Showing papers on "State (polity) published in 2014"

The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism

Abstract: This article returns to Marxist commentaries during a previous period characterized by profound contradictions and conflict—especially the writings of Nicos Poulantzas and Stuart Hall on authoritarian statism/populism from the late 1970s to the 1980s—in order to make sense of the present era. The article argues that we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, which is rooted in the reconfiguring of the state into a less democratic entity through constitutional and legal changes that seek to insulate it from social and political conflict. The apparent strengthening of the state simultaneously entails its growing fragility, for it is becoming an increasingly direct target of a range of popular struggles, demands, and discontent by way of the pressures emanating from this strengthening. A primary reference point for the article is a notable casualty of the post-2007 crisis, European social democracy, but the implications for radical politics more broadly are also considered.

The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition

Abstract: Since its intellectual inception in the 1930s and its political emergence in the 1970s, neo-liberalism has sought to disenchant politics by replacing it with economics. This agenda-setting text examines the efforts and failures of economic experts to make government and public life amenable to measurement, and to re-model society and state in terms of competition. In particular, it explores the practical use of economic techniques and conventions by policy-makers, politicians, regulators and judges and how these practices are being adapted to the perceived failings of the neoliberal model. By picking apart the defining contradiction that arises from the conflation of economics and politics, this book asks: to what extent can economics provide government legitimacy?

Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain

Abstract: Winner of the Political Book of the Year Award 2015 The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is the most significant new party in British politics for a generation. In recent years UKIP and their charismatic leader Nigel Farage have captivated British politics, media and voters. Yet both the party and the roots of its support remain poorly understood. Where has this political revolt come from? Who is supporting them, and why? How are UKIP attempting to win over voters? And how far can their insurgency against the main parties go? Drawing on a wealth of new data – from surveys of UKIP voters to extensive interviews with party insiders – in this book prominent political scientists Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin put UKIP's revolt under the microscope and show how many conventional wisdoms about the party and the radical right are wrong. Along the way they provide unprecedented insight into this new revolt, and deliver some crucial messages for those with an interest in the state of British politics, the radical right in Europe and political behaviour more generally.

The Islamic State

Abstract: Max Weber argued that ‘only the Occident knows the state in the modern sense, with a constitution, specialised officialdom and the concept of citizenship. Beginnings of this in antiquity and in the Orient were never able to fully develop.’1 Weber’s perception of the non-Western pre-modern world suggests a lack of sophistication in forms of political organisation prior to the development of nation-states. However, this may not be an entirely valid assumption. The nation-state exists as the most contemporary and powerful manifestation of the concept of sovereignty and political order. The nation-state is not, however, unchallenged. Historians suspect that the first ‘states’ began to form in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE, created by the Sumerian civilisation. Despite the structure of these states looking dramatically different from the modern state, this still suggests the beginnings of a political order.2 Indeed, as Bernard Lewis observes, ‘the bureaucratic state is probably older in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world’.3 Ideas regarding sovereignty, the state and legitimacy are intimately linked. They are relevant in attempting to conceptualise both the contemporary international system, which has its basis in the Western tradition, as well as the Salafi Jihadist notion of order based on the Islamic tradition.

The Political Economy of State Capture in Central Europe

Abstract: This article demonstrates that most new EU Member States experience serious problems of state capture. It argues that central European states cluster around two dominant modes of party competition. In the first, predominantly ideologically committed elites (Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Slovenia and Estonia) established relatively ‘electoral professional’ party competitions, only to face deepening fiscal constraints on mainstream ideological competition. Following the collapse of the social democratic left, both Hungary and Poland experienced attempts to reassert political monopoly, i.e., ‘party state capture’. In the second group (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia), more entrepreneurial political elites established ‘brokerage’ party systems, in which public policy remains a side-product of an essentially economic competition. All five states show high levels of ‘corporate state capture’ in which public power is exercised primarily for private gain. These findings contest the more optimistic expectations of the institutionalist literature on state-building and democratic consolidation.

