Showing papers on "State (polity) published in 1999"

Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument

Abstract: Introduction - transitions and continuities - the question of analysis. Part 1 The informalization of politics: whither the state? the illusions of civil society recycled elites. Part 2 The re-traditionalization of society: of masks and men - the question of identity the use and abuse of the irrational - witchcraft and religion warlords bosses and thugs - the profits of violence. Part 3 The productivity of economic "failure": the moral economy of corruption the bounties of dependence what if Africa refused to develop?. Conclusion - a new paradigm - the political instrumentalization of disorder.

Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics

Abstract: What motivates states to follow international norms, rules, and commitments? All social systems must confront what we might call the problem of social control—that is, how to get actors to comply with society's rules—but the problem is particularly acute for international relations, because the international social system does not possess an overarching center of political power to enforce rules. Yet, taken in balance with other values, a measure of order is a valued good. Some take this absence of centralized power to mean that the international system is like a Hobbesian state of nature, where only material power matters; others see it as evidence that international rules have force only when they are in the self-interest of each state. I show that these two conclusions are premature because of their shallow reading of international society and misinterpretation of the ways in which authority works in domestic society.

"Mediatization" of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy?

Abstract: The growing intrusion of media into the political domain in many countries has led critics to worry about the approach of the "media-driven republic," in which mass media will usurp the functions of political institutions in the liberal state. However, close inspection of the evidence reveals that political institutions in many nations have retained their functions in the face of expanded media power. The best description of the current situation is "mediatization," where political institutions increasingly are dependent on and shaped by mass media but nevertheless remain in control of political processes and functions.

The invention of the passport : surveillance, citizenship and the state

Abstract: In order to distinguish between those who may and may not enter or leave, states everywhere have developed extensive systems of identification, central to which is the passport. This innovative book argues that documents such as passports, internal passports and related mechanisms have been crucial in making distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. It examines how the concept of citizenship has been used to delineate rights and penalties regarding property, liberty, taxes and welfare. It focuses on the US and Western Europe, moving from revolutionary France to the Napoleonic era, the American Civil War, the British industrial revolution, pre-World War I Italy, the reign of Germany's Third Reich and beyond. This innovative study combines theory and empirical data in questioning how and why states have established the exclusive right to authorize and regulate the movement of people.

Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda

Abstract: Who did the planning for the murder of hundreds of thousands in Tutsi? Has was mass murder organised in such a short time? Why was the French state supportive of the former government? Did their arms sustain this regime? This report looks at the United Nations' reaction - were expatriates rescued whilst Rwandans were left to their fate?

The Criminalization of the State in Africa

Abstract: This book examines the growth of fraud and smuggling in African states, the plundering of natural resources, the privatization of state institutions, the development of an economy of plunder and the growth of private armies. It suggests that the state itself is becoming a vehicle for organized criminal activity. The authors propose criteria for gauging the criminalization of African states and present a novel prognosis: they distinguish between the corruption of previous decades and the criminalization of some African states now taking place. Major operators are now able to connect with global criminal networks. Also, the notion of social capital has led to current attitudes towards the use of public office for personal enrichment, or even systematic illegality. Looking at South Africa, the authors examine the decades-long tradition of association between crime and politics in this area. South Africa is now the centre of important international patterns of crime, notably in the drug trade. It has Africa's largest formal economy and the continent's largest criminal economy. Considering the economic origins of official implication in crime, the authors conclude that new forms of corruption have been unintentionally helped by liberal economic reforms.

Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State

Abstract: Borders are where wars start, as Primo Levi once wrote. But they are also bridges - that is, sites for ongoing cultural exchange. Anyone studying how nations and states maintain distinct identities while adapting to new ideas and experiences knows that borders provide particularly revealing windows for the analysis of 'self' and 'other'. In representing invisible demarcations between nations and peoples who may have much or very little in common, borders exert a powerful influence and define how people think as well as what they do. Without borders, whether physical or symbolic, nationalism could not exist, nor could borders exist without nationalism. Surprisingly, there have been very few systematic or concerted efforts to review the experiences of nation and state at the local level of borders. Drawing on examples from the US and Mexico, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Spain and Morocco, as well as various parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, this timely book offers a comparative perspective on culture at state boundaries. The authors examine the role of the state, ethnicity, transnationalism, border symbols, rituals and identity in an effort to understand how nationalism informs attitudes and behaviour at local, national and international levels. Soldiers, customs agents, smugglers, tourists, athletes, shoppers, and prostitutes all provide telling insights into the power relations of everyday life and what these relations say about borders. This overview of the importance of borders to the construction of identity and culture will be an essential text for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, nationalism and immigration studies.

Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State

Abstract: 1. The collapse of socialism and socialist states 2. Domestic socialism: monopoly and deregulation 3. Federalism and the Soviet Bloc: monopoly and deregulation 4. Leaving socialism 5. Leaving the state 6. Violent versus peaceful state dismemberment 7. Institutions and opportunities: constructing and deconstructing regimes and states.

Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and Postliberal Challenge in Latin America

Abstract: Scholars of democratic consolidation have come to focus on the links between political institutions and enduring regime outcomes. This article takes issue with the conceptual and analytical underpinnings of this literature by highlighting how new political institutions, rather than securing democratic politics, have in fact had a more checkered effect. It delineates why the theoretical expectations of the democratic consolidation literature have not been realized and draws, by example, on the contemporary ethnic movements that are now challenging third-wave democracies. In particular, it highlights how contemporary indigenous movements, emerging in response to unevenly institutionalized reforms, pose a postliberal challenge to Latin America's I newly founded democracies. These movements have sparked political debates and constitutional reforms over community rights, territorial autonomy, and a multiethnic citizenry. As a whole, I they have laid bare the weakness of state institutions, the contested terms of democracy, and the I indeterminacy of ethnic accommodation in the region. As such, these movements highlight the need to qualify somewhat premature and narrow discussions of democratic consolidation in favor I of a broader research agenda on democratic politics.

The rise and decline of the state

Abstract: The state, which since the middle of the seventeenth century has been the most important and most characteristic of all modern institutions, is in decline. From Western Europe to Africa, many existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart. Many of their functions are being taken over by a variety of organizations which, whatever their precise nature, are not states. In this unique volume Martin van Creveld traces the story of the state from its beginnings to the present. Starting with the simplest political organizations that ever existed, he guides the reader through the origins of the state, its development, its apotheosis during the two World Wars, and its spread from its original home in Western Europe to cover the globe. In doing so, he provides a fascinating history of government from its origins to the present day.

Civil society at the turn of the millenium: prospects for an alternative world order

Abstract: The meaning of ‘civil society’ has evolved considerably since its use in the context of the 18th century European Enlightenment. Then it signified the realm of private interests, in practice the realm of the bourgeoisie, distinct from the state. While one current of thought retains that meaning and its implications, others view civil society rather as the emancipatory activity of social forces distinct from both state and capital. Antonio Gramsci's thought embraced both meanings: civil society was the ground that sustained the hegemony of the bourgeoisie but also that on which an emancipatory counterhegemony could be constructed. Is civil society today in the latter sense, a surrogate for revolution that seems a remote possibility towards the attainment of an alternative social and world order? It is useful to test this proposition by examining the potential for civil society in different parts of the world.

Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines

Abstract: This book focuses on local bossism, a common political phenomenon where local power brokers achieve monopolistic control over an area’s coercive and economic resources. Examples of bossism include Old Corruption in eighteenth-century England, urban political machines in the United States, caciques in Latin America, the Mafia in Southern Italy, and today’s gangster politicians in such countries as India, Russia, and Thailand. For many years, the entrenchment of numerous provincial warlords and political clans has made the Philippines a striking case of local bossism. Yet writings on Filipino political culture and patron-client relations have ignored the role of coercion in shaping electoral competition and social relations. Portrayals of a “weak state” captured by a landed oligarchy have similarly neglected the enduring institutional legacies of American colonial rule and the importance of state resources for the accumulation of wealth and power in the Philippines. The author, by contrast, argues that the roots of bossism in the Philippines lie in the inauguration of formal democratic institutions at a relatively early stage of capitalist development. Poverty and insecurity leave many voters vulnerable to clientelist, coercive, and financial pressure, and the state’s central role in capital accumulation provides the basis for local bosses’ economic empires and political machines. These contradictions have encouraged bossism in the Philippines, as well as in other countries. The book elaborates these arguments through case studies of bosses in two Philippine provinces, Cavite and Cebu. The contrast between single-generation gangster politicians in Cavite and enduring commercial dynasties in Cebu reveals variation in the forms of bossism that reflect variations in the local political economies of the two provinces. Comparisons between bosses over successive historical periods highlight the gradual transformation of bossism through capitalist development. In sum, Capital, Coercion, and Crime provides a comparative historical analysis of bossism, drawing conclusions of great interest not only to scholars of Southeast Asia but to students of comparative politics as well.

The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Does It Make a Difference in Human Rights Behavior?

Abstract: Formal acceptance of international agreements on human rights has progressed to the point where currently over three-quarters of the UN member states are parties to the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. In fact, becoming a party to this covenant seems to be concomitant with joining the UN. Of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and in the region of the former Soviet Union, only Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Macedonia have not joined the treaty. This article tests empirically whether becoming a party to this international treaty (and its optional protocol) has an observable impact on the state party's actual behavior. The hypothesis is tested across 178 countries over an eighteen-year period (1976-93) and across four different measures of state human rights behavior. Initial bivariate analyses demonstrate some statistically significant differences between the behavior of states parties and the behavior of non-party states. However, this difference does not appear in th...

Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Abstract: Not simply an "event" or merely an "incident, " the 1962 standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba was a crisis, which subsequently has achieved almost mythic significance in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. Jutta Weldes asks why this occurrence in particular should be cast as a crisis, and how this so significantly affected "the national interest." Here, Weldes analyzes the so-called Cuban missile crisis as a means to rethink the idea of national interest, a notion central to both the study and practice of international relations.Why did the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba constitute a crisis for U.S. state officials and thus a dire threat to U.S. national interests? It was, Weldes suggests, more a matter of discursive construction than of objective facts or circumstances. Drawing on social theory and on concepts from cultural studies, she exposes the "realities" of the crisis as social creations in the service of a particular and precarious U.S. state identity defined within the Cold War U.S. "security imaginary." Constructing National Interests shows how this process allowed for a redefining of the identities, interests, and likely actions of various states, so that it seemed to logically serve the U.S. national interest in removing the missiles from Cuba.

The Scottish nation 1700-2000

Abstract: Part 1 1700-1760: Scotland in Great Britain the Jacobite challenge the Union and the economy roots of Enlightenment the parish state. Part 2 1760-1830: Scotland transformed the rural lowlands - the old world and the new urbanization the disintegration of clanship the old regime and radical protest highlandism and Scottish identity. Part 3 1830-1939: the world's workshop politics, power and identity in Victorian Scotland the decline and fall of liberal hegemony the Scottish city religion and society educating the people the highlands and crofting society land, elites and people emigrants new Scots Scottish women - family, work and politics. Part 4 1939-2000: war and peace the Scottish question a nation reborn?.

