Chapter 2. Internal Operations and the Weak Infrastructural Power of the State

2006 ◽  
pp. 67-176
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Internal Operations ◽  
Infrastructural Power

Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965441989792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaffa Truelove
Keyword(s):  
Water Governance ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
State Infrastructural Power ◽  
Indian Cities ◽  
Infrastructural Power

In Indian cities, a variety of state and non-state political actors and institutions play a role in regulating infrastructures in the everyday. Anthropological approaches to the everyday state have demonstrated how residents experience and discursively construct the state in relation to key services and amenities. However, less is known and theorized regarding how city-dwellers and public authorities understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructure that includes a variety of actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. This article partially addresses this lacuna through ethnographic research on (1) residents’ experiences and narrations of the everyday infrastructural governance of water and (2) the practices of key political actors who engage in regulating urban water infrastructures in Delhi’s neighborhoods. This research demonstrates that political actors’ and residents’ narratives and practices related to the infrastructural governance of water sharply contest both singular and dichotomous (state/non-state) readings of state power, instead revealing nuanced and situated understandings of hybrid and negotiated forms of “infrastructural power.” In particular, the practices and narratives of both residents and political authorities bring attention to the ways social and political power is decentered in the everyday and the porosity of the institutions of everyday infrastructural governance. My findings show the complex ways that infrastructures are tied to differing experiences, understandings, and articulations of power in relation to urban environments.

scholarly journals High capacity, low resilience: The ‘developmental’ state and military–bureaucratic authoritarianism in South Korea

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olli Hellmann
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
High Capacity ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
The State ◽  
Sufficient Condition ◽  
International Context ◽  
The Military ◽  
Infrastructural Power

This article argues that high levels of state capacity are not a sufficient condition for consolidating autocratic rule. Rather, whether non-democratic rulers can harness the infrastructural power of the state to implement strategies of regime stabilization depends on three crucial factors: the state’s social embedding; the international context; and the extent of elite cohesion. The paper develops this argument through a case study of the military–bureaucratic regime in South Korea (1961–1987), which – despite a high-capacity ‘developmental’ state at its disposal – failed to maintain high levels of resilience.

scholarly journals And the Heat Goes On: Police Repression and the Modalities of Power

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200272110130
Author(s):  
Howard Liu ◽  
Christopher M. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Local District ◽  
Unique Data ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
Infrastructural Power

Among security institutions, police occupy a unique position. In addition to specializing in the repression of dissent, police monitor society and enforce order. Yet within research studying state repression, how police institutions are used and deployed to control domestic threats remain under-explored, particularly as it relates to the dual functionality just described. In this study, we develop and test an explanation of police repression accounting for the bifurcation of Mann’s two modalities of state power: infrastructural power and despotic power. Infrastructural power allocates police resources to surveil dissidents and preemptively limit dissent’s emergence or escalation. Police deploy despotic power through repressive responses to political threats. Empirically, we employ unique data to investigate police repression and the modalities of power in Guatemala. To analyze how shifting the balance between infrastructural and despotic power affects police repression, we isolate damage occurring from an earthquake that exogenously reshaped the landscape of infrastructural power. Results affirm the role of infrastructural power in regulating the despotic power of the state. Where local infrastructure was most affected by the earthquake, the security apparatus lost the capacity to surveil nascent movements and predict their activity, thereby providing opportunity for dissidents to mobilize and forcing police to (over-)react rather than shutdown resistance preemptively. However, the intensity of state violence recedes as the state recovers from the infrastructural damage and regains its control of local district.

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.

Practical Picture Processing

1974 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 338-339
Author(s):  
T. A. Welton
Keyword(s):  
Radiation Damage ◽  
Coherence Length ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Coherent Radiation ◽  
The State ◽  
Energy Spread ◽  
Electron Micrograph ◽  
Picture Processing ◽  
Molecular Skeleton

Various authors have emphasized the spatial information resident in an electron micrograph taken with adequately coherent radiation. In view of the completion of at least one such instrument, this opportunity is taken to summarize the state of the art of processing such micrographs. We use the usual symbols for the aberration coefficients, and supplement these with £ and 6 for the transverse coherence length and the fractional energy spread respectively. He also assume a weak, biologically interesting sample, with principal interest lying in the molecular skeleton remaining after obvious hydrogen loss and other radiation damage has occurred.

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