Ruling at a Distance in Game of Thrones

From Game of Thrones (HBO)

Categories:

Run time: 1:11

Clip Description: Cersei tells her son that the North cannot be held — “not by an outsider. It’s too big and too wild.” A short exchange about the limits of governing territory you cannot see.

Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: The oldest problem in the study of states: rule at a distance. A center that wants to govern a far province must send someone, and whoever it sends has local information the center lacks and interests of their own. That is the principal-agent problem in its territorial form, and every historical solution — hostages at court, rotating appointments, garrisons of outsiders, marriage alliances — is an attempt to manage it. It connects to work on state formation, on the relationship between geography and centralization, and to why empires so often governed through local elites rather than replacing them.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Good at the start of a unit on the modern state, because it makes the problem concrete before the vocabulary arrives. It pairs naturally with the Succession principal-agent clip: the same three ingredients, one in a boardroom and one across a thousand miles.

Discussion Questions

Cersei’s claim is that the North cannot be held by an outsider. Separate the two halves of that: is the problem distance, which is about the cost of moving soldiers and information, or legitimacy, which is about whether the locals will accept the appointee at all? Historical empires reached for different instruments against each, so say which instrument you would expect to work for which problem.
The standard solution is to govern through local elites who already hold authority — and the standard cost is that you have now empowered someone whose interests are not yours and whom you cannot easily remove. Name two real empires or states that made this trade, and say what each did to keep the local elite dependent on the center.
Modern states rule at distances that would have been unthinkable to a medieval king, and the reason usually given is technology: roads, railways, telegraph, bureaucracy, the census. Yet some modern states still fail to govern their own peripheries. What does the technology not solve, and what does that tell you about the relationship between infrastructure and control?

Assignment

Pick one modern state with a periphery it governs poorly — Pakistan’s former tribal areas, Nigeria’s north-east, Mexico’s Tierra Caliente and Myanmar’s borderlands all work. Using the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s georeferenced event dataset, which is free, map where organized violence occurs relative to the capital and to major roads. In two pages, report what the geography shows and assess how much of the pattern distance alone explains. The hard part is that distance and every other disadvantage travel together: peripheries tend to be poorer, more mountainous and more ethnically distinct from the center as well as further away. Say what you would need in order to separate those, and whether your case offers anything close to it.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons, uploaded by Daniel Bragen.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 1: Political Systems, Regimes, and Governments

Topics: 1.7 Federal and Unitary Systems; 1.5 Sources of Power and Authority
Skill: Country Comparison
Big idea: Power and Authority
Course countries: United Kingdom, Nigeria, Russia

Cersei tells her son that the North cannot be held by an outsider because it is too big and too wild. In seventy-one seconds the clip states the problem every large state has to solve, and the arrangements the course teaches — unitary, federal, devolved — are all competing answers to it.

Discussion questions

Define unitary and federal systems. Then say which arrangement the clip is arguing would be insufficient here, and why.
The United Kingdom is a unitary state that has devolved substantial power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Nigeria is a federal state of thirty-six states. Name one problem each arrangement was built to solve.
Devolved power can be taken back by the center; federal power is constitutionally protected. Explain why that difference matters enormously to a region that wants more autonomy.

Short activity

The three-country grid (15 minutes). Rows for the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Russia. Columns for whether the country is unitary or federal on paper, how much power the center actually holds in practice, and one piece of evidence for the second column. The gap between column one and column two is the entire point of the exercise, and Russia is where it opens widest: a federation on paper in which the center appoints, funds and removes at will.