State (polity)

About: State (polity) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36954 publications have been published within this topic receiving 719822 citations. The topic is also known as: state (polity).

Globalization, the knowledge society, and the Network State: Poulantzas at the millennium

Abstract: In State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas conceptualized a state that materializes and concentrates power and displaces the class struggle from the economic to the political arena. In the past twenty years, much has changed. We argue that economic relations have been transformed by economic globalization, work reorganization, and the compression of space, time, and knowledge transmission through an information and communications revolution. Knowledge is far more central to production, and the locus of the relation between power and knowledge has moved out of the nation state that was so fundamental to Poulantzas’ analysis.

Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation

Abstract: Introduction: The Death of the Nation?Part I: Culture as Freedom: Territorializations and Deterritorializations The Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the Social and Political BodyKant's Cosmopolitanism and the Technic of NatureIncarnations of the Ideal: Nation and State in Fichte and HegelRevolutions That Take Place in the Head: Marx and the National Question in Socialist DecolonizatonPart II: Surviving (Postcoloniality) Novel Nation: The Buildung of the Postcolonial Nation as Sociological OrganismThe Haunting of the People: The Spectral Public Sphere in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru QuartetAfterlives: The Mutual Haunting of the State and NationThe Neocolonial State and Other Prostheses of the Postcolonial National Body: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Project of Revolutionary National CultureEpilogue. Spectral Nationality: The Living-On of the Postcolonial Nation in Globalization

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Abstract: This book should be widely read, discussed, and diffused. Building on generations of struggle and scholarship, it provides the basis for a full understanding of the US as a colonial-settler state. ...

Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities.

Abstract: Anthony Reid (*) This article attempts to bring together recent literature about the typology of nationalism, with the ways in which 'Malay' or 'Melayu' have been used as the core of an ethnie or a nationalist project. Different meanings of 'Melayu' were salient at different times in Sumatra, in the Peninsula and in the eastern Archipelago, and the Dutch and British used their respective translations of it very differently Modern ethno-nationalist projects in Malaysia and Brunei made 'Melayu' a contested and often divisive concept, whereas its translation into the hitherto empty term 'Indonesia' might have provided an easier basis for territorial, or even ultimately civic, nationalism in that country. As the world stumbles hesitantly towards post-nationalist ways of understanding identity, it has at last become possible to discern what nationalism is, and the roles it has played in dominating the last century of our common history. (1) It no longer seems as 'natural' and uncontroversial as it did at its height before 1945. Yet the plethora of fine analyses which began to appear in the 1980s (2) has barely begun to be integrated into the study of Southeast or indeed East Asia, where nationalism is still new enough to arouse more excitement and sympathy than concern or serious analysis. The work of Benedict Anderson, global in reach but drawing more heavily than most on anti-colonial examples in the New World, is much the most influential of these theoretical models among writers on Southeast Asia. I wish to draw attention here however to a different strain of analysis well established in the European-focused writing -- the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms. Hans Kohn, writing at the depth of Germany's disastrous experiment with extreme nationalism, was the first to point out how differently nationalism developed east of the Rhine. 'French nationalism was born (as English and American had [been] before it) in a wave of generous enthusiasm for the cause of mankind; the opposing nationalisms ... were directed to laudable but narrower goals, self-centred but antagonistic.' (3) He showed how territorial nationalism developed earlier, gradually admitting more and more groups within the borders in question into citizenship in the nation, which was always territorially defined. Anthony Smith makes this disti0nction crucial to his discussion in The Ethnic Origins of Nations. (4) Where in the older territorial model the geographically bounded state eventually created the culturally coherent nation, the ethnic model was the other way around: an ethnic group with unclear borders attempted to acquire appropriate borders and political status. Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism is so far the most careful historical analysis of the relationship between these two models in the context of European history. She sees the concept of nation developing in sixteenth-century England in the sense of a sovereign people, entitled to representation in the body politic. It was thus a concept closely wedded to the emergence of democracy in early modern Europe. As it spread eastwards through Europe in the eighteenth century, however, the unique quality of the nation became more marked than its sovereign or democratic character. The sovereignty of this type of nation was held to lie in its distinctiveness, not its participatory civic character. While in the civic variant 'nationality is at least in principle open and voluntaristic', in the ethnic variant 'it is believed to be inherent - one can neither acquire it if one does not have it, nor change it if one does'. (5) Although the distinction on the ground cannot be as sharp as the one in abstract analysis, her study of 'five roads' shows Germany and Russia more influenced by this ethnic path, while England and the United States (in common with most anti-colonial New World nationalisms) can be characterised more by the civic path, and France by an ambivalent path eventually veering towards the civic. …

Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times

Abstract: This essay examines recent debates concerning the emergence of cosmopolitan norms such as those pertaining to universal human rights, crimes against humanity as well as refugee, immigrant and asylum status. What some see as the spread of a new human rights regime and a new world order others denounce as the “spread of empire” or characterize as “law without a state”. In contrast, by focusing on the relationship of global capitalism to deterritorialized law this essay distinguishes between the spread of human rights norms and deterritorialized legal regimes. Although both cosmopolitan norms and deterritorialized law challenge the nation-state and threaten to escape control by democratic legislatures, it argues that cosmopolitan norms enhance popular sovereignty while many other forms of global law undermine it. It concludes by pleading for a vision of “republican federalism” and “democratic iterations”, which would enhance popular sovereignty by establishing interconnections across the local, the national ...