A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

Abstract: A Nation Rising chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization. Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoude, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright

Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World

Abstract: In this rigorous distillation of his political philosophy, Philip Pettit, author of the landmark work Republicanism, champions a simple standard for our most complex political judgments, offering a challenging ideal that nevertheless holds out a real prospect for social and democratic progress. Whereas many thinkers define freedom as the absence of interference-we are left alone to do as we please-Pettit demands that in their basic life choices free persons should not even be subject to a power of interference on the part of others. This notion of freedom as non-domination offers a yardstick for gauging social and democratic progress and provides a simple, unifying standard for analyzing our most entangled political quandaries. Pettit reaffirms the ideal, already present in the Roman Republic, of a free citizenry who enjoy equal status with one another, being individually protected by a law that they together control. After sketching a fresh history of freedom, he turns to the implications of the ideal for social, democratic, and international justice. Should the state erect systems for delivering mandatory healthcare coverage to its citizens? Should voting be a citizen's only means of influencing political leaders? Are the demands of the United Nations to be heeded when they betray the sovereignty of the state? Pettit shows how these and other questions should be resolved within a civic republican perspective. Concise and elegant in its rhetoric and ultimately radical in its reimagining of our social arrangements, Just Freedom is neither a theoretical treatise nor a practical manifesto, but rather an ardent attempt to elaborate the demands of freedom and justice in our time.

Ecology, Trade, and States in Pre-Colonial Africa

Abstract: State capacity matters for growth. I test Bates' explanation of pre-colonial African states. He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states. I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states. This is robust to reverse causation, omitted heterogeneity, and alternative interpretations of the link between diversity and states. The result survives including non-African societies. I test mechanisms connecting trade to states, and find that trade supported class stratification between rulers and ruled. I underscore the importance of ethnic institutions and inform our knowledge of the effects of trade on institutions.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity

Abstract: This exciting new study provides an original and provocative expose of the crisis of global capitalism in its multiple dimensions - economic, political, social, ecological, military, and cultural. Building on his earlier works on globalization, William I. Robinson discusses the nature of the new global capitalism, the rise of a globalized production and financial system, a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state and warns of the rise of a global police state to contain the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system that is crisis-ridden and out of control. Robinson concludes with an exploration of how diverse social and political forces are responding to the crisis and alternative scenarios for the future.

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

Abstract: Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, mixed farming practices of hill peoples, mainly swidden agriculture, enhanced their liberty and mobility while subverting coercive taxation by the state. Chapter four covers interaction between the state and ungoverned frontier, where Scott argues that certain markers like language and ethnicity define the shifting boundary. Chinese definitions of civilization contrast with barbarism to inform this concept, denoting that city life as natural meant“[altitude] could then be coded primitive”(p.103) and civilizing efforts were progressive. In chapter five the use of Zomia as a refuge from the valley states is explored and correlated with similar instances outside Southeast Asia; in the New World and Mesopotamia, native peoples fled fertile farmland for the safety of shatter zones. Chapter six focuses on what Scoot terms ‘escape agriculture’, a decentralized and highly malleable farming regime that allowed hill people to avoid confrontation with valley states. Deemed primitive and inefficient, escape agriculture was an effective form of resistance to state control. A half chapter, 6 1/2, discusses the oral tradition of Zomia as a response to the writing-literacy of valley states and the usefulness of ‘Lisu forgetting’ in refusing to cooperate with traditional historical narratives. Both are efforts by hill peoples to resist cultural conformity with the valleys, which disengage on the level of communication and memory. Chapter seven discusses ethnogenesis, described as the fluid nature of ethnicities and identities which impeded efforts to compartmentalize and politically arrange hill peoples. Chapter eight explores the litany of rebellions, or perpetual resistance, to political domination by various Zomians. Prophetic movements operate within Zomia’s diffused social climate, creating what Scott terms “the ultimate escape social In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott develops his theory that state-averse peoples use mountainous terrain and sheer altitude to avoid incorporation into valley regimes. The central focus is on Zomia, the largest extant autonomous region, where “location at the margins, physical mobility, their flexible social structure … are better seen on a long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation”(p. 9). Scott’s exploration of Zomia reveals the glaring flaws of centralized government, noting that the utility of anarchy in hill society is not barbarism, but strategic nonalignment to the interest of the nation- state. Spanning eight southeastern countries, numerous religions, and hundreds of languages, Zomia is a collection of diverse peoples and cultures bound by their geographical locality and desire to avoid incorporation into the valley states. Refusing to adopt the customs of valley states affirms independence, and their “agricultural and social practices … can best be understood as techniques to make good this evasion, while maintaining the economic advantages of the lowland connection”(p. 25). Chapter two concerns state appropriation of the land politically and the ‘friction’ that inhibits central administration. The state’s ability to project power was enhanced by wet-rice cultivation; concentrating manpower and food production meant the state exerted tremendous power over citizens, making Zomia a refuge for those avoiding state control. Chapter three explores the relationship between arable land and manpower, noting that state power rested more upon control of labor than territory in Southeast Asia. The

