scholarly journals The Indian State’s Capacity to Get Things Done

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Ganguly ◽  
William R. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
State Capacity ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
Strong State ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

This introductory chapter assesses state capacity in India. There is little question, as many boosters of India's rise have argued, that the Indian state has exhibited considerable ability to tackle diverse challenges since its emergence from the collapse of the British Indian Empire. It has, for the most part, successfully fended off external challenges to its territorial integrity; it has worn down a series of secessionist insurgencies and has managed to cope with the many fissiparous tendencies of ethnic, class, and religious cleavages that some analysts thought would tear the country apart in the 1960s. However, state capacity remains paradoxical in India. India does not possess a weak state, but neither does it have a strong state. Its state capacity falls in between the conventional weak-strong continuum. As a consequence, the Indian state manifests both strengths and weakness, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently.

Standing in Dorothy’s Shoes: What Can Language Teachers Learn from Dorothy Heathcote? Part One: Where Dorothy Came From, What She Did, and How It Can Support Language Development

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-12
Author(s):  
Ben Cowburn
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Process Drama ◽  
Drama Education ◽  
Educational Drama ◽  
Language Classrooms ◽  
Dorothy Heathcote ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

From the 1960s onwards, Dorothy Heathcote became a highly influential figure in UK drama education. Her practice, based around unscripted, participatory dramas in which students were often guided by a teacher working ‘in role’, helped to shape the way drama is taught in schools today, particularly within the process drama approach. Influenced by a range of educational theorists and practitioners, Heathcote developed a style of educational drama that she saw as being distinct from ‘theatre’, and more concerned with experiencing drama than performing it. To this end, she developed a number of dramatic techniques, such as ‘Teacher in Role’ and ‘Mantle of the Expert’, to help students inhabit dramatic contexts and learn through the direct imagined experience of a particular place, time or problem to be solved. These techniques have much to offer language teaching, particularly when communication is the main goal. Placing students in dramatic contexts is claimed to enhance motivation and engagement and lead to more truly authentic communication than is often found in language classrooms. Using a framework based on Heathcote’s techniques, and those developed by other process drama educators, language teachers can begin to explore the many benefits drama can offer language learners.

Building States to Build Peace? A Critical Analysis

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Call
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
International Peace ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Strong State ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Post War ◽  
External Actors ◽  
State Functions

Agencies throughout the development, humanitarian, political and defence fields have recently endorsed the centrality of state institutions in post-war peacebuilding. But how can external actors go about peacebuilding in a way that reinforces effective and legitimate states without doing harm? Drawing on an International Peace Institute project, this article calls into question the assumption that peacebuilding can be boiled down to building state institutions. The article argues that the process of building states can actually undermine peace, postulating five tensions between peacebuilding and statebuilding even as it asserts that strong state institutions remain crucial for consolidating peace. Identifying three crucial state functions for peacebuilding, the article emphasises the complex interrelationships among legitimacy, state capacity and security in post-conflict societies.

Angela Davis: political activist, radical intellectual and an inspiration for social work

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Belkin Martinez
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Intellectual ◽  
The Many ◽  
Social Causes

For many people, Angela Davis is, first and foremost, an icon of the 1960s, a near-mythic figure of that turbulent era and the many radical social causes we now associate with those years. She has spent five decades writing about racial capitalism, the political economy, woman and the prison–industrial complex. However, behind the icon and the image is a longer and more complicated story, one that today has important lessons for social workers and other activists alike. This article will trace her personal history, examine her political trajectory, provide an overview of a few of her principal writings and briefly discuss her connection with the theory and practice of social work.

Ascending India–Its State-Capacity Problems and Prospects

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Ganguly ◽  
William R. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
State Capacity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Extraction Capacity ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Separatist Movements ◽  
Poor Infrastructure ◽  
Overall Effectiveness

This concluding chapter focuses on India's state-capacity problems and prospects. Its population may become the world's largest, its economy is becoming one of the world's largest, and its military power will probably move along at least a similar upward trajectory. Yet just about everything concerning India is characterized by developmental handicaps of one sort or another. Too many people are poor, infrastructure is lacking, and demands on the state for action to remedy these problems are multiplying. The Indian state, on the other hand, is characterized by a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. It scores high on its democratic attributes but much less so on its overall effectiveness. It has been and continues to be plagued by peripheral insurgencies and separatist movements. Moreover, its extraction capacity has improved but still has a long way to go, given the tasks the state needs to undertake.

