to massacre his opponents in Matabeleland, such a model
for extractive political institutions is not applicable in
Zimbabwe. Instead, because of the way he came to power
in the anticolonial struggle, Mugabe had to cloak his rule
with elections, even if for a while he managed actually to
engineer a constitutionally sanctified one-party state.
In contrast, Colombia has had a long history of elections,
which emerged historically as a method for sharing power
between the Liberal and Conservative parties in the wake
of independence from Spain. Not only is the nature of elites
different, but their numbers are. In Uzbekistan, Karimov
could hijack the remnants of the Soviet state, which gave
him a strong apparatus to suppress and murder alternative
elites. In Colombia, the lack of authority of the central state
in parts of the country has naturally led to much more
fragmented elites—in fact, so much so that they sometimes
murder one another. Nevertheless, despite these
variegated elites and political institutions, these institutions
often manage to cement and reproduce the power of the
elite that created them. But sometimes the infighting they
induce leads to the collapse of the state, as in Sierra
Leone.
Just as different histories and structures mean that the
identity of elites and the details of extractive political
institutions differ, so do the details of the extractive
economic institutions that the elites set up. In North Korea,
the tools of extraction were again inherited from the
communist toolkit: the abolition of private property, state-
run farms, and industry.
In Egypt, the situation was quite similar under the
avowedly socialist military regime created by Colonel
Nasser after 1952. Nasser sided with the Soviet Union in
the cold war, expropriating foreign investments, such as the
British-owned Suez Canal, and took into public ownership
much of the economy. However, the situation in Egypt in the
1950s and ’60s was very different from that in North Korea
in the 1940s. It was much easier for the North Koreans to
create a more radically communist-style economy, since
they could expropriate former Japanese assets and build
on the economic model of the Chinese Revolution.
In contrast, the Egyptian Revolution was more a coup by
a group of military officers. When Egypt changed sides in