Local State Building Research Articles

Everyday processes of state-building in the Colombian Caribbean

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the case of the community of Villa Gloria, located in the northern part of Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) and inhabited by a predominantly Black population. The research questions that guide this paper are: what are the everyday processes of local state-building on the margins and, in the case of Black communities, how do they organize themselves in areas of recent colonization permeated by armed violence? I make two main arguments. First, the emergence of Villa Gloria allows us to understand the state as a collective construction among different actors whose goals and interests in contexts of armed conflict may differ from those of the state. Secondly, community pressure and mobilization make the state visible at the margins. To test these arguments, I propose an analysis of five variables: power, autonomy, authority, security and justice and infrastructure and services. The study provides empirical evidence to discuss the consequences of the type of local state that emerges on the margins and in the context of armed conflict.

The Legacy of Civil War Dynamics: State Building in Mexico, 1810–1910

This article studies the legacy of local dynamics of the War of Independence in local state building in Mexico. The analysis shows that municipalities where local militias were organized have a higher number of public servants and a larger budget per capita in the early 1900s than municipalities with an insurgent legacy, relative to those with no conflict. The results hold when restricting the sample to neighbors and controlling for geographic and economic factors. Historical evidence supports existing theories of intra-elite conflict while highlighting the role of local fiscal councils in municipalities with a legacy of local militias. Decentralization during and after the war strengthened local elites, while the negotiated war termination added a political-elite layer of insurgent leaders, born in conflict with colonial-era economic elites. These findings suggest that the local dynamics of civil warfare can have long-lasting effects on state building, boosting local state capacity in some regions and not in others.

State Building in Post Conflict Rwanda: Popular Participation of Citizen in Local Conflict Mitigation

When studying local state building this article addresses the questions how does state led conflict mitigation in post conflict Rwanda work? How is it experienced by the citizens in terms of participation, accountability and local state legitimacy? Theoretically, the study engages with literature on state-building, state society relations and local conflict mitigation. The study’s findings have indicated that the citizens’ contribution to local state-building was still modest due to low motivation among the citizens involved in the conflict mitigation process due to insufficient resources and infrastructure in the conflict mitigation process, despite the fact that the state has granted legal authority. Another important finding is that heterogeneity of conflicts is an important factor in the understanding of local-level conflicts, and especially in relation to local-level state building. Hence, it focuses on the local perspective of state building, which has mainly been studied as a top-down affair.

Footbinding and Women’s Labor in Sichuan by Hill Gates, and: Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 by Elizabeth J. Remick

Footbinding and Women’s Labor in Sichuan by Hill Gates, and: Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 by Elizabeth J. Remick

Who Governs Local Access in Jharkhand? Mechanisms of Access to Government Services

Government services fail to meet targeted objectives in contexts of political instability. The links between enabling equitable access to these services and building a democratic state have not been sufficiently explicated in the local governance and state-building literature. The Indian state of Jharkhand, formed in 2000, is one instance where little is known about local access to services: the literature reflects a lack of local democracy but rarely considers the relationship between these aspects. Therefore, this study examines the processes through which local actors access benefits from two contrastingly structured government services, using an access analysis framework. The empirical basis comprises two cases in Jharkhand’s forest villages: government service (i) in kendu leaf trade regulation and (ii) of minimum-wage work opportunities for rural households. The objective of each is to benefit poor villagers such as the indigenous Ho people inhabiting these communities. The study explains through what mechanisms access occurs and the distribution of benefits this enables across local actors, and then considers the implications for who governs access locally. It argues that privileged private actors not only use structural and relational mechanisms, such as gender, access to social networks, capital and technology, to access inequitably large benefit shares, but also to exercise institutional authority over services to enable such benefits. Through this recursive relation between access to services and local state-building, private actors partly comprise the local state. They govern access locally alongside government institutions, perpetuating inequitable access to government services and building an undemocratic local state in Jharkhand.

Elizabeth J. Remick. Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937.

Elizabeth J. Remick. Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937.

Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937. written by Elizabeth J. Remick, 2014

Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937. written by Elizabeth J. Remick, 2014

Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 by Elizabeth J. Remick

Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 by Elizabeth J. Remick

Building States and Identities in Post-Conflict States: Symbolic Practices in Post-Dayton Bosnia

An integral part of state formation processes is identity-building: ‘making one out of many’ as Walzer puts it. This is also true in terms of contemporary, internationally led statebuilding projects. This dimension of international statebuilding is important, as fundamental questions pertaining to belonging are as important to successful post-conflict process as institutional arrangements; in fact, assumptions about identities and group boundaries guide the technical decisions on institutional and governance structures. The central aim of this paper is to reflect upon identity-construction as a part of post-conflict statebuilding through exploring how historical and more recently invented symbols are deployed to construct a specific sense of belonging. The analysis finds a multiplicity of identity-building projects that advance different visions of community and belonging. The outcome is politicised and contentious visual, everyday landscape that legitimises competing local statebuilding projects (grounded in the distinctions between Bosnian peoples), while undermining peacebuilding and reconciliation. Yet, rather than indicating a primordial antagonisms or incompatible ‘liberal’ and ‘local’ norms, the conflicts over symbols (and ultimately, identities) between international and local agents are indicative of wider disagreements over how the Bosnian state ought to be organised and are fuelled by the institutional structures of the country and the weaknesses in the international statebuilding mission.

State Building in De Facto States: Somaliland and Puntland Compared

Since the collapse of the Somali state, regional governments in Somaliland and Puntland have engaged in local state building. Studies often compare Somaliland and southern Somalia, but the comparison of Somaliland and Puntland receives less attention. We help fill this gap by comparing the state-building impact of Somaliland’s pursuit of internationally recognized statehood with that of Puntland’s decision to pursue a federalist Somalia. Engaging literature on de facto and unrecognized states, we argue that Somaliland and Puntland share key similarities with regard to security imperatives, revenue scarcity, and democratic challenges, but the quest for international statehood has unified the population and business community behind the Somaliland state and created incentives for its leaders to democratize; in Puntland, by contrast, the government’s continuing relationship with Somalia has complicated local state building.

Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China by Arianne Gaetano, and: Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 by Elizabeth J. Remick

Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China by Arianne Gaetano, and: Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 by Elizabeth J. Remick

The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China by You-tien Hsing (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China by You-tien Hsing Terry G. McGee (bio) You-tien Hsing. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv, 278 pp. Hardcover $80.00, isbn 978-0-19-956804-8. In the last two decades, China has moved rapidly to reach a level of urbanization that, by various estimates, reached 50 percent by the end of 2010. This figure, [End Page 87] which is often used as a threshold for defining an urbanized society, is subject to much debate because of the methods adopted in Chinese statistical systems of data definition and collection, a fact that Chan Kam Wing (1994, 2007) has been pointing out for almost twenty years. While his revisions would suggest slightly lower estimates of the urban population of China, they make little difference in the fact that China has experienced one of the most rapid urban transformations in the history of the world over the last forty years of the post-reform period. Furthermore, this transformation has involved an unprecedented increase in the population being added to urban areas. UN estimates suggest that China’s urban population will continue to grow, reaching a level of 75 percent by 2050 with an increase of more than 400 million people in the next forty years. It is not surprising that this great urban transformation has attracted the attention of policy makers and researchers from both within and outside of China. In an era of global economic volatility, environmental challenges, and social transformation, the level of success that China achieves in responding to these urbanization challenges is important not only to China but also to the world at large, particularly the other developing countries of Africa and Asia where similar processes of rapid urban transformation are occurring. The idea that the Chinese developmental experience may offer a model for other developing countries is, of course, very relevant to the Anglo-European concept of the Beijing Consensus to which China, publicly at least, has been rather cool. However, the announcement at the 2012 meeting of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) leaders that discussed the establishment of a BRICS Development Bank that would fund projects in developing nations suggests that the ideas has some validity. This is the broader context in which Hsing’s valuable book is situated. In this book, the author focuses on trying to provide the answer to two main questions: “[F]irst, how does the state and society shape and become shaped by the urban transformation in post-Mao China?” and, “[S]econd, how does space in the form of territoriality play a role in these contested processes?” (p. 23). In order to answer these questions, Hsing makes the persuasive argument that “land has moved to the center of local politics in post-Mao China. It now shapes the restructuring of Chinese state power and radically impacts state-society relations” (p. 5). Central to this process is the manner in which land has become increasingly commodified since 1988 while not changing the basic constitutional provision of the state ownership of land. This has encouraged local governments to use land-centered accumulation and the rents from this leased land as a key strategy in local state building. It is further argued that the consequences of these processes are to reconfigure “relationships among the local state, the market and society” (p. 6) that are largely “the result of the distributional consequences of this land accumulation that trigger challenges to the process as the local state’s occupation and domination of territory are hotly contested” (p. 8). This assumes [End Page 88] various forms of resistance in different zones within the expanding urban territory that is the consequence of the urbanization process. Often this process is portrayed as a top-down, linear-driven process from national to local levels, sometimes called “state-led urbanization.” This is perhaps best represented by the idea that various administrative scales from national to local levels make up a form of embedded hierarchy, in which the various administrative scales are nested within national and subnational hierarchies. This facilitates more...