Violence Monopoly

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Ganguly ◽  
William R. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
The State ◽  
System A ◽  
Indian State

This chapter examines violence monopoly. Violence monopoly refers to whether the state is capable of establishing an order in which its claim to be the ultimate and principal employer of coercion goes largely unchallenged. The more often states are challenged, and the more intense the nature of the challengers, the less likely the state is to survive as the central institution of a political system. A poor showing in the violence monopoly category is one of the Indian state's greatest vulnerabilities in terms of state capacity. It will need to be improved upon simply to maintain order. Yet it is doubtful that the Indian state will improve in this area rapidly.

scholarly journals Applied science and manufacturing: NAMI and VTZ

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-15
Author(s):  
YU.G. Grudskiy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Diesel Engines ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Fuel Injection ◽  
Vortex Formation ◽  
Flaw Detection ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Manufacturing Cost ◽  
Central Research ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

Starting from the 1960s, a number of acute problems appeared in the engine building during the transition to diesel engines of a new generation, the engines with direct fuel injection into the chamber in the piston. The short time allotted in the cycle for mixture formation and combustion, especially for high-speed diesel engines, makes it extremely scrupulous to approach this in order to obtain high and stable technical and economic indicators. One of the many problems is the organi-zation of efficient and uniform gas exchange across the samples to reduce the spread of final indica-tors during mass production. The article deals with this very problem, specifically - in the case of chill casting of individual heads at the Vladimir Tractor Plant (VTZ) using composite rods of inlet and outlet channels. The method of static blowing of inlet channels developed at Central research and development automobile and engine institute NAMI with a quantitative assessment of the re-sistance and vortex formation in the cylinder was applied. The gas-dynamic parameters (GP) were checked for the heads that received individual numbers in a statistically significant sample of billets on one test bench several times, sequentially according to the stages of the processing. It is shown schematically how these parameters changed during processing and assembly of the heads. It is im-portant that a high “hereditary” correlation is obtained between the GP of the billets and fully ma-chined and assembled cylinder heads. The manufacturing cost of the latter is incommensurably higher than the castings cost. Therefore, according to the results of the work, in order to reduce the cost of products and increase the level and stability of quality, an important decision was made on the early flaw detection of the GP (after casting) with the subsequent remelting of those blanks that are most likely “genetically, hereditarily” will not provide the declared technical and economic in-dicators in assembled product. Similar approaches can be used in the organization of production and other goods with high added value of technological operations required after procurement to ensure the quality of final products.

The Decline and Rise of Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Stasavage
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Central State ◽  
Weak State ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Strong State ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts

Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. This book draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer—democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, the book makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished—and when and why they declined—can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future. Drawing from examples spanning several millennia, the book first considers why states developed either democratic or autocratic styles of governance and argues that early democracy tended to develop in small places with a weak state and, counterintuitively, simple technologies. When central state institutions (such as a tax bureaucracy) were absent—as in medieval Europe—rulers needed consent from their populace to govern. When central institutions were strong—as in China or the Middle East—consent was less necessary and autocracy more likely. The book then explores the transition from early to modern democracy, which first took shape in England and then the United States, illustrating that modern democracy arose as an effort to combine popular control with a strong state over a large territory. Democracy has been an experiment that has unfolded over time and across the world—and its transformation is ongoing. Amidst rising democratic anxieties, the book widens the historical lens on the growth of political institutions and offers surprising lessons for all who care about governance.

Introduction: Patchwork Leviathans

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Erin Metz McDonnell
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Organizational Goals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Stereotypical Image ◽  
Internal Variation

This introductory chapter goes beyond the stereotypical image of dysfunctional public service to argue that many seemingly weak state “leviathans” are instead patchworked. What this means is that they are cobbled together from scarce available resources. They have a wide range of internal variation in organizational capacities sewn loosely together into the semblance of unity. The chapter thus reveals a striking empirical observation with theoretical implications for how to conceptualize states and state capacity: amid general organizational weakness and neopatrimonial politics, there are a few spectacularly effective state agencies dedicating their full working capacity to the routine satisfaction of organizational goals in the public interest. These are the subcultural niches of the bureaucratic ethos that manage to thrive against impressive odds.

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