Buddhist Studies beyond the Nation-State

Author(s):  
Richard K. Payne

This essay examines a variety of dysfunctional consequences of employing modern nation-states as the default organizing category for Buddhist studies regardless of the period being studied. Two of these consequences are directly related to one another: conflating contemporary nation-states with religious cultures, and equating religious and ethnic identities. Additionally, the organizing category tends to privilege some particular tradition as representative of or the essence of Buddhism in a specific nation-state, marking that tradition as uniquely authoritative. More broadly, research is constrained within the boundaries of nation-states, and the continuity of Buddhist traditions that cross nation-state boundaries is obscured. At the same time artificial continuities are retrospectively imposed, and the tradition comes to be defined by forms located at the center of political power. The work of four contemporary scholars is discussed as exemplifying the arguments for and value of moving away from nation-state categories. Consideration is given to the formative role of the training of missionaries and other agents of empire in the institutionalization of nation-state categories.

Author(s):  
E. G. Ponomareva

The processes of globalization have determined significant changes in the prerogatives of nation states. In the twenty-first century the state no longer acts as a sole subject having a monopoly of integrating the interests of large social communities and representing them on the world stage. An ever increasing role in the global political process is played by transnational and supranational participants. However, despite the uncertainty and ambiguity of the ways of the development of the modern world, it can be argued that in the foreseeable future it is the states that will maintain the role of the main actors in world politics and bear the responsibility for global security and development. All this naturally makes urgent the issues related to the search for optimal models of nation state development. The article analyzes approaches to understanding patterns, problems and prospects of the development of this institution existing in modern political science. These include the concept of "dimensionality" based on the parameters of scale (the size of the territory) of the states and their functions in the international systems, as well as the "political order". In the latter case the paper analyzes four models: the nation-state, statenation, consociation, quasi-state. The author's position consists in the substantiation of the close dependence of the success of a model of the state on its inner nature, i.e. statehood. On the basis of the elaborated approach the author understands statehood as "the result of historical, economic, political and foreign policy activity of a particular society in order to create a relatively rigid political framework that provides spatial, institutional and functional unity, that is, the condition of the society’s own state, national political system." Thus statehood acts as a qualitative feature of the state.


2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clarke

Social policy has treated welfare states as nation states. Contemporary processes seem to have unsettled the spatial, scalar and social coherence of nation-states. This article examines the challenge of rethinking the relationships of nation, state and welfare. It argues for a transnational conception of both the current remakings of nation, state and welfare, and of their past formations. Such a view casts doubt on the value of the container model of the nation-state, and makes visible the constitutive or nation-constructing role of welfare states.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mojca Doupona Topič ◽  
Jay Coakley

Sociology of sport knowledge on national identity is grounded in research that focuses primarily on long established nation-states with widely known histories. The relationship between sport and national identity in postsocialist/Soviet/colonial nations that have gained independence or sovereignty since 1990 has seldom been studied. This paper examines the role of sports in the formation of national identity in postsocialist Slovenia, a nation-state that gained independence in 1990. Our analysis focuses on the recent context in which the current but fluid relationship between sport and Slovenian national identity exists. Using Slovenia as a case study we identify seven factors that may moderate the effectiveness of sports as sites for establishing and maintaining national identity and making successful global identity claims in the twenty-first century. We conclude that these factors should be taken into account to more fully understand the sport-national identity relationship today, especially in new and developing nations.


2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (118) ◽  
pp. 123-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Messner

Globalization processes are emphatically changing the coordinate system of politics. The „epoch of the nation state“ is drawing to its end. Dirk Messner discusses four core elements involved in the change of the architecture of politics in the „era of globalism“: (1) the rapidly growing differentiation of the foreign relations of nation states as an indicator of the erosion of the classical bounds of domestic and foreign policy; (2) the trend toward the formation of a world society; (3) the growing density of transboundary networks and global problems that lead not only to an increase of international relations based on interdependency (a phenomenon long familiar to us) but to an erosion of the „internal sovereignty“ of nation states, which is turning the rules of international and global politics upside down; (4) the change of the form of political power under the conditions of globalization.


