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 Scottish nation 1700-2000

Abstract: Part 1 1700-1760: Scotland in Great Britain the Jacobite challenge the Union and the economy roots of Enlightenment the parish state. Part 2 1760-1830: Scotland transformed the rural lowlands - the old world and the new urbanization the disintegration of clanship the old regime and radical protest highlandism and Scottish identity. Part 3 1830-1939: the world's workshop politics, power and identity in Victorian Scotland the decline and fall of liberal hegemony the Scottish city religion and society educating the people the highlands and crofting society land, elites and people emigrants new Scots Scottish women - family, work and politics. Part 4 1939-2000: war and peace the Scottish question a nation reborn?.

The responsibility to protect? Imposing the ‘Liberal Peace’

Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, debate over international peacekeeping has been dominated by the question of the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. Advocates of the right of intervention, largely Western states, have tended to uphold liberal internationalist claims that new international norms prioritizing individual rights to protection promise a framework of liberal peace and that the Realist framework of the Cold War period when state security was viewed as paramount has been superseded. In an attempt to codify and win broader international legitimacy for new interventionist norms, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released a two-volume report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. In the light of this report and broader developments in international security in the wake of September 11, this essay suggests that rather than a moral shift away from the rights of sovereignty, the dominance of the liberal peace thesis, in fact, reflects the new balan...

What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate

Abstract: Scholars of world politics enjoy well-developed theories of the consequences of unipolarity or hegemony, but have little to say about what happens when a state's foreign relations take on imperial properties. Empires, we argue, are characterized by rule through intermediaries and the existence of distinctive contractual relations between cores and their peripheries. These features endow them with a distinctive network-structure from those associated with unipolar and hegemonic orders. The existence of imperial relations alters the dynamics of international politics: processes of divide and rule supplant the balance-of-power mechanism; the major axis of relations shift from interstate to those among imperial authorities, local intermediaries, and other peripheral actors; and preeminent powers face special problems of legitimating their bargains across heterogeneous audiences. We conclude with some observations about the American empire debate, including that the United States is, overall, less of an imperial power than it was during the Cold War.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

Abstract: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by WENDY BROWN New York, Zone Books (distributed by The MIT Press), 2010, 168 pp., 10 illustration $25.95, 19.95[pounds sterling] cloth, ISBN 978-1-935408-08-6. The future of independent and equal state sovereignties is in doubt, or so Wendy Brown argues in her monograph concerning the recent explosion in state-built border walls for keeping people either 'in' or 'out', and to differentiate between 'us' and 'them'. The author of this slim volume utilises the material, physical and psychological characteristics of walls to highlight a renewal of concern regarding the seeming imperviousness of global capital and other transnational forces to individual sovereign state power. The growing imbalance in strength between the global and the local forms in the author's view the central danger to longstanding frameworks of international relations and power-politics. Professor Brown argues in particular that, while walls may project an image of impregnability, the huge pressures being placed on traditional sovereign frameworks of governance by globalised forces have only strengthened the opposing contexts of virtual power over physical power, of open sourcing over material appropriation, of de-territorialised tentacle of control over fixed territorial limits, and so on. Accordingly, border walls can only project an image of statehood, soothe a growing sense of state powerlessness, and bolster national xenophobia against the 'outside other'. How do walls function as effective communicators? Professor Brown points to three central paradoxes of what walls represent and make visual: the power to open or block, to universalise or to exclude/stratify, and to allow virtual networking or to impose physical barriers to networking. After these binary themes are introduced, she develops two further ideas: first, that state sovereignties are today battling a larger 'sovereignty' of globalisation, in the sense of 'a higher power' or the 'power to decide', as advocated by such theorists as Carl Schmitt; secondly, that states utilise the visual symbolism of walling to project an underlying theological dimension of state power, by helping to produce sovereign awe ('God is on our side'). She develops this latter idea in particular to illustrate her premise that the more walls are built, the more 'real' state power diminishes. In turn, as walls are of dubious efficacy when faced with human inventiveness, wall-building states rely on their walls to project a more intense sense of state power, while in actuality, walls can serve only as visual coda, in the sense of the theatrical projection of a bounded, secure nation when nothing could be further from the case. For example, some walls foster a bunker mentality among those living inside them, while others securitise a way of life. Notable examples of walls today are detailed throughout the book, and include post-apartheid South Africa, which has built a complex internal maze of walls and checkpoints, and maintains a controversial electrified security barrier on its Zimbabwe border; Saudi Arabia, which has a ten-foot-high concrete post structure along its border with Yemen (soon to be followed by a similar wall at the Iraq border); and India, which has walled-out Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma, and has walled-in Kashmir, as well as mining, and placing barbed concertina wire along the Indo-Kashmir border. The building of walls, such as the 'Security Wall' in Israel to contain West Bank and Gazan 'terrorists', or that between the southern U.S. and Mexico, to prevent illegal migration, further illustrates the challenges and insecurities felt by the numerous states whose sovereignty is placed under severe challenge, particularly during the last half century, by the growing transnational flows of capital, people, technology, ideas, violence, and politico-religious loyalties. The importance of international institutions of economic governance such as the IMF and WTO, and in the last quarter century the ever-broader assertions of international law and individual rights, further illustrate a failing Westphalian world order of territorial sovereign states. …

The state tradition in Western Europe

Abstract: Why have continental European societies developed the idea of the abstract impersonal state as the fundamental institution of political rule? Why, on the other hand, has this idea played a relatively insignificant part in the history of English-speaking countries? It is to such questions that this major study is addressed. With clarity and conciseness, Kenneth Dyson examines the fascinating tapestry of thought about public authority that the state tradition represents, and identifies the major individual contributions to that tapestry. In addition to offering a clear conceptualisation of state, he deals with such key issues as the role of the intellectual, the social function of state theories, and the difficulties of accommodating state and democracy.