Roots of reform : farmers, workers, and the American state, 1877-1917

Abstract: Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. By Elizabeth Sanders. American Politics and Political Economy. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, c. 1999. Pp. x, 532. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-226-73477-3; cloth, $48.00, JSBN 0-226-73476-5.) This book should have a powerful impact on the content delivered by textbooks and lecturers in survey courses, injecting far more continuity between the Populist and Progressive periods than historians have allowed. The conventional narrative recognizes some linkage between the People's Party's Omaha platform of 1892 and post-1900 reform, but that convention stresses that the social bases and leadership of reform shifted from farms and rural America and third party activists to cities and urban middle classes and Progressive presidents. Elizabeth Sanders powerfully revises this narrative, arguing that "the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians' drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism. The periphery generated the bulk of the reform agenda and furnished the foot soldiers that saw reform through the legislature" (pp. 3-4). The first 147 pages of this book cover the period up to 1896 and offer nothing new in a general way, but this reader's impatience with that situation was allayed by Sanders's bold arguments on many particulars. Regarding the Populists' inability to appeal to workers, Sanders dismisses the notion that the Populists bore full responsibility for that failure. Rather, from the Greenbackers on, Sanders asserts, agrarian reformers, including Bryan in particular, issued strong and consistent appeals to "labor" and "workers," but the latter simply did not respond. Although the book's first section is necessary, it is not an easy read. It is rewarding but might have been briefer given the book's density. Sanders rejects the "capitalist-dominance" thesis that views Progressive Era reform as managed by business and political elites. The capitalist response to new regulation was rather "reactive and largely negative" (p. 4), expressing itself mainly through the executive and the Supreme Court. Whereas earlier interpretations also have centered on presidential leadership, intellectuals, or new professionals, Sanders sharply shifts the focus to the regional political economies of the South and West and, especially, to the congressional representatives of these regions. She also argues that the post-1896 Democratic Party constituted the major vehicle responsible for the federal government's regulatory response to the imbalances of the new industrial-financial economy. William Jennings Bryan emerges in this story as a failing presidential candidate--in 1896, 1900, and 1908--but one who exerted great influence over the Democratic platforms, congressional agenda, and Wilson's New Freedom. Building on the agrarian protests from the 1870s on, and stimulated by renewed rural organization after 1900, Sanders argues that periphery agrarians brought significant government action to "the redefinition of trade policy; the creation of an income tax; a new, publicly controlled banking and currency system; antitrust policy; the regulation of agricultural marketing networks; a nationally financed road system; federal control of railroads, ocean shipping, and early telecommunications; and agricultural and vocational education" (pp. 7-8). The evidential heart of this book is analysis of roll-call voting in Congress from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the Taft and Wilson administrations. Dividing the country into economic regions and subregions, Sanders establishes her argument via three categories of Congressional districts, based primarily on per capita value added in manufacturing: core, diverse, and periphery. Time and again, legislators' votes tended to be polarized between manufacturing-business core and peripheral agrarian districts, with legislators from diverse areas divided or siding with the agrarians. …

Reinventing Government in the American States: Measuring and Explaining Administrative Reform

