Alternative Routes to State Breakdown: Toward an Integrated Model of Territorial Disintegration

A theoretical strategy is proposed to integrate competing models of state breakdown by conceptualizing key concepts in these models at a more abstract level. The demographic model, which asserts that rapid population growth can bring about state breakdown when economic and political institutions are too rigid, is extracted from Goldstone's work. The geopolitical model, which argues that deteriorating geopolitical condition can bring about state breakdown if the state is too weak and the economy too unproductive, is extracted from Skocpol's and Collins's works. The competing models are conceptualized as alternative and interacting routes to state breakdown where changing population pressure and geopolitical condition may generate integrative or disintegrative tendency depending on state power and productivity. A model describing four dimensions of state power—economic, military, political, and administrative—is constructed to incorporate various conceptualizations of the state in the state breakdown literature. Also integrated in the model is a third alternative route suggesting that rapid market development can generate disintegrative tendency if state power is too low. The synthesized model allows us to see that disintegrative/integrative tendency produced by one route may intensify or alleviate that generated by another route.     

Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics

The crises of representative democracy and of state-based politics have been declared many times and ‘participation’ is often advocated as a remedy for the shortcomings of both. While the literature has extensively discussed representative practices in relation to territorial states, we argue in this article that more attention should be paid to the question of representation within transnational social movements striving for a politics that transcends current territorially bounded representative democracy. Analysing the World Social Forum and West African participatory trade policy-making, we find that as transnational social movements aiming at democratic goals deepen their interactions, they can face demanding questions such as: who or what has a right to be made present in a given political process and how is this established? We claim that avoiding the question of representation in transnational non-state-centred politics leaves power too many places to hide.     

State Formation and Property—Reflections on the Political Technologies of Space in Central America

The paper analyzes state formation as the process whereby power/knowledge complexes organize, use and produce social space. In particular the focus is placed on private land ownership as a historical form of land possession. Privatization of land as a technique of government produced a homogeneous fragmentation of space, and the argument made in the paper is that this space became the primary technique in the construction of dualized Salvadorean society based on the exclusion from the political nation of a large group of delinquent and deviant bodies that should be policed, and the inclusion in the political nation of a small group of land owning individuals that took part in politics.     

Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State

Most commentary on the Edward Snowden affair and other recent accounts of government spying leaked in the media has focused on individual privacy concerns, while overlooking how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which new surveillance technologies grant the state a degree of power unthinkable to past generations – exceeding in reach and complexity even the totalitarian state imagined in Orwell's dystopian account, 1984. Any critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption. In the USA, repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market as well as a corresponding loss of public memory and political identity to encourage the widespread embrace of an authoritarian surveillance culture. The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone into a surveillance regime, even as personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based sites as people move across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. It is no longer possible to address the violations committed by the surveillance state without also analysing this broader regime of security and commodification. The authoritarian nature of the corporate–state surveillance apparatus in the USA can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of entertainment, commerce and punishment, and the increasing labelling of democratic dissent as an act of terrorism. If democracy is to have a future in America, then it is imperative to organize social movements capable of recovering public memory and reclaiming dissent as essential features of responsible citizenship.     

State Failure in the South Caucasus: Proposals for an Analytical Framework

The paper examines state failure in the South Caucasus. First, it determines a general system of 13 categories for analyzing the failure of states. Second, it applies these categories to the three internationally recognised South Caucasian states Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The main focus lies on the state monopoly on the use of force in the entire territory of a country. If the government does not fulfil this condition, it faces a lot of severe consequences for many spheres of state performance and societal activity. In the South Caucasus, only Armenia managed to maintain the state monopoly on the use of force. In contrast, the establishment of separatist state entities (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh) led to the de facto collapse of the Georgian and Azerbaijani statehood. Thus, Georgia and Azerbaijan may be considered as failed states also due to the fact that in the foreseeable future there is no apparent chance to restore their territorial integrity.     

