Since at least the Enlightenment, scholars have linked urbanization to state formation in the evolution of complex societies. We challenge this assertion, suggesting that the cooperative units that ...came together in the earliest cities were premised on limiting outside domination and thus usually acted to impede efforts to create more centralized structures of control. Although cities often became the capitals of states, state formation was quicker and more effective where environments kept people more dispersed. Data from the Andes and Polynesia are used to support this argument. In the Lake Titicaca Basin, household- and lineage-based groups living in the city of Tiahuanaco structured urban dynamics without the state for the settlement’s first 300 years, while similarly organized Hawaiian groups that were isolated in farmsteads were quickly realigned into a state structure. By decoupling urbanization from state formation, we can better understand the interactions that created the world’s first cities.
Rethinking Homonationalism Puar, Jasbir
International journal of Middle East studies,
05/2013, Letnik:
45, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In my 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (hereafter TA), I develop the conceptual frame of “homonationalism” for understanding the complexities of how “acceptance” ...and “tolerance” for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated. I had become increasingly frustrated with the standard refrain of transnational feminist discourse as well as queer theories that unequivocally stated, quite vociferously throughout the 1990s, that the nation is heteronormative and that the queer is inherently an outlaw to the nation-state. While the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers like gender, class, and race, both nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation's status as “gay-friendly” has become desirable in the first place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it.
Despite tourism being one of the largest industries in the world and key to the economies of many countries, there has been little effort to systematically connect the nation-state to global circuits ...of tourism. Most theoretical work centres around international flows of capital and issues of policy choice, sidelining how states as sovereign, territorial institutions are constructed through global travel. Using a constructivist approach to the state, the present paper redresses these gaps by building a theory of the state-tourism nexus that synthesises multiple historic and contemporary examples, demonstrating the major mechanisms connecting tourism to the global institutionalisation and positioning of states. Including both domestic and foreign travel, this theoretic illustrates how travel flows are useful for state leaders in constituting, imagining, legitimising and territorialising the nation-state.
Théoriser la politique du tourisme : le tourisme international et l’État-nation
The process of state formation is a social phenomenon closely connected with a polity’s external relationships. During peer–polity interactions, polities undergo social reorganization as they ...mutually influence each other. This study examines this process and argues that in central-western Korea, around 200–400 CE, hostile interactions among multiple polities weakened the power of ingroup members to level social differences and increased social complexity. When confronted with unfriendly outgroups, potential rulers could assume different social roles (e.g., diplomat, war leader, or trader) and utilize new social threats to demand and legitimize higher social status. Archaeological data from central-western Korea illustrate the community’s efforts to build a defense system and prepare for war. Autonomous agricultural communities rapidly realigned into a state system in response to external threats, presumably from historically documented hostile groups such as the Lelang commandery and Goguryeo. The decision to oppose neighboring polities likely enhanced the leaders’ ability to consolidate power, while the rulers of the Baekje (also spelled “Paekche”) state could employ various other means for self-aggrandizement throughout its history.
Comparativists are increasingly researching national border regions. Yet the distinct way in which proximity to borders independently shapes politics is rarely theorized explicitly. Drawing on the ...emerging subdiscipline of border studies, we identify three types of border effects: Borders involve specific actors, shape local identities, and provide distinct strategies, each of which directly affects key areas of comparative politics. An in-depth review of work on political violence and state formation shows that specifying these effects (
a
) demands that comparativists consider the ways in which borderlands differ from other regions and be careful in attributing processes found there to nations as a whole, (
b
) improves theories by elucidating scope conditions, and (
c
) scrutinizes the validity of our research designs and measurement strategies. We end with a call to move from a comparative politics
in
border regions to a comparative politics
of
border regions that contextualizes how borders alter political processes.
Land management is one of the important elements of state formation. State formation is influenced by politics, economy, society, and international relations, and land management also seems to be ...affected by these factors. In particular, international relations could affect not only state formation but also land management in states that have been independent from other states, like Korea. In this regard, this study reviews the relationship between state formation and land management, and analyzes how land reform influenced the formation of the modern state in South Korea between 1945 and 1960. Conceptually, land management can be linked with ancient as well as modern state formation in terms of politics, economy, society, and international relations. In South Korea, land management was associated with modern state formation mainly in terms of international relations under the U.S. military government (1945–1948) and politics under the first South Korean government (1948–1960). The change of relationships between land management and state formation tends to be in line with national context and international situations. There are differences in the role of land management in ancient and modern states from the four perspectives mentioned, which seems to lead into land reform in the process of modern state formation.
The literature on the political "resource curse" has recently seen heated debates over the average causal effects of oil on democracy and the generalizability of the theory. One of the reasons these ...disagreements remain unresolved is that the causal mechanisms of the resource curse receive little scholarly attention and historical and international aspects are frequently overlooked. To address these problems, this study investigates the relationship between oil and the political regime in Brunei, arguably the most understudied state among the archetypes of the resource curse, extending the time frame back to the very beginning of oil exploration during the colonial period. It uncovers a previously overlooked causal process by which oil affected the emergence of authoritarianism. It shows that in the case of Brunei (and potentially some Persian Gulf monarchies), sovereignty is endogenous to the resource curse. That is, oil, together with indirect colonial rule, affected the creation of the state, and this state-formation process contributed to the long-standing autocracy. This study contributes to the resource curse literature by identifying a new mechanism of the resource curse, showing that we need to reconsider the way we apply the potential outcomes approach, and highlighting the importance of historical and international factors.
Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different ...from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa , Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst’s bold contention—that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent—is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything.
This revised edition includes a new preface in which the author links the enormous changes that have taken place in Africa over the past fifteen years to long-term state consolidation. The final chapter on policy prescriptions has also been revised to reflect the evolution of African and international responses to state failure.
Although it is well established that contemporary school-based pedagogy continues to be primarily oriented towards a middle-class habitus, little research has documented how crucial elements of such ...habitus, like an expressive self-conception and emotional management, became integrated in the educational institute and its philosophy. Therefore, this article reconstructs how the current middle-class habitus was institutionalized and what type of personality structuring it eventually replaced. We study the shifts in pedagogical ideas, the role of education and the position of teachers and relate these to structural factors such as state-formation and changing class structures. We draw on the process-relational approach of Elias and Bourdieu and perform a content analysis of 480 pedagogical advice articles published in Flanders (Belgium) between 1880 and 2010, to demonstrate how a discourse of formalization and self-control has been substituted by a more informalized and expressive view. We conclude with a reflection on the impact of such an expressive pedagogical regime on the reproduction of class inequality.
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