Abstract: Reform waves flowing across the American political landscape are not new. In the states they have paralleled and sometimes preceded national government reforms that began early in this century and extended into recent decades (Garnett, 1980; Conant, 1988, 1992). Shortly after the federal Taft Commission proposed management reforms in 1912, states set a pattern of examining their structures for possible reorganization. Garnett (1980) identified state reorganization waves associated successively with the Taft Commission, the Brownlow Committee of the 1930s, and the first Hoover Commission of 1947-49. Conant suggested a fourth wave of reform in the 1960 to 1980 period that included more than 20 successful comprehensive state reorganizations (1988, 894). We examine the nature of state reforms in the current decade. That state-level comprehensive reforms in the 1990s might center on "reinventing government" should come as no surprise. In their book, Reinventing Government, Osborne and Gaebler (1992) raised issues that confront state administrators and cited state leaders' experiences in developing "entrepreneurial government." From these examples they sought to identify "common threads" to offer as guides (19). After examining one state (Minnesota) in depth, Barzelay (1992) described a "post-bureaucratic paradigm" that he argued marks this next reform. The National Commission on State and Local Public Service, chaired by former Mississippi Governor William Winter, assembled a set of scholarly papers and held regional hearings to explore steps to "revitalize state and local governance" (Thompson, 1993, 1). The commission ultimately issued recommendations overlapping with reinvention. The American states appear to be adopting some changes that are consistent with reinvention recommendations. To explore this development, we surveyed state agency directors in late 1994 and early 1995 and examine here the scope, content, and implementation of reinvention reforms across the 50 states near the midpoint of the present decade. From the National Level to the States: Characteristics of Reinvention Reforms As candidates in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore accepted the reinvention challenge at the national level: We can no longer afford to pay more for--and get less from--our government. The answer for every problem cannot always be another problem or more money. It is time to radically change the way the government operates--to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up (Clinton and Gore, 1992, 23-24). The administration's National Performance Review (NPR) represented a turning point in federal administrative reform. Analysts have carefully reviewed the many specific proposals that emerged from it, as well as the more general reinvention proposals, and tried to place the reforms in a systematic framework. These proposals came from many sources. Osborne and Gaebler described writing their book as a process in which they "journeyed through the landscape of governmental change" and "sought constantly to understand the underlying trends" (1992, 19). Their search produced ten principles that they used to organize the book. These principles have been variously described as a "constellation of ideas" (Frederickson, 1996, 263), a "global movement" present in the private sector and all government levels and drawing on reforms in the U.S. and abroad (Kamensky, 1996, 248-49), a "conflated aggregation" (Fox, 1996, 258), a "grab bag" from which "everyone who is interested gets to pick his or her own particular purpose" (Nathan, 1995, 213); and "a collage of fashionable approaches to reforming organizations" (Arnold, 1995, 414).(1) Critics of reinvention (and of the National Performance Review, specifically) have targeted its deviation from the long-established administrative management tradition. …

The Basic Right to Justification: Towards a Constructivist Conception of Human Rights

Abstract: In contemporary debates on the concept of human rights, one frequently encounters the critique that this is not only a specifically Western concept, but also a tool which Western, capitalist states use to politically and culturally dominate other societies. The first thesis concerns the historical genesis and normative validity of human rights, while the second touches on political issues of their interpretation and application. Concerning the second thesis, one needs to take a closer look at the critique, especially at who raises it and against which policy or institution it is directed. It may turn out that such accusations are justified and that, at times, the rhetoric of human rights does serve to veil the political or economic aims of states or international parties who wish to achieve or maintain influence and dominance. But it is just as possible that this critique is unjustified and that the accusation of “neocolonialism” is employed ideologically, in order to conceal governments’ attempts to defend their own political power. Demands that particular values and traditions be observed and corresponding demands that cultural and political autonomy be respected may be pretexts for unimpededly dominating and oppressing segments of one’s own populace or neighboring states. In light of this situation, it is important to see that one walks into a trap if one believes that one must decide the matter generally and unequivocally in favor of one or the other position. For, in any given case, one or the other or even both critiques may be sound. And in the event that both critiques are appropriate, the dichotomous perception of reality characteristic of the postcolonial era threatens to deny the interests of those who raise the demand for human rights against those who hold power in their own state, without sharing the interests or political and economic ideas of Western states. In any case, one makes the situation too easy if one regards a priori every single critique of human rights as a disguised attempt to claim freedom to oppress instead of freedom from oppression. And, regardless of whether it is justified in a given situation, the discussion of political strategies and rhetoric hardly affects the first, more fundamental thesis, which states that human rights are a culturally specific, Western invention and ipso facto cannot be globally valid. Now, it is clearly indisputable that the concept of individual rights human beings have as human beings arose in the context of the secularization and modernization of European culture.3 Hence it is neither very difficult nor unjustified to draw attention to and emphasize

