Beyond Hills and Plains: Rethinking Ethnic Relations in Vietnam and Thailand

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 117-157
Author(s):  
Stan B-H Tan ◽  
Andrew Walker
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Alternative Models ◽  
Ecological Separation ◽  
State Form

Relations between highlanders, migrant-settlers, and the state are often described in terms of conflict. This is informed by two assumptions: (1) the highlands and their inhabitants are characterized by cultural and ecological separation from the lowlands and (2) encounters in the highlands are characterized by a unidirectional homogenizing process. In this conversation, we propose alternative models of transformation in the Vietnamese and Thai uplands. We view the uplands as a "middle ground" of negotiation and compromise, and we describe state formation in terms of localized genesis in which the state form is reshaped as it asserts its claims on the frontier.

Afars of Ethiopia in the system of ethnic federalism

2018 ◽  
pp. 126-146
Author(s):  
Roza Ismagilova
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
State Structure ◽  
Ethnic Federalism

The article pioneers the analyses of the results of ethnic federalism introduced in Ethiopia in 1991 – and its influence on Afar. Ethnicity was proclaimed the fundamental principle of the state structure. The idea of ethnicity has become the basis of official ideology. The ethnic groups and ethnic identity have acquired fundamentally importance on the political and social levels . The country has been divided into nine ethnically-based regions. The article exposes the complex ethno-political and economic situation in the Afar State, roots and causes of inter- and intra-ethnic relations and conflicts with Amhara, Oromo, Tigray and Somali-Issa, competition of ethnic elites for power and recourses. Alive is the idea of “The Greater Afar”which would unite all Afar of the Horn of Africa. The protests in Oromia and Amhara Regions in 2015–2017 influenced the Afar state as welll. The situation in Ethiopia nowadays is extremely tense. Ethiopia is plunging into serious political crisis. Some observers call it “the beginning of Ethiopian spring”, the others – “Color revolution”

The Self-Undermining State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Central Authority ◽  
Interstate War ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Willingness To Sacrifice ◽  
The Cost

This chapter provides an informal rationalist model of state formation as an exchange between a central authority and a population. In the model, the central authority protects the population against external threats and the population disarms and pays taxes. The model specifies the conditions under which the exchange is self-enforcing, meaning that the parties prefer the exchange to alternative courses of action. These conditions—costly but winnable interstate war—are historically rare, and the cost of such wars can rise beyond the population’s willingness to sacrifice. At this point, the population prefers to avoid war rather than fight it and may prefer an alternative institution to the state if that institution can prevent war and reduce the level of extraction. Thus the modern centralized state is self-undermining rather than self-enforcing. A final section addresses alternative explanations for state formation.

scholarly journals The origins of the state: technology, cooperation and institutions

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Giacomo Benati ◽  
Carmine Guerriero
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Risk Sharing ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
Public Spending ◽  
Stable State ◽  
The State ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Production Conditions ◽  
Alternative Theories

Abstract We develop a theory of state formation shedding light on the rise of the first stable state institutions in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Our analysis suggests that the mix of adverse production conditions and unforeseen innovations pushed groups favored by old technologies to establish the state by granting political and property rights to powerless individuals endowed with new and complementary skills. Through these reforms, the elite convinced the nonelite that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments would be shared via public spending and, thus, to cooperate and accumulate a culture of cooperation. Different from the main alternative theories, we stress that: (1) group formation is heavily shaped by unforeseen shocks to the returns on both risk-sharing and innovation; (2) complementarity in group-specific skills, and not violence, is key determinant of state formation; (3) military, merchant and, especially, religious ranks favored state formation and culture accumulation.

scholarly journals Seigneurial governance and the state in late medieval Guelders (14th–16th century)

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Jim van der Meulen
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Cross Sections ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The State ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Central Argument

AbstractThis article charts the long-term development of seigneurial governance within the principality of Guelders in the Low Countries. Proceeding from four quantitative cross-sections (c. 1325, 1475, 1540, 1570) of seigneurial lordships, the conclusion is that seigneurial governance remained stable in late medieval Guelders. The central argument is that this persistence of seigneurial governance was an effect of active collaboration between princely administrations, lords, and local communities. Together, the princely government and seigneuries of Guelders formed an integrated, yet polycentric, state. The article thereby challenges the narrative of progressive state centralisation that predominates in the historiography of pre-modern state formation.