Unspoken Assumptions: Voice and Absolutism at the Court of Louis XIV

This paper indicates how what Norbert Elias described as the disciplining of the aristocracy in 17th-century France, which he took to be essential to the ascendancy of Louis XIV and the growth of the modern state, was itself part of a broader pattern of voiceless politics. The French political bureaucracy and the monarch in this period were able to accumulate power by restraining public political speech, and using a combination of rituals of subjugation and material forms like fortresses to exemplify the power and social efficacy of this political regime. The result was a new form of power, importantly demonstrated in the land and its people: what we have come to call the territorial state.     

Competing for Lebanon's Diaspora: Transnationalism and Domestic Struggles in a Weak State

Just as state strength influences relationships between state and society and among social forces within a national territory, so does it shape relationships between states and their emigrants and diasporas across territorial borders. Scholars debate how transnational migration affirms or challenges the dominance of the nation‐state. When sending states are weak, however, diaspora–homeland linkages can undermine the role of the state in a way that is not transformative, but sustaining of the status quo. Examining Lebanon, this paper explores how domestic actors extend their struggles to vie over and through kin abroad. Three realms of competition are paramount: demography, votes, and money. The resulting transnational outreach reproduces a politics in which both expatriates and the state function as resources as much as actors.     

Jurisdiction,inscription, and state formation: administrative modernism and knowledge regimes

In seventeenth-century France, Colbert built a more effective state administration not by rationalizing state offices but by using public documents to increase the government’s intellectual capacity to exercise logistical power and engage in territorial governance. This pattern calls into question Weber’s model of the genesis of “modern officialdom,” suggesting that its source was not social rationalization, but rather the identification and management of expertise. Colbert recruited into government nascent technocrats with knowledge useful to territorial politics, using contracts and other documents to limit their independence and subordinate them to patrimonial authorities. They exercised specific duties and impersonal powers in jurisdictional areas—much like modern technocrats. Their expertise enhanced the intellectual capacity of the administration to exercise territorial power and made the state less dependent on patrimonial clienteles without challenging the patrimonial culture of power/knowledge.     

Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement

Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term 'primitive globalization' in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marx's Capital , this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neoliberal globalization by 'separating' or disembedding social actors from conditions that otherwise impede short-term economic activity. This conception, which is considered primarily in relation to the United States, positions the state as both facilitator and victim of globalization, draws attention to state fragmentation and national politics, and places the role of the national state in the local state at the center of unstable linkages. It is suggested that under these conditions the national/local state may be caught between the roles of government and governance; for this reason, as well as others, contemporary globalization remains transitional.     

Crossing Boundaries: Legality and the Power of the State in Unauthorized Migration

Unauthorized migrants, often referred to as 'illegal aliens' or 'undocumented immigrants', are a burning political issue in many countries. This paper examines the complexities of unauthorized migration and addresses competing viewpoints on the subject as it relates to the power of the state. Despite the popular image of unauthorized migration as secret border crossing, migrants become 'illegal' in various ways, and the boundary between 'legal' and 'illegal' is more fluid than it may appear to be. Unauthorized migration is conventionally understood as evidence of the limited power of the state over immigration. This view, however, too narrowly focuses on the power of the state over entries of migrants. If we broaden our perspective and examine its power over migrants' lives and the way in which they are integrated into society, unauthorized migration in fact reveals the strong power of the state, which has a capacity to deprive migrants of their rights.     

Why Territorial Disintegration Has Not Occurred in Russia: Applying State Breakdown Theories to Explain Stability

Much has been written to explain the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Little attention, however, has been paid to understanding why post-1991 Russia has maintained stability despite continued economic and political turmoil throughout the 1990s. This paper attempts to answer this question by applying an integrated model of territorial disintegration to examine the political, economic, demographic, and geopolitical changes in the pre-1991 Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia. The integrated model is constructed by synthesizing Goldstone's demographic-structural model, Skocpol's and Collins' geopolitical model, and a modified version of Collins' argument of the destabilizing potential brought about by rapid market development as three alternative routes to territorial disintegration. It is found that improvement in Russia's geopolitical condition after 1991 is largely responsible for the decline in disintegrative potential. Slower population growth also rendered the demographic route less disintegrative during the 1990s. More effective taxation and the availability of foreign loans enabled the Russian state to handle its financial crises, thereby curbing the development of destabilizing forces through the dynamics proposed by Collins.     

