scholarly journals Strengthening the State: Logging and Neoliberal Politics in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Tammisto
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Road Network ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The State ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
National Road ◽  
New Britain

In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited national road network around the provincial capital. Developing the national road network and creating standardized or—to use James Scott’s concept—legible environments can be seen as an integral part of state-making and strengthening the role of the state. In addition to the environment, the state also needs to make social life legible in forms of maps, censuses and laws. As I will argue in my paper, the Ili-Wawas, and other similar projects, may indeed strengthen the role of the state not only by creating the infrastructure and legibility needed by the state, but also in unintended and accidental ways. The side effects of logging and road building include, among others, fear of crime and land disputes. It is these that create among the locals a perceived need for state institutions, which may be as significant in advancing the role of the state as is the creation of infrastructure and legibility.

scholarly journals Strengthening the State: Logging and Neoliberal Politics in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Tammisto
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Road Network ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The State ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
National Road ◽  
New Britain

In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited national road network around the provincial capital. Developing the national road network and creating standardized or—to use James Scott’s concept—legible environments can be seen as an integral part of state-making and strengthening the role of the state. In addition to the environment, the state also needs to make social life legible in forms of maps, censuses and laws. As I will argue in my paper, the Ili-Wawas, and other similar projects, may indeed strengthen the role of the state not only by creating the infrastructure and legibility needed by the state, but also in unintended and accidental ways. The side effects of logging and road building include, among others, fear of crime and land disputes. It is these that create among the locals a perceived need for state institutions, which may be as significant in advancing the role of the state as is the creation of infrastructure and legibility.

scholarly journals Strengthening the State: Logging and neoliberal politics in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Tammisto
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Road Network ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The State ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
National Road ◽  
New Britain

In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited national road network around the provincial capital. Developing the national road network and creating standardized or—to use James Scott’s concept—legible environments can be seen as an integral part of state-making and strengthening the role of the state. In addition to the environment, the state also needs to make social life legible in forms of maps, censuses and laws. As I will argue in my paper, the Ili-Wawas, and other similar projects, may indeed strengthen the role of the state not only by creating the infrastructure and legibility needed by the state, but also in unintended and accidental ways. The side effects of logging and road building include, among others, fear of crime and land disputes. It is these that create among the locals a perceived need for state institutions, which may be as significant in advancing the role of the state as is the creation of infrastructure and legibility.

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.

Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea

1987 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Azarya ◽  
Naomi Chazan
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Societal Response ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Gain Access

Few questions have galvanized the attention of observers of African affairs in recent years as forcefully as the performance of the state on the continent. The debate on the nature of the state—its capabilities, weaknesses, external and societal connections, and impact—has come to occupy center stage in the field of African political studies. This overriding preoccupation emanates from the underlying assumption that the state constitutes a superior means for the fulfillment of economic and social aspirations; participation in its activities is deemed beneficial, and various sectors of society strive to associate with its institutions and gain access to its resources. Some recent works have cast doubt on this assumption, however, and the trend in the literature has been shifting towards an emphasis on the diminishing role of the state in African social life. However, even in these new studies the focus has been primarily on the state itself, its difficulties, incapacities, and failures, rather than on societal response to its actions.

scholarly journals A contrarreforma do Estado na ideologia neoestruturalista da Cepal

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (40) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanda Micheli Burginski
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Structural Capital ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Collective Construction