Contested boundaries

Focaal ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (68) ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
Jennifer Alvey
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
The State ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Shared Language ◽  
Border Dispute ◽  
Land Privatization ◽  
State Actors

This article examines a 20-year border dispute between two adjacent southern interior municipalities in Nicaragua. The dispute acts as window into the politics of state formation and the consolidation of the dictatorship of Anastacio Somoza García (1936–1956). This conflict was waged by locally based “state actors” who contested each other's attempts to stake and extend spatially based claims to authority. Contending parties developed a shared language of contention that I call “administrative disorder”, which tracked closely with accusations of invasion and abuse of authority. Administrative disorder discourses were representational practices that contributed to the discursive construction of the state. They were also the means by which representatives of the state sought to justify or normalize their own activities. As such, these discourses concealed political tensions rooted in patronage networks, municipal formation, land privatization, and ethnic assimilation, which shaped the contours and longevity of the dispute, but remained lurking silences in administrative disorder discourses.

Re-enacting the international order, or: why the Syrian state did not disappear

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Janis Grzybowski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
International Order ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
New States ◽  
Regime Support ◽  
Rare Opportunity ◽  
State Form

Abstract At the height of the Syrian civil war, many observers argued that the Syrian state was collapsing, fragmenting, or dissolving. Yet, it never actually vanished. Revisiting the rising challenges to the Syrian state since 2011 – from internal collapse through external fragmentation to its looming dissolution by the ‘Islamic State’ – provides a rare opportunity to investigate the re-enactment of both statehood and international order in crisis. Indeed, what distinguishes the challenges posed to Syria, and Iraq, from others in the region and beyond is that their potential dissolution was regarded as a threat not merely to a – despised – dictatorial regime, or a particular state, but to the state-based international order itself. Regimes fall and states ‘collapse’ internally or are replaced by new states, but the international order is fundamentally questioned only where the territorially delineated state form is contested by an alternative. The article argues that the Syrian state survived not simply due to its legal sovereignty or foreign regime support, but also because states that backed the rebellion, fearing the vanishing of the Syrian nation-state in a transnational jihadist ‘caliphate’, came to prefer its persistence under Assad. The re-enactment of states and of the international order are thus ultimately linked.

Slavery and the Slave Trade in Dār Fūr

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. O'Fahey
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Central African Republic ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The State ◽  
The South ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
State Organization ◽  
Slave Raid

The institutions of slavery, slave raiding and the slave trade were fundamental in the rise and expansion of the Keira Sultanate of Dār Fūr. The development of a long-distance trade in slaves may be due to immigrants from the Nile, who probably provided the impetus to state formation. This process may be remembered in the ‘Wise Stranger’ traditions current in the area. The slave raid or ghazwa, penetrating into the Baḥr al-Ghazāl and what is now the Central African Republic, marked the triumph of Sudanic state organization over the acephalous societies to the south.The slaves, who were carefully classified, were not only exported to Egypt and North Africa, but also served the sultans and the title-holding elite as soldiers, labourers and bureaucrats. In the latter role, the slaves began to encroach on the power of traditional ruling groups within the state; the conflict between the slave bureaucrats and the traditional ruling elite lasted until the end of the first Keira Sultanate in 1874.

scholarly journals Enacting the Absent State: State-formation on the oil-palm frontier of Pomio (Papua New Guinea)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Tammisto
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Oil Palm ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The State ◽  
Rural District ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Active Worker ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Britain

Tammisto, Tuomas 2016. Enacting the Absent State: State-formation on the oil-palm frontier of Pomio (Papua New Guinea). Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 62: 51-68. In this article I examine the relationship between new oil-palm plantations and state-formation in Pomio, a remote rural district of East New Britain Province (Papua New Guinea). I am particularly interested in the kinds of spaces of governance produced by the new oil-palm plantations and how this contributes to state formation and territorialisation in Pomio.Plantations in Pomio do not became state-like spaces as a result of top-down processes alone, but also because of active worker initiatives. By contributing to state formation in this way, the inhabitants of Pomio also make claims on what the state should be like. While plantations become governable and statelike spaces, they do not produce simply governable subjects, nor do they produce a uniformly governable territory but an uneven space in which some places are more governable than others. The inhabitants of Pomio move between these places in their pursuit of different goals.

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