Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan. By Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 380p. $120.00 cloth.

the different levels of bureaucracy in one state, but views the higher-level bureaucracy as a benevolent actor. It is apparent that the public choice approach in studies of bureaucracies and state agencies, wherein bureaucrats work for themselves, is not part of the larger argument although the empirical details show such motivations. In line with Veeraraghavan’s tendency to see politics and power at local levels, the book briefly touches upon YSR’s motivations (p. 40) without exploring them too deeply. Learning more about what political struggles were essential to the emergence of bureaucratic autonomy would have enhanced the idea that patching is a political process and is missing in the book. How did Raju, the civil servant, continue to make a political case for autonomy faced with resistance at all levels? How exactly did political incentives align with bureaucratic commitment? We can speculate that YSR’s attempt to ensure democratic legitimacy and ensure his legacy could have been factors, but a more fleshed out analysis of the political struggles at the higher level might have added deeper insight into the politics of “information politics” and patching. The title of the book is sweeping and claims to be about India. Yet, the author notes that his findings are very specific to the state he analyses, Andhra Pradesh. The specific constellation of factors that come together to create a successful process of patching are historically and context dependent. While the author did some field research in Bihar, he chose to focus on only Andhra Pradesh partly because the socioeconomic context is very different in Bihar in ways that affect the findings. We know from a larger body of work that Indian states are very distinct, and to understand “information politics and social change in India” takes either a comparative approach well used in studies of development within India or the need to highlight how the ideas travel to the rest of India beyond Andhra Pradesh. While the fine-grained attention to how patching works at the ground level are real empirical strengths, the methodological imagination of the book is not comparative across states. Similarly, the NREGA is a unique program, embodying the institutional design of centralism combined with monitoring. Do other state programs reveal patching? The author notes the uniqueness of the NREGA program and some illustrative comparisons are presented with other state programs without assessing this comparative claim too deeply. As a cautionary note, books relying on local levels should try not to inflate their specific and local claims to India writ large, especially when there is a strong tradition of comparative studies of India’s regions. The local and specific is surely important, but it does not exhaust the larger process of information and bureaucratic change across India and especially across a variety of states. Despite that specificity, the idea of patching and the fine-grained attention to detail in how the state works in Andhra Pradesh means that the book will be an important contribution to the literature. The notion of bureaucratic patching, and an analysis of the role of information within policy implementation, is a pathbreaking finding that future researchers could attempt to assess in other states. Veeraraghavan’s ethnographic method and attention to struggles and contestations creates a new standard for research at the local level, heralding a rarely used political ethnography approach that yields many fascinating insights. It is a book worth reading.