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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).


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Journal Article
TL;DR: Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation as mentioned in this paper is a history of the institution of marriage and its role in the formation and enforcement in American society, including the role of the state in defining and enforcing marriage laws.
Abstract: Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Nancy E Cott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2000. 297 pp. ISBN 0-674-- 00320-9. $27.95 (cloth). In this synthesis of the substantial historical literature about marriage, historian Nancy Cott demonstrates that an institution we have traditionally labeled private has in fact always served public purposes, operating through the apparatus of the state. Marriage laws, in the service of moral, economic, and civic objectives, have shaped and continue to shape gender roles inside the home and out; they control the choice of suitable partners, at times in the past establishing racial barriers and at present determining the (il)legitimacy of samesex unions. In addition, marriage law trenches on the conveyance of citizenship, which affects both nationality and suffrage. Most citizens most of the time accept and therefore confirm legal limits; others resist, making marriage law over time a common site of contest about social mores. The revolution that separated the United States from Great Britain affected not only international relations and domestic legal systems; marriage theory also incorporated the repudiation of subjection implicit in monarchical governments. American women "consented" to be governed by husbands of their own choosing, although they lost substantial autonomy when they did so. But the American form of marriage reflected the values not only of a democratic republic but also of a Christian nation. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Native Americans, European and Asian immigrants, religious dissidents such as the Mormons, Utopian socialists-all who espoused nonmajoritarian marital practices could not withstand the demands of Congress and of states that families form themselves into the units prescribed by the Christian church. Thus, tribal arrangements, polygamy, "common law" couples, and communities of "free lovers" largely disappeared by 1900, while tolerance of arranged marriages vanished in the twentieth century. "If marriages produced the polity," Cott notes, "then wrongfully joined marriages could be fatal" (p. 155). Choice and consent notwithstanding, Christian marriage doctrine could countenance rules making interracial marriage unacceptable; and if marriage signified state-sanctioned sexual association, laws controlling prostitution and sex outside of marriage (through restrictions on abortion and birth control) represented the other side of the coin-all in the service of a single model of marriage. …

270 citations

BookDOI
31 Dec 1997
TL;DR: Cedarman as mentioned in this paper argues that the dominant focus on cohesive nation-states as the only actors of world politics obscures crucial differences between the state and the nation; traditional theory usually treats these units as fixed.
Abstract: The disappearance and formation of states and nations after the end of the Cold War have proved puzzling to both theorists and policy-makers. Cedarman argues that this lack of conceptual preparation stems from two tendencies in conventional theorizing: firstly, the dominant focus on cohesive nation-states as the only actors of world politics obscures crucial differences between the state and the nation; secondly, traditional theory usually treats these units as fixed. This book presents complex adaptive systems modelling as a way of analyzing world politics. It provides a series of models, computerized thought-experiments, that separate the state from the nation and incorporate these as emergent rather than preconceived actors.

270 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the current difficulty in reasserting civilian supremacy in the Turkish political system by focusing on several theoretical points, from a historical perspective, relating to the substance and sources of the Turkish military's autonomy.
Abstract: The most profound contradiction marking Turkish democracy in the 1990s is the demonstrated inability of civilian politicians to control the military. The Turkish military enjoys a strong degree of military autonomy. Three times it has intervened in Turkish politics. The patterned nature of military-civilian relations has created a legacy that reinforces and maintains the independence of the armed forces. Since 1980, however, fresh developments make studying military-civilian relations even more significant. First, the democratic thrust of the radically altered political economy since 1980, both domestically and internationally, must be considered. The growing political role of the armed forces is at best anachronistic and at worse incongruent with the regime's commitment to the norms associated with liberal democracy and free market capitalism. The existence of parallel state structures, one civilian and the other military, undermines the authority and the democratic accountability of elected civilian governments. Furthermore, despite the deep breach in Turkish politics between rhetoric and action, the structural distortions and contradictions generated by the march toward a more "liberal" economic and political order, and the Kurdish insurgency, one should not assume that the past necessarily predicts the future. Finally, there are internal and global conditions antagonistic to the military's ethics and political credentials. Nevertheless, the harmony of the series of civilian governments with the military since the transition to civilian democracy testifies to the civilians' tenuous hegemony. This essay addresses the current difficulty in reasserting civilian supremacy in the Turkish political system. The problem will be identified and analyzed by focusing on several theoretical points, from a historical perspective, relating to the substance and sources of the Turkish military's autonomy. The autonomy of the military will then be examined using index variables measuring the military's political effectiveness vis-A-vis civilian institutions over the last two decades. It is important to note that this essay neither analyzes the causes of coups in Turkey nor studies the nature and consequences of the transition from military to civilian rule. Rather, it focuses on the expanded role of the Turkish military under civilian governments since the 1980 coup.

269 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the World Bank's latest actions effectively target resource-based populations, account for them and the qualities of their environments through new discourses of ecological improvement, and compel them to participate in the new neoliberal process of ecogovernment.
Abstract: This article contends that the debates on the effects of “ globalization” on states and state power could be enhanced by focusing on new global regulatory regimes for the environment, especially those that have recently been designed and operationalized by the World Bank in its borrowing countries. The article concentrates on both the changing structural relations within and among states, which has led to the construction of transnationalized environmental states, and the changing nature of the ‘ art of government,’ in the Foucauldian sense. I utilize the example of World Bank interventions in the Mekong region to demonstrate how these two new dimensions of power operate. Based on ethnographic research, I argue that the World Bank’ s latest actions effectively target resource-based populations, account for them and the qualities of their environments through new discourses of ecological improvement, and compel them to participate in the new neoliberal process of ecogovernment. The science of judging these populations’ needs and dee ciencies becomes critical to the World Bank’ s interventions and investments, and gets refracted through new environmental state institutions and foreign investments designed for borrowing countries. In this way, the art of eco-government circulates and expands through multiple sites of encounter (e.g., beyond and below the nation-state) and leads to new forms of capitalist expansion and new modalities of power/knowledge. In a 1996 report written by a prominent environmental organization for the World Bank sits a hand-drawn map of Lao People’ s Democratic Republic (Laos). This map does not demarcate the nation’ s capital, its towns or villages; the only cartographic markings are round,

267 citations

Book
24 May 2004
TL;DR: The Changing Welfare, Changing States as discussed by the authors is a recent book that encourages students to "rethink" welfare states, drawing on social policy, politics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, and contributes to key debates on globalization, neo-liberalism, changing forms of governance and conflicts over citizenship.
Abstract: Changing Welfare, Changing States disentangles the various answers to these questions, inviting us to think differently about the remaking of the relationships between welfare, state and nation. Informed by the `cultural turn' in the social sciences, the book reflects a commitment to the importance of rethinking social policy at a time when social, political and intellectual certainties have been profoundly unsettled. Key features of the book include: } a thought-provoking approach - encourages students to 'rethink' welfare states. } broad coverage - engages with a range of approaches to the study of welfare states, drawing on social policy, politics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. } contributes to key debates on: globalization, neo-liberalism, changing forms of governance and conflicts over citizenship in the contemporary remaking of welfare states. Written by a leading academic in the field, the book has a flowing narrative and clear structure that makes it accessible to and popular with students and academics alike. It is an invaluable resource for undergraduates and postgraduates in the field of social policy and will also be of interest to students and researchers in related disciplines such as sociology, politics, anthropology and cultural studies.

266 citations


Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202214
2021837
20201,140
20191,144
20181,239
20171,447