reduces the opportunities for corruption and allows market efficiency. Each of these is a real consideration and each has real evidence behind it, particularly in states where the discretionary apparatus is itself the principal source of rent.
• The decisive objection is that formal liberty is not real liberty. A poor, illiterate or sick person may be legally free and practically helpless. The rights the minimal state protects are worth exactly as much as one’s capacity to exercise them, and in conditions of deep deprivation that capacity is close to zero.
• In developing societies specifically, a purely minimal state increases inequality and exclusion, because it withdraws the only agency capable of correcting for the starting positions colonialism and structural dependence produced.
• The capability critique, associated with Sen and Nussbaum, states the objection most precisely: what matters is not the formal possession of rights but what a person is actually able to do and to be, and converting rights into capabilities requires health, education, nutrition and security that the minimal state does not provide.

The contemporary test case

Argentina since 2023 is the most serious live experiment in minimal-state government anywhere, and it deserves detailed treatment rather than a sentence, because it produces evidence for both sides.

• The instruments were radical and rapid.
  • An emergency decree eliminated or amended over 300 regulations, repealing rental, supply, industrial-promotion and land laws, restricting strike rights, and extending probation.
  • Ministries were cut from eighteen to nine, secretariats from 106 to 54.
  • An omnibus statute of 664 articles delegated legislative authority to the executive and authorised privatisations across energy, water, rail and roads.
• The results are genuinely mixed, and honest use requires stating both halves.
  • The first budget surplus since 2011-12 was achieved, and inflation fell from an annual 211% in 2023 to around 32% at the end of 2025.
  • Poverty rose sharply first and then fell below its starting point — from around 41.7% before the programme, spiking to over 50%, then falling to about 31.6% in the first half of 2025, the lowest since 2018.
  • The economy contracted in 2024 and grew around 4.4% in 2025.
  • Employment costs were real: some 34,000 federal workers removed in the first year, roughly 290,000 net jobs lost over two years, and a rise in informal employment.
  • Disinflation has stalled in the low thirties rather than converging, and public debt stands at around 73% of GDP, with substantial external financial support required to hold the exchange-rate regime together.
  • Politically the programme was endorsed — the governing party nearly tripled its lower-house seats at the 2025 midterms — on a record-low turnout for modern Argentine democracy, and a general strike followed the labour reform in early 2026.
• The honest conclusion is that the case supports neither camp cleanly. Fiscal consolidation and disinflation were achieved and poverty did eventually fall; the transitional costs were concentrated on employment and formality, and the political legitimacy of the programme is contested even where it has been electorally endorsed.

The parameter itself is under question

• Recent global experience has tested the minimal state and found it wanting where it matters most. The pandemic, the climate crisis, mass unemployment and digital monopoly all required active state intervention that no minimal state could have supplied.
• The right conclusion is not that the minimal state is too small, but that the size question is the wrong question. The real issue is what kind of state — arbitrary, minimal, welfare, developmental, regulatory or enabling — and what it is capable of doing well.
• This reframing matters for the whole topic. Judging developing states by how far they approximate a minimal state judges them against a standard that the advanced economies themselves abandoned whenever they were seriously tested.

The question was never how much state a developing society should have. It was always what the state is capable of doing, and to whom it answers when it fails.

Eurocentrism and the study of non-Western states

Comparative politics seeks answers by comparing states. The difficulty is that many of its core concepts are themselves Eurocentric — products of a particular history presented as universal categories.

