UC San Diego

Many African states fail to exercise meaningful control over the entirety of the territory defined by the state's de jure borders. This dissertation seeks to map the current geographic reach of the African state, and assess the impacts of living in either state-consolidated or unconsolidated territory on the lives of African citizens.

The first part of the dissertation presents a novel mapping of governed and ungoverned space in Africa, and asks why state leaders choose to exert control over certain regions of their countries and not others. Using a series of supervised machine learning algorithms, I find that the spatial distribution of state authority is strongly correlated with market access and economic productivity, as well as areas with high concentrations of critical infrastructure, suggesting that rent extraction and strategic concerns are two core motivations in the decision of where to locate government assets.

The second part of the dissertation looks explicitly at the effects of living inside and outside of state-controlled territory. I examine outcomes such as the public's attitudes towards traditional authorities, and the incidence of transmissible diseases like Malaria and HIV, and find marked differences between areas in which the state is present and areas in which the state is effectively absent.