Book excerpt: Marco Just Quiles offers new perspectives on how domestic and external factors interact to shape variations in local state capacity. Using Bolivia as a case, he applies quantitative and qualitative methods to decode the nexus between global interdependencies, subnational bargaining processes, and diverging configurations of public service provision at the local level. Relying in part on newly compiled indicators, the author presents the ways in which shifting distributional coalitions between regional elites, central governments and their connections with international markets in different periods of the last century have produced the contemporary fragmentation of stateness in Bolivia.