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).

Social movements as challenges to authority: resistance to an emerging conceptual hegemony

Abstract: This chapter argues against the recent crystallization of “contentions politics” as the anchoring concept for the study of collective action on the grounds that it is overly restrictive, foreclosing consideration and analysis of much social movement activity not tied directly to government or the state and which thus falls beyond the bailiwick of the political arena. The problematic character of the contentious politics frame is discussed and illustrated both empirically and conceptually, and a more inclusive and elastic conceptualization is proposed and elaborated, one that conceives of movements broadly as collective challenges to systems of authority. This alternative conceptualization includes collective challenges within and to institutional, organizational, and cultural domains other than just the state or the polity. Not only are direct challenges to authorities included, but also movements that challenge authorities indirectly either through covert means, as in the case of terrorist movements, or by exiting the system, as in the case of separatist and communal movements and other-worldly religious “cults.”

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.

Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism

Abstract: When and where did the environmental movement begin? To understand how a public endued with the principles of laissez-faire reversed in such short order a century-old policy of government land disposal, this paper examines how public ownership of land came to be celebrated, with a newly defined professional corps of government foresters such as Dietrich Brandis and Gifford Pinchot feted as popular heroes. Hard-headed environmentalists and legislators found in empire forestry a ready-made model to construct vast areas of the public domain as a utensil for not only environmental but state purposes—industrial, settlement, and budgetary. The empire forestry matrix of government reservations, fire protection, and revenue-enhancing forests solved the tension between romantic preservationist notions and laissez-faire ideals and gave the compromise from which modern environmentalism emerged: it posed environmental problems and solutions as a means to construct the state. This article traces the international trail of modern environmentalism from India, under Lord Dalhousie's forest charter, to the British colonies in Africa and Australasia where it matured, and finally to Canada, the United States and other parts of the globe where environmentalism permanently entered the pantheon of democratic political creeds.

States of Exception on the Mexico–U.S. Border: Security, “Decisions,” and Civilian Border Patrols

Abstract: Civilian border patrol groups, like the much publicized Minutemen, who engage in the unofficial and unauthorized patrolling of U.S. borders, have proliferated in recent years. They have received an overwhelming amount of press, both national and international, but have garnered very little scholarly attention. In this article, I explore this phenomenon with an eye toward addressing conceptual and theoretical issues raised by the existence and practices of these groups. Specifically, how do we conceptualize civilian border patrol groups in terms of their relationship to statecraft, identity, and security? Do they have implications for the ways in which sovereignty and the political can be understood? I argue that while Carl Schmitt's theory of the political and the Copenhagen School's securitization theory are useful in attempting to understand and theorize the practices of these groups, the case ultimately points to the need for a reexamination of some of Schmitt's concepts including sovereignty and the political. Evidence from this case suggests that we should not limit our understanding of decisions that result in contemporary manifestations of exceptionalism to those controlled by the state or elites. Rather, decisions can arise in numerous locales and can be made by seemingly insignificant agents. This has implications for how we understand the practices that can lead to exceptionalism as well as how we understand sovereignty and the political.

The Segmentary State in Africa and Asia

Abstract: Segmentary state was the concept coined to fit Alur society into the theory of political anthropology of the 1940s. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard made the first giant step in the comparative analysis of African political systems, but supposedly centralized states and stateless segmentary lineage systems were the only ones to receive full consideration. Nadel had already distilled the voluminous Eurocentric literature on the theory and philosophy of the state, overburdened as it was with Hegelian growth, to produce a precise empirically oriented and workable definition of the state for anthropologists. Alur society did not fit or even approximate anywhere within the range of the model provided. But the model formulated in 1956 under Alur inspiration was an awkward and cumbersome derivation of Nadel's rather than a clear model in its own right. It would be simpler and better to define the segmentary state as one in which the spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible, changing periphery. The latter is confined to the central, core domain.