States of Conservation: Protection, Politics, and Pacting within UNESCO's World Heritage Committee

Abstract: The title, States of Conservation, deliberately references the two “states” that now occupy critical yet oppositional nodes within UNESCO’s 1972 Convention and its conservation agenda. It recalls the State of Conservation (SOC) reports commissioned by the World Heritage Center in conjunction with its Advisory Bodies that relay the condition of World Heritage properties to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. But more critically, “states” here also refers to the most powerful, emergent players in World Heritage Site inscription and protection processes—the States Parties of the 1972 Convention. Many researchers have debated the merits and consequences of World Heritage. While this work remains critical, my own contribution specifically traces the international political pacting, national economic interests, and voting blocs through which particular states increasingly set the World Heritage agenda and recast UNESCO as an agency for global branding rather than global conservation. I contend that as the rush for World Heritage inscription increases and economic and geo-political pacting between nations intensifies, the resources, concerns, and commitments for conservation of sites already inscribed potentially declines. The politics of inscription has now spilled over into the politics of conservation and endangerment. But whereas the former seeks international status and socio-economic benefits through global branding, the

Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci

Abstract: This chapter shows how the gramscian conception of hegemony involved, in the practical state and the operation of an anti-reductionist problematic of ideology. It restate the main argument: showing that a radically anti-economistic problematic of ideology is operating in the practical state in Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony and that it constitutes its actual condition of intelligibility. In the case of the hegemony of the working class, therefore, the latter would have to extricate the social groups which it required as allies from the influence of bourgeois ideology and impose its own ideology upon them. As presented here the problematic of hegemony contains in the practical state the broad outlines of a possible articulation between the relative autonomy of ideology and the determination in the last instance by the economy. Gramsci must surely be the first to have undertaken a complete and radical critique of economism, and it is here that his main contribution to Marxist theory of ideology lies.

The ‘state’ of food sovereignty in Latin America: political projects and alternative pathways in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia

Abstract: The concept of food sovereignty has been enshrined in the constitutions of a number of countries around the world without any clear consensus around what state-sponsored ‘food sovereignty’ might entail. At the forefront of this movement are the countries of the so-called ‘pink tide’ of Latin America – chiefly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This paper examines how state commitments to food sovereignty have been put into practice in these three countries, asking if and how efforts by the state contribute to significant transformation or if they simply serve the political purposes of elites. Understanding the state as a complex arena of class struggle, we suggest that state efforts around food sovereignty open up new political spaces in an ongoing struggle around control over food systems at different scales. Embedded in food sovereignty is a contradictory notion of sovereignty, requiring simultaneously a strong developmentalist state and the redistribution of power to facilitate direct control over food sy...

Pascal's Wager: Health Insurance Exchanges, Obamacare, and the Republican Dilemma

Abstract: Enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) created a dilemma for Republican policy makers at the state level. States could maximize control over decision making and avoid federal intervention by establishing their own health insurance exchanges. Yet GOP leaders feared that creating exchanges would entrench a law they intensely opposed and undermine legal challenges to the ACA. Republicans' calculations were further complicated by uncertainty over the Supreme Court's ruling on the ACA's constitutionality and the outcome of the November 2012 elections. In the first year of operation, only seventeen states and the District of Columbia chose to design and implement their own exchanges; another six partnered with the federal government, and twenty-seven states ceded control to Washington. Out of thirty states with Republican governors in 2013, only four launched their own exchange. Why did many Republican-led states that initially appeared open to establishing exchanges ultimately reverse course? Drawing on interviews with state policy makers and secondary data, we trace the evolution of Republican responses to the exchange dilemma during 2010-13. We explore how exchanges became controversial and explain why so few Republican-led states opted for their own exchange, focusing on the intensifying resistance to Obamacare amid a rightward shift in state politics, partisan polarization, and uncertainty over the ACA's fate.