• The concepts at issue are the load-bearing ones: sovereignty, the nation-state, secularism, citizenship, civil society, political development, and development itself. All emerged largely from European history, and all are routinely applied as though they were neutral.
• State formation is the clearest case of a category that does not travel.
  • In Europe, state formation involved centralisation, war-making and nation-building over centuries, with borders settled by the outcome of conflict and identities consolidated afterward.
  • In most post-colonial societies, borders were drawn by colonial powers, not by organic national development, and the state was handed over rather than won. A theory of state formation built on the first process explains almost nothing about the second.
• Secularism is the sharpest illustration, and the Indian case is the standard example.
  • Western secularism emerged from church-state conflict — a specific historical struggle between an institutionalised church claiming temporal authority and a state seeking to displace it. Its solution was separation and the privatisation of religion.
  • India had no such conflict. There was no unified ecclesiastical authority to separate from, and religion historically furnished part of the basis of political authority rather than competing with it.
  • Indian secularism therefore developed differently: principled distance rather than a wall of separation, with the state regulating religion in the interest of reform and equality — abolishing untouchability, opening temples, legislating on personal law — and treating all religions with equal respect rather than ignoring all of them.
  • Judging the Indian state against a Western notion of secularism therefore measures it against a solution to a problem it never had. The Indian arrangement has real difficulties, but they are not the difficulties the Western concept identifies.
• Class analysis is the second major case.
  • Western class categories cannot fully explain caste, tribe, ethnicity and community politics in India and Africa.
  • These are not distorted versions of class. They are distinct structures of stratification with their own logics of mobilisation.
  • Forcing them into a class framework has consistently produced bad predictions about who allies with whom.

The theoretical formulation

• Chakrabarty’s formula is the most economical statement of the position: European thought is at once indispensable and inadequate.
  • Indispensable because the concepts — rights, sovereignty, citizenship, civil society — are the ones through which anti-colonial politics itself was fought, and they cannot simply be discarded.
  • Inadequate because they cannot capture the historical experience of societies that entered modernity through subjugation rather than through their own transformation.
  • The prescription is to provincialise Europe — to treat the European experience as one experience among many rather than as the universal model against which all others are measured as incomplete.
• This is the internal tension of post-colonial theory, and it is worth naming. The tradition attacks the universalisation of European categories using concepts — sovereignty, rights, civil society — that come from precisely that tradition. That is not a fatal objection, but it does rule out the simplest version of the argument.
• Acharya’s Global IR develops the constructive counterpart for the study of international politics, and its concepts transfer usefully to comparative politics.
  • Pluralistic universalism — supplementing rather than replacing existing theory, grounded in world rather than European history.
  • Norm localisation — non-Western actors do not passively receive international norms; they actively reconstruct them to fit local beliefs and practices.
  • Norm subsidiarity — weaker states create norms of their own to resist arrangements imposed by great powers, of which the Bandung conference is the classic instance.
  • A multiplex world order — a post-hegemonic system with many plots, directors and actors rather than a single centre.
• The wider decolonial literature supplies the underlying claim.
  • Quijano’s coloniality of power links political domination to the coloniality of knowledge — colonialism established not only who rules but what counts as knowing.
  • Mignolo develops this into the geopolitics of knowledge and a case for epistemic disobedience.
  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o locates the first site of decolonisation in language rather than in geopolitics.
  • Mamdani argues for multilingual universities treating non-Western traditions as living scholarship rather than as objects of study.
• The strongest internal critique deserves equal weight.
  • Táíwò argues that decoloniality wrongly conflates coloniality with modernity, and in doing so denies agency to formerly colonised societies — treating everything they have built since independence as derivative rather than their own.
  • It is an argument for taking post-colonial states seriously as authors of their own institutions — a more demanding form of respect than the one it criticises.

The balanced position

• Modern constructs are useful but not sufficient. They should not be rejected wholesale — comparative politics without shared concepts is not comparison at all — but they must not be applied mechanically.
• The working discipline is to treat every imported concept as a hypothesis rather than a template: ask what work it was built to do, whether that work exists in this case, and what it makes invisible.
• Comparative politics must provincialise Europe — treating the European experience as one case among many, valuable precisely because it is particular rather than because it is universal.

