Marco Just Quiles defended his Ph.D. thesis on December 20th, 2017. His dissertation, entitled “The Origins of Fragmented State Capacity. External shocks, sub-national actors and local public services in Bolivia”, explores the determinants of contemporary sub-national state capacity variations in Bolivia. Unlike existing studies, the analysis adopts a multi-scale perspective by decoding the nexus between global interdependencies, sub-national bargaining processes and diverging configurations of public service provision at the local level over a long-standing research period (1900–2012). Using an original mixed-method design, which combines regression, comparative historical and case study analysis, the dissertation shows that local state capacity variations in Bolivia are primarily caused by an externally triggered volatility which originates from the countries’ export-driven economy.