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).

The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Partiality: community, citizenship and the defence of closure 2. Impartiality: freedom, equality and open borders 3. The Federal Republic of Germany: the rise and fall of a right to asylum 4. The United Kingdom: the value of asylum 5. The United States: the making and breaking of a refugee consensus 6. Australia: restricting asylum, resettling refugees 7. From ideal to non-ideal theory: reckoning with the state, politics and consequences 8. Liberal democratic states and ethically defensible asylum practices List of references Index.

Rebuilding State Institutions in Collapsed States

Abstract: The international community has embraced an unprecedented approach to collapsed states — those that have lost their capacity to perform even the most basic functions. While historically such states simply disappeared, divided up into smaller units or were conquered by a more powerful neighbour, collapsed states are now expected to be rebuilt within the same international borders thanks to the intervention of multilateral organizations and bilateral donors. Furthermore, there is now the expectation that these states will from the very beginning be rebuilt as democracies with strong institutions. This article examines the model of state reconstruction currently adopted by the international community and some examples of its implementation. It concludes that the approach cannot be applied to all countries, that institution–building is often undertaken prematurely, and that there is a discrepancy between the donors’ prescriptions and the resources they are willing to make available.

On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States : State Formation in the Context of ‘Fragility’

Abstract: Puts forth the claim that conflict transformation and peacebuilding need to be of a hybrid nature and combine traditional, state- and civil society-centred approaches in order to be successful. The authors critically discuss the discourse on failing states and the current state of the art in state-building. They review successes and failures in the context of Somaliland, Bougainville and East Timor.

The Transformation of the Western State: The Growth of Democracy, Autocracy, and State Power Since 1800

Abstract: This article uses POLITY II, a new dataset on the authority traits of 155 countries, to assess some general historical arguments about the dynamics of political change in Europe and Latin America from 1800 to 1986. The analysis, relying mainly on graphs, focuses first on the shifting balance between democratic and autocratic patterns in each world region and identifies some of the internal and international circumstances underlying the trends, and deviations from them. Trends in three indicators of state power also are examined in the two regions: the state's capacity to direct social and economic life, the coherence of political institutions, and military manpower. The state's capacity has increased steadily in both regions; coherence has increased in the European countries but not Latin America; while military power has fluctuated widley in both regions. The article is foundational to a series of more detailed longitudinal studies of the processes of state growth.

The political economy of trading states: Factor specificity, collective action problems and domestic political institutions

Abstract: The fundamental problem that international trade poses for states is this. Trade typically offers cheaper goods, with more choice for consumers and the greatest economic output for society as a whole. But at the same time, it is also very disruptive to individuals’ lives, tying their incomes to the vagaries of international markets. In so doing, trade affects the distribution of wealth within the domestic economy, raising questions of who gets relatively more or less, and what they can do about it politically. Trade also has important effects, naturally, on aggregate domestic economic welfare and on the distributions of wealth and power among national societies. Anyone theorizing about “trading states” (states of trading societies) should consider the state’s problem of how to weigh the aggregate, external effects against the internal, distributional effects-and indeed against the costs or disturbances that those internal redistributions may bring.