India and the modernisation thesis

• The modernisation thesis holds that economic affluence breeds stable democracy. As societies become richer, more urbanised, more educated and more industrialised, they develop the middle class, the associational life and the tolerance that democracy requires. Lipset is the name most closely associated with the argument.
• India is the standing exception, and the scale of the exception is what makes it important.
  • India adopted universal adult franchise in 1950 despite mass poverty, very low literacy, entrenched caste hierarchy, communal division and negligible industrialisation — conditions under which the thesis predicts democratic failure.
  • India did not wait for affluence before democracy. Democracy itself became the method of nation-building, social integration and conflict management, rather than its reward.

Why it worked

• The national movement created democratic habits before independence. Decades of debate, internal elections, organisational contest and mass mobilisation inside the Congress produced a political class already practised in persuasion and accommodation.
• The Constitution supplied legitimacy at the founding moment, and did so through a deliberative process rather than an imposition — which mattered for whether losers accepted outcomes.
• Federalism accommodated diversity. Linguistic reorganisation and asymmetric arrangements converted potential secessionist energies into ordinary state-level politics.
• Elections gave marginalised groups a peaceful route to power, and they used it. The upward mobility of backward castes and Dalits through electoral politics is the single strongest evidence that the system delivered on this.
• Institutions maintained continuity — the Election Commission, the judiciary, Parliament and the civil services provided the machinery that made repeated peaceful transfers possible.
• Caste and community identities entered democratic politics instead of becoming separatist wars. This is the counter-intuitive finding and the most important one: identities that theory predicted would fragment the polity became the organising basis of competitive party politics and thereby of integration.

India did not become a democracy because it grew rich. It used democracy as the instrument for holding together a society that had no other reason to stay together.

The costs, and the current record

• Indian democracy also carries serious problems: money and muscle power in elections, the criminalisation of politics, polarisation, and the weakening of institutional independence.
• The external assessments are unfavourable, and must be reported rather than dismissed.
  • V-Dem continues to classify India as an electoral autocracy, placing it 105th of 179 on its liberal democracy index and listing it among autocratising states, citing freedom of expression, media independence and pressure on civil society and opposition.
  • Freedom House rates India 62 of 100, “Partly Free”, down from the previous year and 14 points below its 2005 level, having downgraded India from Free in 2021.
• The domestic record cuts in more than one direction, which is precisely why the assessment is contested.
  • The 2024 general election returned the governing party below a parliamentary majority for the first time in a decade, producing a genuine coalition government — an outcome delivered by voters, not by institutions.
  • State elections since have produced alternation in several directions, including changes of government in Delhi, West Bengal and Kerala and a hung assembly in Tamil Nadu — outcomes inconsistent with a closed system.
  • The Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme as violating the right to information under Article 19(1)(a), ending an anonymous corporate funding channel through which ₹9,857 crore had passed.
  • Against this, the nationwide revision of electoral rolls removed very large numbers of names — around 10.2% of the electorate in the phase covering nine states and three union territories — and became the central opposition allegation of the period, with the Supreme Court directing judicial oversight in one state.
• The honest conclusion is the one the case has always supported.
  • India’s survival shows that democracy is not only a product of wealth. It can also be a framework for managing diversity and generating political legitimacy where the modernisation thesis predicts failure.
  • Whether it is now eroding is a separate question, and the evidence on it is contested rather than settled.

Conclusion

The state in developing societies has never had the luxury of doing one thing at a time. It was expected to build a nation it inherited rather than made, industrialise an economy specialised for someone else’s, and deliver welfare to populations with no contributory base — all under electoral scrutiny, in a world economy it did not design.

The theories examined here — the soft state, the prismatic society, political decay, dependency, the overdeveloped state, political society — are all attempts to explain why the results have been so uneven, and so different from the European trajectory.

What the recent record adds is a warning against assuming direction. The developing state is not converging on a single model. It builds digital infrastructure at world-leading scale and fails one biometric authentication in four; it extends health insurance to universalism for the elderly and converts an employment guarantee back into a budgeted scheme.

The useful question is no longer whether the state should be large or small — the last five years have answered that everywhere. It is whether the state is capable: whether it can collect what it is owed, deliver what it promises, and be removed by the people it governs when it does neither.