Material Reproduction and Stateness in Bosnia and Herzegovina

A state’s capacity to govern, that is to guarantee universal rights to its citizens, to provide public goods, and to implement coherent decisions despite potential competing interests, depends on different factors, of which a basic one is the state’s extraction capacity. Its fundraising determines the scope of the state’s room for manoeuvre, its governance possibilities and thereby, ultimately, its potential to peacefully regulate social conflict. Historically, the monopolisation of extraction was both a necessary condition for establishing the state’s monopoly of violence as well as its effect. Later, state monopolies were gradually depersonalised, subjected to procedural principles and, finally, democratised (Elias, 1976: 279–311). In the Western welfare states of the twentieth century, (re-)distributive functions became core state tasks and a foundation for the potentially pacifying force of bourgeois-capitalist modernity (Siegelberg, 1994: 79–101). In the ideal-type nationally bounded state, state capacity and fiscality are mutually dependent: sufficient finances shape governance capacity, while state capacity, in turn, is essential for the efficient extraction of resources from society (Bönker, 2003).