State and towns in the Middle Ages

Conclusion The relationship between state and towns in medieval Scandinavia was a close and a complicated one. Towns were part of the political power, but they were also something else outside the state. p ]From an internal perspective the towns can be regarded as forming part of the power-cum-control system of the state. In medieval Scandinavia this meant that towns should, above all, be considered against the background of the extent and possession of the supremacy right. During the 1000–1150 stage, towns formed political and religious points d'appui for the new feudal sovereignty. In the course of the 1150–1350 stage, they also became vital centers for that exchange of goods that was instigated by the people who were in possession of feudal supremacy. Finally, from 1350 to 1550, the towns became the original bases for the new, mercantile supremacy, in a mutual relation with the emerging territorial state. In feudal society, it was of decisive importance from the beginning to be in control of production; as time went by, however, it turned out to be just as essential to control distribution as well.From an external perspective the medieval towns of Europe had specific features, which set them apart from towns in other epochs and in other places. This externality is best regarded as a part of the structure of feudal society, which was founded on the exercise of power by means of enfeoffments. The towns were subservient to feudal supremacies, but groups in the towns gradually came to exercise lordship within as well as outside the towns. In medieval Scandinavia this externality can be conceived as a gradual process of liberation from the state. First a period in 1000–1150, when towns were totally subordinate to the political power. Then a stage in 1150–1350, when the external delimitation and the internal partial autonomy were developed. And lastly a period from 1350 to 1550, when towns obtained internal independence and external influence as well. This external influence was, in a few instances, directed against the state, too.Though the main lines of the internal and external development of the towns can be traced in Scandinavia as a whole, there were important regional differences between the countries. The formation of a state and the urbanization were most evident in Norway, and above all in Denmark, at an early stage. The Danish urban profile kept its structure for a long time, and was radically changed only in the late Middle Ages. In Norway minor adjustments were made in the urban profile at an earlier stage, but during the late-medieval agrarian crisis both the state and the towns stagnated. In Sweden the formation of a state and the urbanization were of a later date, which meant that the urban profile became more adjusted to international trade, at an earlier stage. The importance of mining also meant that several towns were connected with a partly different kind of economy than Danish and Norwegian towns. Besides, the most far-reaching autonomy can be traced in Swedish cities, such as Visby, Stockholm, and Kalmar.In connection with the formal dissolution of the Union in 1523, and with the Reformation in Sweden (in 1527) and in Denmark-Norway (in 1536), the bases of new bureaucratic states were laid in Scandinavia. As before, it is possible to trace evident differences in the character of the two states. In Denmark an aristocratic state was organized, where the burghers had less influence than before. In Sweden the position of the aristocracy was dominant, too, but the state was more consistently organized in a bureaucratic way and the burghers maintained some of their influence. An expression for the new Swedish administration was the national land registers that were set up in the 1540s. Similar surveys did not occur in Denmark until the end of the seventeenth century.The development of the bureaucratic state, above all in Sweden, meant that a new form of politically controlled exploitation was created. This new political order opened up economic and social possibilities for urban settlements in new areas. At the end of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century the previous ecological limit of urbanization was exceeded, and many new towns were founded in the boreal zone, along the shores of the Bothnian Gulf (see figure 5). This urban burst of the ecological setting of previous periods can be regarded as one of the conditions for the Swedish empire in the Baltic, in the seventeenth century.

