The State as an Always-Unfinished Performance: Improvisation and Performativity in the Face of Crisis

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-342
Author(s):  
Charles Tripp
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
The Face ◽  
State Analysis

The apparent fixity of the state has been produced by state-building projects, but also by the logic of state analysis that needs an object for its study. Encouraging critical reflection on the essentialism often associated with these processes, Pierre Bourdieu argued that these two aspects of “state formation” are contingently and epistemologically intertwined: “to endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) the thought of the state.” Others, including Ellen Lust in her essay, have focused on state-making practices, and their symbolic and material effects that produce and reproduce the state as dominant idea and as ultimate institutional frame in a particular time and place. Taking this further, Kevin Dunn frames “‘the state’ as a discursively produced structural/structuring effect that relies on constant acts of performativity to call it into being.” It is this performative aspect of state making in all its variety that will be the focus here, echoing themes in the pieces by Lisa Anderson and Rabab El-Mahdi.

State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America. By Aaron Schneider. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 260p. $90.00.

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1144-1146
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Easter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Central America ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Charles Tilly ◽  
Tax Regimes ◽  
The Status

After a long period waiting in the wings, the Fisc (the state treasury, or the larger system of public finance) has returned to center stage in comparative politics. During this time, fiscal sociologist Joseph Schumpeter was more likely to be cited for his “creative destruction” thesis, than for his “crisis of the tax state” analysis. While the “return to the state” dates back to the late 1970s, it still took another decade before taxation became a monograph headliner, with influential works by Margaret Levi (Of Rule and Revenue, 1988), Charles Tilly (Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992, 1992) and Sven Steinmo (Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State, 1996). Since then, tax policy and extractive capacity have increasingly come to be recognized by comparativists as central to state-building projects, thus confirming Edmund Burke's old adage that “the revenue of the state is the state.” As part of this fiscal revival in comparative politics, Aaron Schneider has rightfully earned the status as leading expert on Central America with his new book, State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America.

The Frontier Effect

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teo Ballvé
Keyword(s):  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Local Politicians ◽  
Grassroots Support ◽  
Violent Conflicts ◽  
Political Disorder

This book challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although the book takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, it demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder. Through this exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and drug-related violence, the book argues that Urabá, rather than existing in statelessness, has actually been an intense and persistent site of state-building projects. Indeed, these projects have thrust together an unlikely gathering of guerilla groups, drug-trafficking paramilitaries, military strategists, technocratic planners, local politicians, and development experts each seeking to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of “the state” in a space in which it supposedly does not exist. By untangling this odd mix, the book reveals how Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient, if not at all benevolent, regimes of rule.

Building for the State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Scheidel
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Times

In this chapter, Scheidel carries out a wide-ranging comparative analysis to explore premodern strategies for achieving state-building projects. He identifies two main options: rulers can either compel their subjects to perform the necessary work under the supervision of the authorities, or they can compel them to hand over resources that can be used to compensate workers who are hired or otherwise employed by the state. Scheidel surveys relevant examples from around the world and, on the basis of that survey, argues that Greek and Roman state strategies of labor procurement were highly exceptional. Once we enter the world of the Iron Age polis, we lack evidence of regularized civilian corvée among citizen populations. In Rome, civilian corvée for construction was likewise unknown, at least in historical times. Contracting in a free labor market was the default arrangement.

Self-Renunciation and State Formation

2020 ◽  
pp. 182-224
Author(s):  
Nathan S. French
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
State Formation ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Building Project

While the legal defenses of martyrdom-seeking operations of al-Qaʿida jurists and their sympathizers emphasize individual acts of self-renunciation, the state-building project of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) instrumentalized martyrdom-seeking operations as fundamental to its political objectives. Alongside the arguments of Abu Bakr al-Naji and Abu ʿAbdullah al-Muhajir, the authors and jurists of ISIS—foremost among them Turki al-Binʿali, a former student of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and grand mufti of ISIS—maintained Jihadi-Salafi narratives of theodicy and self-renunciation but identified specific gender roles for men and women in the state-building project. Women were to practice self-renunciation away from the battlefield and within the household, where they were to prepare the next generation of fighters. Men, on the other hand, were expected to go forth and fight in God’s cause, seeking martyrdom if necessary.

scholarly journals The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Africa's Water Tower, Environmental Justice & Infrastructural Power

Daedalus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (4) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Harry Verhoeven
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
The State ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Water Wars ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Face ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Party State ◽  
Infrastructural Power

