Living in Ungoverned Space: Pakistans Frontier Crimes Regulation

Why do substantial swathes of territory remain ungoverned for long periods of time? We explore this question using a unique set of legal institutions in Pakistan that clearly demarcate spaces that are to be left ungoverned. During colonial rule, the British divided Pakistan into two distinct regions. The first was the Raj, where the British built modern political and bureaucratic institutions. In the second region, the British put a small number of political agents in charge of tribal areas and codified pre-colonial institutions in the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). Legal decisions were left to customary law carried out by local tribal councils, or jirgas. Though the area under FCR has steadily decreased, FCR is still in place in the tribal areas of Pakistan today. This makes Pakistan a prime case study in the choice by both colonial and modern governments to leave territory ungoverned in an environment of broadly weak institutions. We use primary legal documents to create a dataset of when and where FCR applied in Pakistan between 1901 and 2012 at the sub-district level. We then exploit the differential impact of the Green Revolution on potential land revenue at the sub-district level empirically model this choice to leave territory ungoverned. We find that sub districts that we predict would see a disproportionate increase in potential land revenue as a result of the Green Revolution are disproportionately more likely to have FCR removed following the advent of the Green Revolution, relative to before. ∗Harvard Kennedy School of Government. email: michael [email protected] †New York University. email: [email protected] ‡University of California, San Diego. email: [email protected] §Princeton University. email: [email protected]