Title: “Capacity, Lords and the Limits of Iron Fist Development (joint work with Pablo Beramendi and Berfin Baydar)”
Date and Time: April 29, 2026, 12:30
Venue: A130 Seminar Room, FEASS
Speaker: Aslı Cansunar, University of Washington
Abstract: We examine how central government efforts to extend territorial control shape development over time. Although coercive state expansion often involves investments in infrastructure, such investments do not automatically generate broader developmental gains. Their long-run effects depend on how local communities respond when the state first seeks to consolidate control. In regions marked by high levels of ethnic, linguistic, or cultural heterogeneity, local elites often have strong incentives to defend their autonomy and resist central encroachment. Where their capacity to resist is limited, interactions with the center can evolve into a process of endogenous assimilation, through which repression gradually declines and public goods provision expands. Where local resistance is initially strong, by contrast, the state is more likely to restrict investment and rely primarily on coercive intervention. We identify these dynamics by exploiting the staggered rollout of General Inspectorates across different regions of Turkey between 1928 and 1936, areas that varied substantially in both heterogeneity and the strength of local elites. Using extensive archival and geocoded data, we examine the short-term and long-term effects of inspectorate exposure on the presence of schools, roads, and piped water infrastructure across treated and untreated regions. We show that the developmental consequences of coercive state-building depended fundamentally on local responses, themselves shaped by historically rooted power relations and political context.
Bio: Asli Cansunar is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Nuffield College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She earned a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Economics from Duke University. Her research examines the long-run interaction between politics and the economy, with a focus on inequality and state-building, and her award-winning work appears in leading journals such as Journal of Politics, World Politics, and Socio-Economic Review.