2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Trittin

In this article, the German Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety analyzes the role of the nation state in international environmental policy. With reference to the European Union, he argues that independent national environmental policy no longer exists inside the Union. Brussels now has greater influence on environmental legislation than any nation state in Europe—a development that the minister expressly welcomes. He argues that it has proven highly useful for Union members to speak with one voice at global environmental conferences and to present a united front just like one strong nation state. On the other hand, the communitarization within Europe does not prevent members from becoming front-runners in environmental policy. The minister further calls for changes at the global level to ensure that global environmental institutions and environmental law are given much greater weight. The historic task of nation states today is to introduce global environmental legislation that is more powerful than any nation state or any transnational corporation. The German government therefore strongly favors transforming UNEP into a world environment organization that can stand up to the WTO, the FAO and transnational corporations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (Summer) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Nour Abu-Assab ◽  
Nof Eddin

In light of the recent attention to the incarceration, surveillance, and policing of non-normative people in the Middle East and North Africa, this article does not seek to offer alternatives to systems of justice. Instead, our argument revolves around the need to turn the concept of justice on its head, by demonstrating that justice within the context of the nation-state is in its essence a de facto and de jure mechanism of policing and surveillance. To do so, this article draws on Michael Foucault’s notion of state-phobia from a de-colonial perspective, intersectional feminist theory, and Hisham Sharabi’s conceptualisation of the Arab-state as neo-patriarchal. This article highlights the need to move away from the post-colonial benevolent imaginary of the state, as a result of people’s desire for self-determination, to a more realistic de-colonial conceptualisation of nation-states that emerged post-colonisation, as sites of oppression. This article will also shed light on the role of civil society in reinforcing the unjust justice sought within nation-state frameworks by drawing on the examples of the recent crackdown on non-normative people in Egypt, and the example of non-normative Palestinians living under occupation. The Egyptian and Palestinian cases are, respectively, one of an allegedly sovereign state that overtly restricts gender and sexual freedom, and another of an occupying state that nominally guarantees gender and sexual rights. These examples are used to demonstrate the theoretical underpinnings of this article, through which we seek to problematise and break binaries of justice versus injustice, and the state versus civil society, in an attempt to queer the concept of justice.


2019 ◽  

In our increasingly insecure world, governance is being confronted with new challenges every day. Rising nationalism, terrorist attacks, an increasing number of populist forms of governance, the egoism of governments, digital change, ‘warlordism’ and anarchy: this is an incomplete list of the problems modern governance is having to face. These problems have to be seen against the background of structural changes caused by the process of globalisation. Among others, they not only affect the fundamental relationship between individuals and society, but also that between the constitutional bodies of a state and the role of the nation state itself. Moreover, they influence both the relationships between states and the sharing of tasks between nation states and supra national bodies. This volume is composed of a series of lectures held at Andrássy University between 2015 and 2017, which describe current trends of change and concentrate on their consequences for states, nations and societies. With contributions by Joachim Bitterlich, Erhard Busek, Hartmut Koschyk, S.D. Fürst Hans-Adam II. von und zu Liechtenstein, András Masát, Dirk Metz, Martin Mosebach, Jean-François Paroz, Ulrich Schlie, Horst Seehofer, Michael Stürmer, Thomas Weber


2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Jänicke ◽  
Klaus Jacob

The article discusses the role of the nation state in stimulating lead markets for green innovations. It is often feared that the nation state loses its capacity for action because of economic and political globalization. This article rejects this hypothesis. It argues that empirical research on actual environmental policies reveals that it is most often nation states that pioneer new approaches, push for advances in environmental policy, and serve as regional starting points for new ‘green’ technologies. The innovation and diffusion of environmental technologies and their support through national environmental policies bear the potential of a far-reaching ecological modernization.


2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERICK D. LANGER

AbstractUsing the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.


2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-58
Author(s):  
Gary Wickham

The term ‘post-national formations’ is a product of some of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas. In using this term, Habermas highlights what he regards as a laudatory trend in social and political research. This is the trend away from an intense focus on the role of nation-states – a role he believes to be unconducive to progressive politics – and towards a focus on the role of new configurations – a role he believes to be much more conducive to this type of politics. ‘Post-national formations’, then, is the term Habermas uses to describe new non-state configurations he has identified. He is confident these configurations will eventually break free of the supposed yoke of the nation-state and usher in a new era of progressivism. This article is not concerned with the post-national formations literature per se. Rather, it is concerned with this literature’s failure to take into account the full history of both the nation-state and the notion of sovereignty that helps the nation-state to function. In pursuing this concern, the article draws material from various sources to offer a short historical defence of the sovereign state.


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