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State Formation and the Politics of Regime Survival: Zimbabwe in Theoretical Perspective

This article analyses state formation in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. The main question posed is this: Why has state power eroded so dramatically? To answer this question, the development of the state is analysed in the light of general theories of state formation. In spite of a situation which according to prevailing theories was conducive for the formation of a strong state, Zimbabwe entered a downward spiral, where state power gradually eroded. To explain this, it is necessary to move beyond these theories, and analyse the changing nature of the ruling regime's constituencies. While security threats and sources of revenue are important, their impact on processes of state formation is mediated by the inter‐relationship between ruling regimes and their constituencies, which is shaped by society's class structure.     

The Spatial Ecology of Power: Long‐Distance Trade and State Formation in Northeast Africa

This study examines the longue durée pattern of state formation in northeast Africa by situating its determinate dynamics within a wider constellation of social‐property relations and inter‐regional exchange networks. Given the social dynamics of tributary relations, increases in surplus extraction typically took the form of extensive territorial expansion rather than intensive augmentation of production, and the supply of means of coercion (weapons) and means of persuasion (luxury goods) with which to build retinues and alliances was a crucial determinant of the persistent oscillations between centralized rule and periods of pronounced regional autonomy. The sustained spatiality of power in the region was consequently shaped by the uneven and combined dynamics of production and exchange relations rather than by any simple dominance of one over the other. Within the more inclusive spatiotemporal framework adopted here, it is their historical imbrications rather than their idealized juxtapositions that calls for critical analysis and social explanation.     

Transnational Debt Groups: The Challenges of Campaigning Within the Internationalising State

A central question facing transnational civil society campaigns is where they can exercise power most effectively in a globalising world. Is the nation state still a worthy site for struggle, or has power shifted significantly to the international arena? Taking transnational debt campaigning as a case study, and using Robert Cox’s concept of the internationalising state, this article examines these questions. While building common cause transnationally, and developing a transnational profile, were important dimensions of debt campaigning, the evidence from the study is that debt campaigns focussed strongly on national governments in order to influence international decision-makers. In this context, the article argues that transnational debt campaigns were re-articulating their governments towards greater accountability to domestic societies, countering the thrust towards the internationalisation of the state.     

England, France and their North American Colonies: An Analysis of Absolutist State Power in Europe and in the New World

Using Michael Mann's concepts of "despotic" and "infrastructural" power as a starting point, this paper examines how the political associations between the state elite and dominant groups in "absolutist" England and France gave rise to state mechanisms that resulted in their exercising very different sorts of power, both at home and in their respective North American colonies. It is determined that the system of governance that defined the infrastructural power of the English state was less conducive to trans-Atlantic rule than the system that defined the combined despotic/infrastructural power of the French state. The analysis shows how the social relationships that comprise the structure of a state come to define the source and character of state power, and how the durability of those relationships can have a lasting effect on the exercise of state power.     

The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State

Abstract  This article examines how official representations of the violence and displacement of Partition organized the sovereign power of the post-independence Pakistani state. It addresses how Partition's chain of violence and displacement engendered the state as an entity capable of wielding the sovereign power to decide on life and death. Crucial to this process were practices of knowledge and power in which the refugee was produced ambivalently, as a figure of right and a biopolitical problem in need of resolution. Focusing on Pakistan's official response to the "refugee problem", I analyze how the management of the potential and actual movement of populations relied upon, and informed implicit logics of official commensuration with the communal violence of the mass.     

Redrawing the Contours of the Nation‐State in Uruguay? The Vicissitudes of Emigration Policy in the 2000s

This study analyzes Uruguay's recently launched emigration policy. It argues that the redrawing of the boundaries of the nation‐state along non‐territorial basis is still an incipient and contested process. The findings highlight some relatively under‐explored explanatory factors: emigrants' profile; political junctures requiring immediate commitment; the impact of rhetorical changes and post‐neoliberal projects; presidents as policy drivers and sources of inconsistencies; and institutional deficiencies, inertias, lack of reform, and society's conflictive notions of nation and belonging as brakes. The conclusions indicate that the sustainability of emigration policy is contingent on the state's progress toward internal reform and society's ability to acquire a greater voice and more organizational capacity. Exploring emigration policy characteristics and sources of setbacks in Uruguay unveils the inter‐mestic character of state transnational outreach efforts, qualifies and refines existing explanations, expands our understanding of new governance techniques, and provides some insights into the requirements for emigration policies to work effectively.     