Building Local States: China during the Republican and Post-Mao Eras. By Elizabeth J. Remick. [Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. 318 pp. $49.50. ISBN 0-674-01398-0.

It is commonplace in China studies to declare that China is too large and too diverse to be fully understood as one entity. Whether in historical or contemporary terms, a complete understanding of China can only be attempted if one looks at the diversity within. Too often, the analysis stops there, without pursuing the details of regional variation needed to develop a more sophisticated analysis.Elizabeth Remick's Building Local States is a much-needed antidote to this tendency. In her carefully researched comparative monograph, Remick details how two very different regions – Hebei and Guangdong – developed local and regional government institutions in the context of central government upheaval and redefinition. Using local gazetteers, interviews with officials, published statistical records and archives, the book demonstrates how and why these two regions diverged in their approach to taxation and public finance. Faced with her own findings that show very little commonality between the two regions, Remick still manages to make an important, general conclusion: for the Chinese state to survive in the 21st century, it must allow regional adaptation to circumstance, or else the central regime will face increasing resistance to its interference, even to the point of tax revolts.The book's subtitle, in particular, marks the book as exceptional: “China during the Republican and Post-Mao Eras.” While both of these periods are popular topics, it is rare to compare them. On the face of it, the reasons for the comparison are unclear. Remick, though, effectively demonstrates that the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) and the post-Mao reform era (1980–1992) were both times of local state-building, spurred by a need to reassert government control in the wake of periods of great chaos (the warlord era of the 1920s and the Cultural Revolution, respectively).

Building local states: China during the republican and post-Mao eras

This book examines two eras of Chinese history that have commonly been viewed as periods of state disintegration or retreat. And they were - at the central level. When re-examined at the local level, however, both are revealed as periods of state building. In both the Nanjing decade of Guomindang rule (1927-1937) and the early post-Mao reform era (1980-1992), both national and local factors shaped local state building and created variations in local state structures and practices. This book focuses on one key area of the state, taxation and public finance, to trace the processes of local state building in these two eras. Using the records of local tax and finance offices in the Tianjin area and in Guangdong province, the author maps the process by which these county-level offices grew. This book highlights variation in local state structures and practices between localities and between the central and local governments. As the author shows, this variation is important because it results in regional differences in state-society relations and affects central state capacity in terms of the local state's ability to implement central state policies as well as its own.

Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945–1950. By Steven E. Phillips. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 272 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-8047-4457-2.

In recent years the sub-field of Taiwan studies has begun to take off and Steven E. Phillips' excellent study of local elite political activities and Nationalist state-building in Taiwan during the highly charged period following the island's retrocession to China is evidence that this process is now extending into the realm of historical research on the Nationalist period. Using a wide array of Chinese, English and Japanese language primary sources, Phillips examines the tensions between local, provincial forces and centralizing, national forces as he traces the question of local self-government through Taiwan's evolution from colony to province to province/nation in the period between 1945 and 1950. He argues that, given the different experiences of Taiwan's elite and the Nationalists, some sort of clash was inevitable, and both groups acted between 1945 and 1950 in ways that were consistent with their past actions and experiences. He further argues that the February 28 incident of 1947 was a turning point after which the Nationalists took over the drive for local self-government in Taiwan and Taiwan's local elite were increasingly politically marginalized.

Prostitution Taxes and Local State Building in Republican China

When we think of prostitution in Republican China, we usually think of it as having been one of the major social problems in China's most cosmopolitan cities, such as Shanghai or Tianjin. When we think of the relationship between brothels and the outside world, we usually think more about their ties to gangs and protection rackets than we do about their formal, institutional connections with the state. And when we think of prostitution's political significance, we usually limit our consideration to the realm of political discourse. Yet prostitution was an important political and fiscal issue in many places outside the major metropolises, while institutional connections between prostitution and the local state helped determine the direction and amount of local state building that took place in early twentieth-century China. These institutional connections show that rather than being simply a social problem, an extension of organized crime, or the subject of a discourse about modem morality, prostitution was important in the political and fiscal life of the local state in early twentieth-century China. To make the case that prostitution mattered fiscally and politically, this article explores how localities in late Qing and early Republican China (roughly 1900-1937) taxed female prostitution.' In virtually all provinces, at least one locality (usually the provincial capital) taxed prostitution, and the revenue from those taxes was almost always