Globalization and International Relations Theory

Abstract: Introduction The Great Divide Globalization Globalization and the State The Sovereign State The Competition State The Security State The Normative State The Democratic State Conclusion Bibliography Index

Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France

Abstract: This text offers an interpretation of the transformation of French economic policymaking and state-society relations during the last quarter of the 20th century. In so doing, it challenges widely held views about the preconditions for state leadership and for a vibrant civil society. France has long been characterized as a statist political economy, with state "strength" predicted on autonomy from a weak and divided civil society. Jonah Levy shows that this disdain for societal and local institutions has come back to haunt French officials - what he terms "Tocqueville's revenge". The absence of societal partners undermined the operation of statist policymaking in the 1970s and early 1980s, and has made it difficult to forge alternative forms of economic coordination in the post-statist period.

The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization

Abstract: To date, the only account of the `zone of peace' among states in the core of the international system is that found in the democratic peace debates. We rework the conceptual parameters through which the object of analysis — the zone of peace — is defined in the democratic peace debates. Specifically, we historicize the concepts — `democracy' and `war' — that enable the identification of zones of peace and war, and contextualize those histories in processes of globalization. This enables us to offer an alternative account of the emergence of zones of peace and war in the international system and of the central unit of analysis in the democratic peace debates, the sovereign and territorial liberal democratic state. This account conceives of the international system as a whole and recognizes the mutually constitutive character of relations between the zones. It opens up a research agenda focused not on why democratic states do not war with one another but on the international relations of democracy and war.

Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos

Abstract: Three distinct components of the citizenship principle have been identified in the literature: a political principle of democracy, a juridical status of legal personhood and a form of membership and political identity. The modern paradigm of citizenship was based on the assumption that these components would neatly map onto one another on the terrain of the democratic welfare state. Globalization, new forms of transnational migration, the partial disaggregation of state sovereignty and the development of human rights regimes have rendered this model anachronistic. Only if the various elements of the citizenship principle are disaggregated and reinstitutionalized on independent levels of governance, some national, some supranational, will the exclusiveness constitutive of the ideal of citizenship be tempered with the demands of justice.

Governing the Health Care State: A Comparative Study of the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany

Abstract: Part 1 Understanding the health care state: identifying the health care state the embedded nature of the health care state capitalism, democracy and health care choosing the cases. Part 2 Building the health care state: how states are built the United Kingdom - building a command and control state Germany - building a corporatist state the United States - building a supply state democratic politics and health care states. Part 3 Governing consumption: consumption and commodification the United Kingdom -consumption and the limits of citizenship Germany - consumption and the limits of corporatism the United States - from supply state to regulatory state the converging government of consumption. Part 4 Governing doctors: professions, states and markets the United Kingdom - doctors, the state and democracy Germany - doctors, the state and corporatism the United States -doctors, states and markets states, doctors and private interest government. Part 5 Governing technology: medical technology and capitalist democracy the United States - democracy, capitalism and technology the United Kingdom and Germany - medical technology and industrial politics property rights, medical technology and democracy. Part 6 Transforming the health care state: a puzzle restated three systems of politics embeddedness revisited death or transfiguration?

The role of the state in economic growth

Abstract: This paper attempts to trace and describe the role played by the government sector – the state – in promoting economic growth in Western societies since the Renaissance. One important conclusion is that the antagonism between state and market, which has characterised the twentieth century, is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the Renaissance one very important task of the state has been to create well‐functioning markets by providing a legal framework, standards, credit, physical infrastructure and – if necessary – to function temporarily as an entrepreneur of last resort. Early economists were acutely aware that national markets did not occur spontaneously, and they used “modern” ideas like synergies, increasing returns, and innovation theory when arguing for the right kind of government policy. In fact, mercantilist economics saw it as a main task to extend the synergetic economic effects observed within cities to the territory of a nation‐state. The paper argues that the classical Anglo‐Saxon tradition in economics – fundamentally focused on barter and distribution, rather than on production and knowledge – systematically fails to grasp these wider issues in economic development, and it brings in and discusses the role played by the state in alternative traditions of non‐equilibrium economics.

