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).

Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East

Abstract: Tribes and State Formation is the first effort to bring together the disciplines of history, anthropology, and political science around a major topic that none of these alone is adequately equipped to address. How and why did certain tribal societies metamorphose over time into states? Scholars concerned with general questions of theory and methodology and the interaction of anthropology and history, as well as political scientists and sociologists concerned with concepts of the state in the Middle East and other developing regions, will be well served by this innovative work. The articles by an array of distinguished scholars cover a wide range of topics: the relationship of ideology to tribal and state power, comparisons between different regional patterns of tribe-state interaction, historical case studies from North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Iran extending to the contemporary period; theoretical and methodological inquiries, and systematic reviews of the literature on tribes and states. The articles argue against a unilinear approach to the study of tribes and state formation by emphasizing that states often existed alongside tribes and even created tribes for their own purposes. Some case studies emphasize the incompatibility of states and tribalism, while others illustrate the many areas in which tribes actually enhanced rather than impeded state formation.

Sino-Capitalism: China's Reemergence and the International Political Economy

Abstract: There is little doubt that China's international reemergence represents one of the most significant events in modern history. As China's political economy gains in importance, its interactions with other major political economies will shape global values, institutions, and policies, thereby restructuring the international political economy. Drawing on theories and concepts in comparative capitalism, the author envisages China's reemergence as generating Sino-capitalism—a capitalist system that is already global in reach but one that differs from Anglo-American capitalism in important respects. Sino-capitalism relies more on informal business networks than legal codes and transparent rules. It also assigns the Chinese state a leading role in fostering and guiding capitalist accumulation. Sino-capitalism, ultimately, espouses less trust in free markets and more trust in unitary state rule and social norms of reciprocity, stability, and hierarchy. After conceptualizing Sino-capitalism's domestic political economy, the author uses the case of China's efforts to internationalize its currency, the yuan or renminbi, to systematically illustrate the multifarious manner in which the domestic logic of Sino-capitalism is expressed at the global level. Rather than presenting a deterministic argument concerning the future international role of China, he argues that China's stance and strategy in the international political economy hew quite closely to Sino-capitalism's hybrid compensatory institutional arrangements on the domestic level: state guidance; flexible and entrepreneurial networks; and global integration. Sino-capitalism therefore represents an emerging system of global capitalism centered on China that is producing a dynamic mix of mutual dependence, symbiosis, competition, and friction with the still dominant Anglo-American model of capitalism.

Antinomies of community: some thoughts on geography, resources and empire

Abstract: Community is a fundamental modality for the conduct of modern politics. This paper explores the antinomies of community in an oil nation: Nigeria. Oil states stand in relation to a particular sort of capitalism (what I call petro-capitalism) in which a key resource (petroleum) and a logic of extraction figure centrally in the making and breaking of community. I pose the following questions: how are communities imagined (or not), territorialized (or not), identified (or not) and ruled (or not) at a multiplicity of scales and in relation to a particular natural resource, namely oil? Each community is imagined, so to say, through and with oil – the communities are ‘naturalized’ in relation to the effects, social, environmental, political, of oil exploration and production – but produces forms of rule and identity that are often fragmented, unruly and violent. The communities I address are, in a sense, all oil-producing communities but of rather different qualities: namely, the chieftainship as a local form of customary community rule at the level of the village; the ethnic or indigenous community at the level of the region; and the nation, or more properly the nation-state known as Nigeria. And standing at the heart of each community is a fundamental contradiction. Nigerian petro-capitalism operates through a particular sort of ‘oil complex’ (a configuration of firm, state and community) that generates or refigures differing sorts of community, what I shall refer to as governable spaces, in which differing sorts of identities, forms of rule and territory come into play. These sorts of community emerge from oil extraction, but the dynamics of petro-capitalism and the oil complex contribute to, and are constitutive of, a deep crisis of secular nationalist development. Imperial oil and its concessionary political economy can be read as a sort of enclosure or dispossession and it is out of this development crisis in Nigeria that particular senses of community are being constituted – with and through oil.

Governance and Public Policy in the United Kingdom

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Public Policy in a Changing World 2. Interpreting Governance 3. Interpreting the Modern State 4. From Modernity to Crisis 5. Internal challenges to the Modern State : The New Right 6. External challenges to the Modern State I: Globalization 7. External challenges to the Modern State II: Europeanization 8. Governance and Civil Society 9. Changing Relations between Ministers and Civil Servants 10. Governance and New Labour 11. Conclusion: Governance, Power and Public Policy

The Utility of Elazar's Political Culture: A Research Note

Abstract: Herein Professor Sharkansky attempts to take an impressionistic concept-Daniel Elazar's well-known theory of state political cultures-and find out empirically whether there is anything to it. He finds that, with some modifications, it is an empirically useful concept, and that it makes an "additive" contribution to our store of knowledge about state politics. It is good to learn, occasionally, that traditional observation can be validated.