Abstract Global environmental imaginaries such as “the climate crisis” and “water wars” dominate the discussion on African states and their predicament in the face of global warming and unmet demands for sustainable livelihoods. I argue that the intersecting challenges of water, energy, and food insecurity are providing impetus for the articulation of ambitious state-building projects, in the Nile Basin as elsewhere, that rework regional political geographies and expand “infrastructural power”–the ways in which the state can penetrate society, control its territory, and implement consequential policies. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam should be understood as intending to alter how the state operates, domestically and internationally; how it is seen by its citizens; and how they relate to each other and to their regional neighbors. To legitimize such material and ideational transformations and reposition itself in international politics, the Ethiopian party-state has embedded the dam in a discourse of “environmental justice”: a rectification of historical and geographical ills to which Ethiopia and its impoverished masses were subjected. However, critics have adopted their own environmental justice narratives to denounce the failure of Ethiopia's developmental model and its benefiting of specific ethnolinguistic constituencies at the expense of the broader population.

scholarly journals Understanding the role of the Catholic Church in the processes of state formation in the religious traditionalism of V. Lipinsky

2013 ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Yuriy Kovtun
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Theoretical Foundation ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Ukrainian Society ◽  
The Catholic Church

The processes of reform and crisis phenomena in the Ukrainian society at the end of the XX - the beginning of the XXI century suggest that a stable ideological and theoretical foundation is lacking for the stable functioning of the modern Ukrainian state and the formation of civil society. On the basis of this, the state-building concepts of the prominent Ukrainian thinkers of the 20th century become very important. The personal place among them is the creative heritage of Vyacheslav Lypynsky, who, despite the dominant socialist approaches to the transformation of Ukrainian society at that time, advocated an alternative conservative-monastic idea of ​​state-building in Ukraine.

The State in the Pulpit: State Incorporation of Religious Institutions in the Middle East

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birol Baskan
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Political Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Capacity ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Development Literature ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractPolitical development literature held that the process of secularization is conflict-ridden between the state and religious institutions. Later state building literature left state-religion relations outside its theoretical scope and left a puzzle in our understanding of state building. How did state-religion relations really change in the course of modern state formation? This article argues that the relationship between state builders and religious institutions was not necessarily conflictual. Rather, there were potential areas of cooperation between the two. However, whether any cooperation was realized was historically contingent. Depending on the type of relationship established, state-religion relations took different institutional shapes. This article makes two observations. First, if the religious institutions have a fairly hierarchical internal organization, then the state and religious institutions part their ways. This is the picture classical political development literature paints. Second, in cases where the state faces a disunited body of religious institutions, the state incorporates religious institutions into its apparatus, its extent depending on the institutional capacity of the state. As the institutional capacity of the state increased, its control over religious institutions also increased. The article then illustrates these observations through major cases from the Middle East.

scholarly journals Christian tradition of state formation and individual constants of the interpretation of Christ's doctrine

2015 ◽  
pp. 109-116
Author(s):  
Maxim Isaenko
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Power Law ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
State Power ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
State Creation

In the proposed article by Maxim Isaenko "Ukrainian Christian tradition of state creation ... "on the question of application A comparative methodological approach is presented in the analysis conceptual dispositions available in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian types of state-building and organization of power institutions. Studying socio-legal models that are characteristic of three Slavic peoples, vectors of kinship and distance are outlined understanding of the phenomena of the state, power, law.

Yu.F. Samarin’s Model of the National State: Between Archaic and Modern

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 149-155
Author(s):  
Alexey B. Panchenko
Keyword(s):  
Rural Community ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
The State ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
National State ◽  
Basic Model ◽  
The Face ◽  
Identical Position ◽  
Ethnocultural Community ◽  
Communicative Space

Yu. F. Samarin’s works are traditionally viewed through the prism of his affiliation with Slavophilism. His view of the state is opposed to the idea of the complex empire based on unequal interaction of the central power with the elite of national districts. At the same time it was important for Samarin to see the nation not as an ethnocultural community, but as classless community of equal citizens, who were in identical position in the face of the emperor. Samarin’s attitude to religion and nationality had pragmatic character and were understood as means for the creation of the uniform communicative space inside the state. This position for the most part conformed with the framework of the national state basic model, however there still existed one fundamental difference. Samarin considered not an individual, but the rural community that owned the land, to be the basic unit of the national state. As the result the model of national state was viewed as the synthesis of modernistic (classlessness, pragmatism, equality) and archaic (communality) features.

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