Dr Deval Desai
Sabbatical Fellow, February - June 2024
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Deval is Reader in International Economic Law. He joined Edinburgh Law School in 2020. His work focuses on law and development, administrative law and regulation, theories of the state, and (de)colonial patterns of knowledge and authority. He has taught on these topics at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Harvard Law School, Manchester, Northeastern Law School, SOAS, and the Universidad de los Andes.
Deval previously held research positions at Harvard Law School and the Geneva Graduate Institute. He serves on the editorial board of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, the Emerging Scholars Forum of Global Perspectives, and has served on the editorial board of the Harvard International Law Journal.
Deval is an interdisciplinary scholar. His articles appear in leading journals in law, political science, and development studies. His first monograph, Expert Ignorance (Cambridge University Press; open access), draws on legal and social theory, development studies, international relations, and performance and theatre studies. His work is also informed by a decade of experience working for the World Bank on rule of law and governance in sub-Saharan Africa; as well as advising the UN on rule of law issues.
Project title: The Anti-Fiscal State
Project Description: State institutions are formed by the tax they raise and the revenue they expend. Literatures on the fiscal state have a sophisticated theoretical vocabulary to tie fiscal processes to state institutional capacity and its political drivers, state-citizen relations (especially through tax bargains and accountability), and state-society relations (especially through state welfare provision).
How should we understand the forms of states that fail to tax and under-expend? Those same literatures would see these as “flawed states” : driven by some combination of low fiscal capacity, deficient institutional structures, and a variety of political strategies, these states deviate from an institutional logic of fiscal efficacy. Here, every non-collection or non-distribution of funds is in fact either a failure to collect and distribute, or a collection and distribution in disguise (e.g. suspending welfare distributions until the run-up to an election).
By contrast, this short book takes under-collection and under-spending on its own terms, to foreground their legal and institutional arrangements that may constitute a distinctive form of the state. This approach is animated by a well-established theoretical move that insists on analysing the politics and institutions of developing states on their own terms rather than as deviations from developed-world models. What form and theory of the state, it asks, is embodied in its anti-fiscal practices?