The Art of the State: Difference and other Abstractions

Abstract This article explores the role of othering and the social sciences in Italian State formation through a historical sociology of the state. The mapping of particular forms of others in popular imagination including 'vagrants','beggars', and 'gypsies', in the nineteenth century resonates with contemporary state projects which seek to document and identify new "alien" newcomer groups. The official document, an integral part of a technology of state power constitutes a kind of "cosmology", with whole social orders, classes and others codified in each line entry. The state designates absolute definitions of places, bodies and things. In 1885 the first medical survey of Italy sought to map out the "medical geography" of the nation, such practices laid the ground work for conceptions of normalcy and difference. The definition of the 'average citizen' is an integral part of the construction of State as Cosmos. Difference and its mapping in its interplay with "normalcy" defines in many ways, the State. yet there can be no taken-for-granted submission of the subaltern classes to this state cosmos, nor to the practices of the social sciences complicit in its construction.     

State making and state terror

Conclusion The interesting question, therefore, is this: why have we seldom heard about the destabilizing consequences of Central government policy in the pre-1949 Chinese countryside? Surely one reason has to do with the fact that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government. Up until the time Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions there were, generally speaking, three such models. In the first of these models, the Central government was said to have been a state blown apart by military separatism. Advocates of a second model acknowledged that Chiang Kai-shek led the Central government to defeat most of the aristocratic warlord armies of the 1927–30 period, but nonetheless portrayed the center as lacking the bureaucratic machinery necessary to penetrate the vast rural interior and halt the devolution of state power. According to Philip Kuhn, William Wei, and Philip C. C. Huang, this devolutionary process played into the hands of entrenched local elites who were against state building, or who, as Prasenjit Duara has brilliantly shown, acted as brokers to alter Central government claims in order to serve their own interests. Yet a third model was sketched out in the insightful historical studies of Lloyd E. Eastman. According to Eastman, the Republican center was real enough, but the plans of its policymakers to create economic wealth and expand their controls over rural society were confounded by factional infighting and cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.To be sure, each of the preceding models has enriched our understanding of the relation of the Republican polity to rural society within a given time frame and in a given place. William Wei's study, which shows that Chiang Kai-shek's Central government was more or less compelled to compromise with local strongmen in order to pacify Jiangxi province in the mid-1930s, is but one convincing example of the warlord devolution of state power thesis. Thus Wei strikes a familiar Skocpolian note — that of a Republican state permeated by rival social interests — when he concludes that the inescapable irony of it all was that by restoring the rural elite to power, the Guomindang had actually undermined its long-sought goal of placing the countryside fully under Central government control.By way of contrast, the formation of collective protest among the peasant salt producers of North China cannot be explained by merely evoking one of the well-established models of the Republican polity. That the Central government and its political interest is missing in most scholarly accounts of the coming of the Chinese Revolution is not surprising, for as Bruce Cumings wisely has pointed out, scholars of agrarian political systems have not developed a sufficient understanding of what prompts rural people to rebel largely because they seldom know what the politics of particular state structures are. I suspect that the precepts of the past, in combination with the current preoccupations with social history, have blinded us to the larger questions about the Republican state and its role in inciting rural disorder. Yet by following Tilly, and by exploring the macrohistory of the Republican state, we can see that there was a Central government, and that Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Song, H. H. Kong, and other state makers made up the core of a ruling national clique bent on developing a political economy that would serve its own political interest. Having grasped this piece of the puzzle, we are in a better position to comprehend the political origins of collective protest in the countryside. Clearly, the Chiang Kai-shek center did have a major interest in salt revenue, and just as clearly the grievances and gatherings of the country people were linked to the revenue demands of the reconditioned gabelle. The emergence of popular collective action thus can be explained by the fact that China's country people could not adapt their lives to