In Migdal’s quest, in the book “Strong Societies and Weak States”, to understand state-society relations in the Third World, the author posits that the nature of state is largely determined by the nature of its society and that the achievement of social control by state institutions also rests heavily on the degree of conflict, or lack of, between the rules and mobilizing success of the state leaders and other social organizations. Migdal deduces that it is this conflict that shapes the distribution of social control and the degree to which a state is consequently deemed strong or weak.

Governments utilize tools of political influence to mobilize the populace and use material resources, such as judicial courts or the army, to execute legitimate state action. To maintain strong social order, states ought to be successful in ensuring both material incentives and, to an extent, coercive mechanisms to ensure compliance and legitimization, but also manifest the state institutions as a symbolic aspect of the society’s survival strategy. Social disorder and fragmentation emerge, in Migdal’s view, when the divergence between the rules of the state and non-state organizations deepens. Nevertheless, strong societies can manifest themselves in highly state-centralized arrangements or exhibit extreme fragmentation across many state and non-state organizations leading to undermining of state power.

To explain the factors leading to weak state institutions in the presence of strong societies, Migdal points to the role of market forces and colonialism in many Third World countries in creating a “melange of social organizations” and, resultantly, posing structural threats to incumbent governments by introducing contesting rules by which people can live. Many a times, Migdal further posits, in an attempt to thwart rival power centers and prolong their tenure, rulers in such instances also weaken the state structure themselves.