Registration Regime Theory (RRT): State Collapse as Registration Collapse Extending Registration Regime Theory through Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen

This paper fully articulates and defends Registration Regime Theory (RRT) as an original framework for understanding state collapse. Contrary to dominant approaches in International Relations and Political Sciencewhich explain collapse through territorial loss, monopoly of violence failure, or service breakdownRRT argues that modern statehood is ontologically grounded in registration continuity. Civil registries, cadastral records, legal archives, and identification systems do not merely document social reality; they constitute it. When registration regimes are destroyed, fragmented, weaponized, or captured, the state collapses ontologically even if armed control, borders, or institutions persist. Engaging critically with Weberian, Foucauldian, Marxist, biopolitical, and “failed state” literatures, the paper demonstrates their shared blind spot: the failure to theorize registration as a primary ontology of power. Through comparative analysis of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, the paper shows how de-registration produces legal nonexistence, ontological uncertainty, irreversible exclusion, and the structural impossibility of post-conflict recovery. RRT does not claim that all state failures originate in registration collapse; rather, it argues that no durable recovery is possible without restoring registration continuity.