Despite vast efforts to build the state, profound political order in rural Afghanistan is maintained by self-governing, customary organizations. Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan explores the rules governing these organizations to explain why they can provide public goods. Instead of withering during decades of conflict, customary authority adapted to become more responsive and deliberative. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and observations from dozens of villages across Afghanistan, and statistical analysis of nationally representative surveys, Jennifer Murtazashvili demonstrates that such authority enhances citizen support for democracy, enabling the rule of law by providing citizens with a bulwark of defence against predatory state officials. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it shows that 'traditional' order does not impede the development of the state because even the most independent minded communities see a need for a central government - but question its effectiveness when it attempts to rule them directly and without substantive consultation.

Abstract. Political theories of property rights are less optimistic than self-governance perspectives regarding the ability of non-state organizations to supply private property institutions. Despite offering different answers to the question of where property rights come from, these diverse perspectives share a concern with organizational capacity, constraints, and legitimacy as explanations why organizations are able to supply private property rights. We use these shared concerns as a point of departure to investigate formal and informal private property rights in rural Afghanistan. We find that informal private property rights are more effective than formal private property rights because customary organizations fare better than the state on the dimensions of capacity, constraints, and legitimacy. More generally, these 'political' features of formal and informal organizations explain why self-governance works, as well as provide insight into the challenges confronting efforts in fragile states to establish formal private property institutions. IntroductionOne of the fundamental questions of institutional economics is where private property rights come from. A long tradition of the literature in both the 'old' and 'new' institutional economics views the state as the main source of private property rights. Commons (1924), in one of the early works that came to define the old institutional economics, located the origins of private property rights in legal decisions of judges. Along similar lines, Bromley (2006) suggests that the concept of a private property 'right' only makes sense when individuals can call on a state to enforce it. There is also a sizable new institutional economics literature that conceptualizes of the state as the fundamental source of private property rights (North and Weingast, 1989;Olson, 1993;Riker and Sened, 1991;Riker and Weimer, 1993). These political theories of property rights expect that informal private property rights will be inferior to state-backed private property rights (Hodgson, 2009). 1 *

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