Political Theory: An Introduction

Abstract: 1. What is Political Theory? 2. Human Nature, the Individual and Society 3. Politics, Government and the State 4. Sovereignty, the Nation and Transnationalism 5. Power, Authority and Legitimacy 6. Democracy, Representation and the Public Interest 7. Law, Order and Justice 8. Rights, Obligation and Citizenship 9. Freedom, Toleration and Identity 10. Equality, Social Justice and Welfare 11. Property, the Market and Planning 12. Security, War and World Order 13. Tradition, Progress and Utopia

States and strangers : refugees and displacements of statecraft

Abstract: Refugees may flee their country, but can they escape the confining, defining logic of all the voices that speak for them? As refugees multiply in our troubled world, more and more scholars, studies, and pundits focus on their plight. Most of these attempts, says Nevzat Soguk, start from a model that shares the assumptions manifested in traditional definitions of citizen, nation, and state. Within this hierarchy, he argues, a refugee has no place to go. States and Strangers questions this paradigm, particularly its vision of the territoriality of life.A radical retheorization of the refugee from a Foucauldian perspective, the book views the international refugee regime not as a simple tertiary response, arising from the practice of states regarding refugee problems, but as itself an aspect of the regimentation of statecraft. The attendant discourse negates the multiplicity of refugee events and experience; by assigning the refugee an identity -- someone without the citizen's grounding within a territorial space -- the state renders him voiceless and deprives him of representation and protection. States and Strangers asks how this happens and how it can be avoided.Using historical, archival research and interpretive strategies drawn from a genealogical approach, Soguk considers the role of the refugee in the emergence and maintenance of the sovereign territorial state from the late seventeenth century to contemporary times.

Rentier Wealth, Unruly Law, and the Rise of Opposition: The Political Economy of Oil States

Abstract: The relationship between oil and politics has generated much intellectual debate. The resulting framework called "rentierism" has produced a number of propositions about the nature of the developmental process. A prominent theme contends that the financial autonomy of oil states grants them immunity from social pressures. I argue that no necessary link exists between the accumulation of wealth and a particular social outcome. The windfall profits of petroleum exports do not translate into a politically quiescent population. Oil states often foster their own civil opposition because of the way revenues are deployed. The rentier framework is limited because it relegates political choices to a back seat, behind structural economics. Its utility is enhanced if we construct more explicit linkages between state strategies of expenditure and the political consequences for particular social groups. I integrate the conditions of rentierism and personal rule to explain the creation and convergence of dissent in oil states and give substance to the oft-repeated call for the rule of law (hukm al qanun).

Reproducing the State

Abstract: People are said to acquire their affiliations of ethnicity, race, and sex at birth. Hence, these affiliations have long been understood to be natural, independent of the ability of political societies to define who we are. "Reproducing the State" vigorously challenges the conventional view, as well as post-structuralist scholarship that minimizes state power. Jacqueline Stevens examines birth-based theories of membership and group affiliations in political societies ranging from the Athenian polis, to tribes of Australia, to the French republic, to the contemporary United States. The book details how political societies determine the kinship rules that are used to reproduce political societies.Stevens analyzes the ways that ancestral and territorial birth rules for membership in political societies pattern other intergenerational affiliations. She shows how the notion of ethnicity depends on the implicit or explicit invocation of a past, present, or future political society. She also shows how geography is used to represent political regions, including continents, as the seemingly natural underpinning for racial taxonomies perpetuated through miscegenation laws and birth certificates. And Stevens argues that sex differences are also constituted through membership practices of political societies. In its chronological and disciplinary range, "Reproducing the State" will reward the interest of scholars in many fields, including anthropology, history, political science, sociology, women's studies, race studies, and ethnic studies.