the Central government attempt to establish a political economy based on state monopoly and state-organized violence.Clearly, also, the Central government under Chiang Kai-shek did attempt to build its own state apparatus - its army, police forces, and bureaucracy — by developing new sources of revenue. By detailing the Republican state interest in taxing, or taking over, trade in rural products such as timber, salt, and coal we can begin to explore the process whereby the center reached deep into the countryside, and thereby advance our understanding of the progress made by the state in imposing its claims in the face of competition from provincial warlord regimes, county level actors, and village society. Few if any of the authors of the well-established models of the Republican polity have in fact looked systematically at the Central government quest for one specific type of revenue, or traced the development and extension of state revenue machinery within a given region, province, or county - let alone a village - over the long duree of modern Chinese history. My challenge to Skocpol, and the literature upon which her thesis is based, rests on just such a research strategy, that is, on evidence that the Central government was expanding its control over salt trade and over revenue from salt taxes in the North China interior during the Nationalist decade, 1927–37. By surveying the politics of salt, we have seen that the Central government Ministry of Finance was making some measure of progress in overcoming warlord controls, overriding the objections of local elites, and obliterating the structures of everyday peasant resistance.What does all of this suggest about the weakness of the Nanjing Central government? When Central government fiscal policy is placed firmly in the context of evolving state power, the Chiang Kai-shek center appears less anemic than is usually assumed - at least in this one issue area. To make this case, we need not deny that a condition of multiple sovereignty persisted in Republican China, or that Chiang Kaishek's Republic was not fully effective in its attempted expansion. But neither should we neglect the fact that the Chiang Kai-shek center was attempting to build a state in China, and that its state strengthening policies misfired and triggered collective protest. Such ill-conceived policies, along with the popular resistance to police efforts to enforce them, combined to place a major constraint on the state-building experiment.Thus, the fiscal claims of the Republican Central government itself combined with microlevel factors to produce this particular episode of collective protest. Gabelle-based income was one of the main pillars of Central government revenue from Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek. The center's attempt to transform China's long-established system of salt tax collection into a big profitable business was of course undertaken to pay off war indemnities and foreign debts and to underwrite state development. The problem was that progress in this sphere came at the expense of thousands upon thousands of village dwellers who shared an interest in the old earth salt economies of inland China. Understandably, the revved-up revenue collection machinery of the Central government's Salt Bureau - specifically the efforts of its tax police to seize the earth salt produced in peasant villages, which historically had been opposed to the official monopoly - drew the country people into confrontations and clashes with the agents of the state. Hence at the heart of this little known story is the resistance of China's salt land villages to a system of bureaucratic police controls supportive of the expansion of central state power. Of course for a more searchingly nuanced and complex explanation, we could factor in warlord politics, local elite inputs, and the factional intrigues of the Chiang Kaishek clique, but the important point is that the problem facing the country people was systemic, that is, the state-making process itself.Finally, the spirit of this episode of collective protest was not anti-capitalist. Rather, China's country people turned to collective action in order to preserve their longstanding rights to produce for the free market. The struggles of the peasant salt makers thus underscore the prevalence of the deeply structured market forces of which G. William Skinner has written, and remind us that rural protest sometimes took the form of a broad popular statement against state market controls. At the lower rungs of the rural marketing hierarchy, the peasant salt producers joined other pro-market groups, including local merchants and lower gentry, to prevent the Central government police from subordinating their communities to the state drive for revenue. Whether the Republican state was on the verge of winning this war on the popular market before World War II remains to be seen. But one point is clear: Central government interference in the popular market prerogatives produced a cast of angry characters who gained experience in organizing collective actions that transcended village politics, and their actions attracted the attention of Chinese Communist Party cadres who also were suffering from the repression of the protostate.