Violence and Local State Formation: A Longitudinal Case Study of Appalachian Feuding

We investigate the causes of protracted violent conflict by examining the dynamics of a so-called family feud in one Appalachian county in the 19th century. Using data from the civil and criminal court docket and sociohistorical sources, we find that protracted local violence was neither an alternative to dispute resolution through the courts nor a simple function of economic development. Rather, feud violence reflected the social and economic relations and cleavages that accompanied local state building. We discuss the implications of these findings for a historically specific understanding of the relation between local governance and protracted disputing.

The Struggle to Dictate China's Administration: The Conflict of Branches vs Areas vs Reform

Previous articleNext article No AccessStudiesThe Struggle to Dictate China's Administration: The Conflict of Branches vs Areas vs ReformJonathan UngerJonathan Unger Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 18Jul., 1987 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2158582 Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 16Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs (1979-1995), which is continued by The China Journal (1995-present). Copyright Australian Journal of Chinese AffairsPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Carolyn Cartier “There are no cities in China” and the paradox of urban theory, Eurasian Geography and Economics 3 (Mar 2022): 1–18.https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2022.2047750Anita Chan Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency, Journal of Contemporary Asia 50, no.33 (Jul 2019): 321–340.https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2019.1623907Tao-chiu Lam and Carlos Wing-Hung Lo Local State-Building and Bureaucratization of China’s Public-Sector Service Organizations: A Case Study of the Environmental Protection System in Guangzhou, The China Journal 81 (Dec 2018): 123–141.https://doi.org/10.1086/699232Jae Ho Chung China’s Local Governance in Perspective: Instruments of Central Government Control, The China Journal 75 (Nov 2015): 38–60.https://doi.org/10.1086/683210Peter Thomas in der Heiden China’s Leapfrog to New Electric Vehicles, (Nov 2015): 103–128.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24229-3_7Dr C. Lattemann and Professor W. Zhang, Jonathan Unger, Anita Chan State corporatism and business associations in China, International Journal of Emerging Markets 10, no.22 (Apr 2015): 178–193.https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOEM-09-2014-0130Yi Li, Fulong Wu The emergence of centrally initiated regional plan in China: A case study of Yangtze River Delta Regional Plan, Habitat International 39 (Jul 2013): 137–147.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2012.11.002Yi Li, Fulong Wu The transformation of regional governance in China: The rescaling of statehood, Progress in Planning 78, no.22 (Aug 2012): 55–99.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2012.03.001Hon S. Chan, Jie Gao Death versus GDP! Decoding the Fatality Indicators on Work Safety Regulation in Post-Deng China, The China Quarterly 210 (May 2012): 355–377.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741012000379Him Chung The Planning of ‘Villages-in-the-City’ in Shenzhen, China: The Significance of the New State-Led Approach, International Planning Studies 14, no.33 (Dec 2009): 253–273.https://doi.org/10.1080/13563470903450606Guirong Mao On Governmental Reform in China: Two Suggestions from Japanese Experiences, Chinese Public Administration Review 2, no.1-21-2 (Mar 2003): 20–36.https://doi.org/10.22140/cpar.v2i1.2.37A. Young The Razor's Edge: Distortions and Incremental Reform in the People's Republic of China, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no.44 (Nov 2000): 1091–1135.https://doi.org/10.1162/003355300555024 Jonathan Unger , and Anita Chan China, Corporatism, and the East Asian Model, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 33 (Oct 2015): 29–53.https://doi.org/10.2307/2950087Jack Man Keung Lo Urban Government and Administrative Reform in Post‐Mao China: Issues, Trends and Future Directions, International Journal of Public Sector Management 6, no.66 (Jun 1993).https://doi.org/10.1108/09513559310046810Susan L. Shirk “Playing to the Provinces:” Deng Xiaoping's political strategy of economic reform, Studies in Comparative Communism 23, no.3-43-4 (Sep 1990): 227–258.https://doi.org/10.1016/0039-3592(90)90010-J Book Reviews, Asian-Pacific Economic Literature 3, no.11 (Mar 1989): 83–120.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8411.1989.tb00168.x