Resumo – Este artigo explicita a afinidade entre o pensamento neoestruturalista da Cepal e o neoliberalismo, tendo como foco o papel do Estado na acumulação capitalista em face à crise estrutural do capital. O objetivo é trazer os principais elementos teóricos do pensamento estruturalista clássico da Cepal para demonstrar que o neoestruturalismo não se constitui em alternativa ao neoliberalismo. O Estado é acionado para estabelecer a primazia do mercado na definição do desenvolvimento, no sentido de fazer com que as regulações referentes à legislação trabalhista e os direitos sociais sejam reduzidas, em sintonia com as contrarreformas em curso. O programa neoestruturalista não produz enfrentamentos às medidas regressivas que acirram a barbarização da vida social, o que sugere a mobilização de forças sociais para a construção coletiva de um programa de esquerda, de transição para outra sociabilidade. Palavras-Chave: Cepal; neoliberalismo; neoestruturalismo; contrarreforma; Estado.  Abstract – This article explores the affinity between neoestructuralist thinking of ECLAC and neoliberalism, focusing on the role of the state in capitalist accumulation in face of the structural capital crisis. Its goal is to bring the main theoretical elements of classical estructural thinking of ECLAC to demonstrate that neostructuralism does not constitute an alternative to neoliberalism. The state is called upon to establish the defining role of the market primacy in development, in order to ensure that regulations regarding labor legislation and social rights are reduced, in tune with current counter-reformations. The neoestructuralist program does not produce confrontations with regressive measures that aggravate the barbarization of social life, which suggests the mobilization of social forces for the collective construction of a left-wing program, in transition to another type of sociability. Keywords: ECLAC; neoliberalism; neostructuralism; counter-reformation; State.

scholarly journals Der Norden und der Süden: die Rolle des Staates bei der wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Spaltung Italien.

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (98) ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Isaia Sales
Keyword(s):  
Social Integration ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The South ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Italian History ◽  
The North ◽  
Role Of The State

The dominating role of the state in the failed economic and social integration of the Mezzogiorno into the modern and developed northern part of the country since the creation of the Italian union is analysed. The mutation of the 'southern' to the'northern question' constitutes one of the most recent phenomena in Italian history which threatens the concept of national unity. Therefore, a new contract between the North and the South is necessary to combat the backwardness of the Mezzogiorno. This also requires a new quality of state and not its withdrawal from social life.

Party plenum strengthens Xi’s grip on China

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Senior Leaders ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Political Economic

Subject The Communist Party's recent Fourth Plenum meeting. Significance The Communist Party concluded a five-day meeting of senior leaders on October 31. The meeting, called the ‘Fourth Plenum’, focused on institutional and intra-Party affairs. Press statements that followed were short on policy detail, but the meeting appears to have reaffirmed President Xi Jinping's efforts to place the Party and its ideology at the centre of China's political, economic and social life. Impacts Xi’s grip on the Party appears unassailable. There are no signs of Xi lining up a successor; he looks likely to remain leader for a third term. There are no indications that Beijing will compromise on US demands to reduce the role of the state in industry.

Civil society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Critical Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Formal Economy ◽  
Role Of The State

In modern social and political philosophy civil society has come to refer to a sphere of human activity and a set of institutions outside state or government. It embraces families, churches, voluntary associations and social movements. The contrast between civil society and state was first drawn by eighteenth-century liberals for the purpose of attacking absolutism. Originally the term civil society (in Aristotelian Greek, politike koinonia) referred to a political community of equal citizens who participate in ruling and being ruled. In the twentieth century the separation of philosophy from social sciences, and the greatly expanded role of the state in economic and social life, have seemed to deprive the concept of both its intellectual home and its critical force. Yet, approaching the end of the century, the discourse of civil society is now enormously influential. What explains the concept’s revival? Does it have any application in societies that are not constitutional democracies? From a normative point of view, what distinguishes civil society from both the state and the formal economy?

Politocratic communitarianism, immanentist sociology and sphere sovereignty

2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andries Raath
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Dialectical Tensions ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Dialectical Tension

Politocratic communitarianism supports the historic revival of ancient Greek notions of social life in opposition to the nominalist trends in modernistic philosophy of society. The need for a penetrating normative philosophy of society from an integral non-dualistic angle to social life is manifest from Danie Goosen's and Koos Malan's pursuit of the neo-Aristotelian philosophical revival of the Greek polis: their formalistic approach to sociology, the dialectical tension between "normativity" and "factuality", and the juxtaposing of the "general" and the "specific" in their approach to social phenomena. In this article the shortcomings of politocratic communitarianism are traced to its immanentist approach to social theory with all the ensuing dialectical tensions emanating from its social philosophy and its views on the role of the state in society.

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