World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

Abstract: In World Order, Henry Kissinger - one of the leading practitioners of world diplomacy and author of On China - makes his monumental investigation into the 'tectonic plates' of global history and state relations World Order is the summation of Henry Kissinger's thinking about history, strategy and statecraft As if taking a perspective from far above the globe, it examines the great tectonic plates of history and the motivations of nations, explaining the attitudes that states and empires have taken to the rest of the world from the formation of Europe to our own times Kissinger identifies four great 'world orders' in history - the European, Islamic, Chinese and American Since the end of Charlemagne's empire, and especially since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europeans have striven for balance in international affairs, first in their own continent and then globally Islamic states have looked to their destined expansion over regions populated by unbelievers, a position exemplified today by Iran under the ayatollahs For over 2000 years the Chinese have seen 'all under Heaven' as being tributary to the Chinese Emperor America views itself as a 'city on a hill', a beacon to the world, whose values have universal validity How have these attitudes evolved and how have they shaped the histories of their nations, regions, and the rest of the world? What has happened when they have come into contact with each other? How have they balanced legitimacy and power at different times? What is the condition of each in our contemporary world, and how are they shaping relations between states now? To answer these questions Henry Kissinger draws upon a lifetime's historical study and unmatched experience as a world statesman His account is shot through with observations about how historical change takes place, how some leaders shape their times and others fail to do so, and how far states can stray from the ideas which define them World Order is a masterpiece of narrative, analysis and portraits of great historical actors that only Henry Kissinger could have written

Alternative Complexities: The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadic States

Abstract: Almost a century of systematic anthropological research on pastoral nomads has produced significant data and theory for understanding these mobile societies. Substantially less attention has been devoted to complex sociopolitical organization among pastoral nomadic groups and, in particular, to the large-scale polities referred to as nomadic confederations, states, or sometimes empires. This article reviews established ideas for how and why complex organization emerged among nomadic groups and then considers these ideas in the context of recent archaeological theory on statehood and new material evidence for pastoral nomadic prehistory. Revised conceptions of both the state and the nomad suggest that pastoral nomadic polities represent alternative forms of complex organization that were different from classic Old World states but still quite complex in unexpected ways. These organizational differences resulted from the mobile and flexible politics practiced among herding peoples and gave rise to regional polities based on spatial networking, distributed authority, and innovations in transport and exchange.

Toward a political geography of food sovereignty: transforming territory, exchange and power in the liberal sovereign state

Abstract: The failures of food security and other policies to guarantee the right to food motivate the calls for the radical reforms to the food system called for by food sovereignty. Food sovereignty narratives identify neoliberal state policies and global capital as the source of the food insecurity, and seek new rights for producers and consumers. However, the nature of territorial state power and the juridical structures of the (neo)liberal state may mute the more radical aims of food sovereignty. An engagement with literature on liberal sovereignty illustrates the primacy of the neoliberal market to the exercise of liberal sovereignty by the modern nation-state. The rights of the state to govern trade, often in the interests of capital, and the rights of trade and commerce often trump the citizen's right to food. Reading political theory against the practice of food sovereignty offers insight into solutions for food sovereignty that work within, against and in between the powers of the sovereign liberal state....

Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship

Abstract: How is the Internet transforming the relationships between citizens and states? What happens to politics when international migration is coupled with digital media, making it easy for people to be politically active in a nation from outside its borders? In Nation as Network, Victoria Bernal creatively combines media studies, ethnography, and African studies to explore this new political paradigm through a striking analysis of how Eritreans in diaspora have used the Internet to shape the course of Eritrean history. Bernal argues that Benedict Anderson's famous concept of nations as "imagined communities" must now be rethought because diasporas and information technologies have transformed the ways nations are sustained and challenged. She traces the development of Eritrean diaspora websites over two turbulent decades that saw the Eritrean state grow ever more tyrannical. Through Eritreans' own words in posts and debates, she reveals how new subjectivities are formed and political action is galvanized online. She suggests that "infopolitics"-struggles over the management of information-make politics in the twenty-first century distinct, and she analyzes the innovative ways Eritreans deploy the Internet to support and subvert state power. Nation as Network is a unique and compelling work that advances our understanding of the political significance of digital media.

Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom

Abstract: Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling , Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.

‘Fragile States’: introducing a political concept

Abstract: The special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the oecd, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the n...

How European citizenship produces a differential political space

Abstract: Since its formalisation in 1992, European citizenship as a membership status detached from nationality has been regarded as a promise of a ‘democracy to come’ (Derrida, 2006) . There is a close historical connection between the fall of the Berlin wall and the introduction of a common citizen status for the peoples of the present and future member states. The Maastricht Treaty was a self-proclaimed further step towards the accomplishment of a more integrated, more democratic and larger Union, and the establishment of a European citizenship was meant to be the sign and the foundation of these future developments (Preuss, 1998 ; Linklater, 1998). At the same time, almost twenty years later the present state of Europe seems to be much less encouraging. The economic crisis that started in 2008 has amplified the differences among EU member states : the economic and social conditions of European citizens have significantly diverged since the introduction of the common currency in 2000, and old stereotypes and mistrust have reappeared in the public debates and controversies (Hadjimichalis, 2011 ; Shore, 2012). The divergent social and economic conditions, and the luck of a form of solidarity among European citizens, represent a threat to the credibility of European citizenship, understood as a symbol of political unity. Starting from an analysis of the historical background of EU citizenship and of the present conditions of its functioning, this chapter attempts to provide a definition of EU citizenship as a tool for building spatial differentiation at the continental level.

Indigenous Autonomy and the Contradictions of Plurinationalism in Bolivia

Abstract: The government of Bolivia led by President Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party claims to be constructing a new postliberal or plurinational state. However, this alleged experiment in plurinationalism conflicts with two central elements of government and MAS party strategy: the expansion of the economic development model based on the extraction of non-renewable natural resources, and the MAS's efforts to control political space, including indigenous territories. This article analyzes these contradictions by examining how Bolivia's constitution and legal framework appear to support indigenous autonomy while simultaneously constraining it. Specifically, it explores how political and bureaucratic processes have seriously limited opportunities to exercise indigenous rights to autonomy. The article makes a comparative analysis of the implications of Bolivia's experience for indigenous autonomy and plurinationalism for other resource extraction–dependent states.

Convincing State-Builders? Disaggregating Internal Legitimacy in Abkhazia

Abstract: De facto states, functional on the ground but unrecognized by most states, have long been black boxes for systematic empirical research. This study investigates de facto states’ internal legitimacy—people's confidence in the entity itself, the regime, and institutions. While internal legitimacy is important for any state, it is particularly important for de facto states, whose lack of external legitimacy has made internal legitimacy integral to their quest for recognition. We propose that the internal legitimacy of de facto states depends on how convincing they are to their “citizens” as state-builders. Using original data from a 2010 survey in Abkhazia, we examine this argument based on respondent perceptions of security, welfare, and democracy. Our findings suggest that internal legitimacy is shaped by the key Weberian state-building function of monopoly of the legitimate use of force, as well as these entities’ ability to fulfill other aspects of the social contract.

Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State

Abstract: 1. Rethinking civil rights and American political development 2. The birth of the NAACP, mob violence, and the challenge of public opinion 3. The unsteady march into the Oval Office 4. Anti-lynching legislation and the sinking of the Republican ship in Congress 5. Defending the right to live 6. Civil rights bound Appendix: manuscript sources.

De Facto States in International Politics (1945–2011): A New Data Set

Abstract: Sovereign states remain the primary units of analysis in conflict research. Yet, the empirical record suggests that the international system includes a wider range of actors whose behavior is relevant for conflict outcomes. This article introduces De Facto States in International Politics (1945–2011), a new data set dedicated to understanding the behavior of de facto states—separatist statelike entities such as Abkhazia. I begin by explaining why de facto states deserve attention. Further, I provide a definition of the de facto state that separates it from cognate phenomena. Thereafter, I offer an overview of the data set and illustrate its utility by demonstrating how it contributes to the literatures on war and state making, civil war, and rebel governance.