Logic Of State Research Articles

Institutional Logic of Fragile States: Afghanistan and South Sudan in Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT In the violence trap framework, ruling elites use rents to control contending elites who pose a violent threat. Political development results in transitions from a fragile state, wherein rents are tentative and personalized, to a basic natural state, and then a mature natural state, through standardization of elite privileges, consolidated state control of the political-military apparatus, and the enactment of a credible contracts regime. Accordingly, the institutional logic of fragile states is rooted in the incentives that undergird elite bounded rationality, transacting under highly personalized, tentative patronage networks. The paper addresses the question of why fragile states fail to develop into basic natural states. In doing so, it applies the violence trap analytical framework to illustrate the logic of the fragile state through a most different systems (MDS) comparison of Afghanistan and South Sudan. The main finding is that the institutional logic of the fragile state in the two cases is rooted in a lack of three necessary conditions: institutional incentives for broadening elite consensus, credible patronage agreements among different elite groups, and a consolidated state with specialized political and military functions.

The civilization state in the war against Ukraine

ABSTRACT Do considerations of civilization play a role in the Russian aggression against Ukraine? This study starts from the assumption that the conflict in Ukraine cannot be fully explained by the arguments of John Mearsheimer, the main representative of the so-called offensive realist school of international relations theory, who argues that the Russian invasion is driven by fear of NATO’s eastward expansion. The author challenges this dominant explanatory framework, arguing that we need to dig deeper to understand Putin’s intentions. The paper focuses on the role of the “civilizational state” created by the Putin regime and analyzes the role of its guiding ideology, Eurasianism. The author concludes that the war in Ukraine must be interpreted in the context of the confrontation between the West and Russia, and that this development cannot be understood without taking into account the specific logic and offensive nature of the Russian civilization state.

Schumacher against globalism and ecomodernism: Ecology, subsidiarity and the politics of scale

E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful is one of the most succinct elaborations of Catholic social teaching (CST) and ‘distributism’ – construed as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. Extending the logic of Polanyi, both market and state, and their right- and left-wing ideological expressions, are shown to be contending forms of collectivism – in that both aggregate the agency of disembedded ‘billiard ball’ individuals. Schumacher’s socio-economic vision is rooted in Livelihood and is orthogonal to both left and right, creating an opportunity for an alternative to modernity involving patterns of embedded production, consumption and reproduction (family, household and place-bound community). ‘Smallness’ and ‘localness’ speak to forms of embedded social capital that are ‘sticky’, viscous and relational, more ascriptive and less fluid. But for precisely this reason, the political agenda implicit in Schumacher’s vision is not only post-liberal, but explicitly both covenantal and Christian. It requires the ontology of sovereign, self-actualizing individuals to be reconnected and constrained through a transcendent relationality with God. Small is Beautiful is shown to be diametrically opposed to the eco-modernist, gnostic and sometimes even transhumanist worldview of global environmentalism.

Do States Really Sink Costs to Signal Resolve?

Abstract Sinking costs to signal resolve has become a vital part of how the field of international relations (IR) understands crisis bargaining. The logic of a resolved state “burning money” to distinguish itself from an unresolved state is well established in theory. But do states choose to sink costs and burn money in practice? We address the question on two fronts. First, we collect and analyze the examples of sinking costs in the mainstream IR literature. We find almost no clear-cut cases of sunk-cost signals. Second, we argue that this is because states typically prefer other signaling strategies. Rather than burning money, states can expend those resources more constructively. In particular, states can invest in improving the probability of victory in war (“balance tilting”), or they can downpay the costs of war. We conclude that balance tilting and downpaying costs plausibly explain a great deal of state behavior in peacetime, in crises, and even in wartime.

Thresholds of repression and criminalisation of oppositional political activism in the Israeli settler state: a preliminary investigation

This article investigates processes of criminalisation and mechanisms of repression and control of oppositional political activism of Israel’s citizens, both Palestinians and Jews, given the state’s particular political formation as a ‘liberal settler state’ (Robinson, 2013). In order to do so, the article traces the ‘threshold of threat’ that leads to criminalisation and repression in Israel. I argue that the process of criminalisation and repression is tied with the construction of the concept of ‘threat’ and is always bound with race-making. Further, the article treats criminalisation as a multilayered process involving both state and non-state actors, and a range of informal and formal strategies. I further argue that the operational logic of the settler state dictates the strategies used to tolerate, contain, limit or crush dissent altogether. Since the Israeli state strives to maintain privileges to its Jewish citizenry, we can trace more reliance on ‘informal’ strategies of criminalisation towards its Jewish citizens, led by civil society organisations and actors, while the ‘formal’ strategies, led by the state, are preserved almost exclusively for dealing with Palestinian political activism. Finally, I argue that unravelling processes of criminalisation and oppression, triggered by the crossing of the threshold of threat, exposes state vulnerabilities and fragility. By tracing the shifting thresholds of threat we gain a window into the precarity of such a system of power and how it can be challenged and transformed. We can also learn what opportunities for resistance exist and what ‘openings’ must be seized.

The transformation of European welfare states and its implications for social work (research): staying on the tanker or choosing a small sloop?

Since the conception of post-war national welfare states and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the notions of citizenship and of civic, political and social rights were institutionalised in European welfare states. In that vein, a social work workforce acquired a professional and public mandate to implement social policies. During recent decades, however, welfare state arrangements seem to have moved in another direction. The premise that the welfare state is responsible for social protection and the redistribution of resources has subtly shifted into one of an active welfare state, with a stronger focus on individual responsibility and conditionality. In addition, welfare state arrangements have been based on the premise of a territorial logic of the nation state, making it more difficult for migrants to access services. In this article, we first discuss the transformation of welfare state arrangements. We then make use of an exemplary case, namely, the emergence of new social work practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, to illustrate the current positioning of social work practice. In the final part, we critically tease out the changing role of social work and social work research in these circumstances.

Good Woman, Bad Woman: Language, Gender and Agency in Pakistani TV Dramas

The present study analyses Pakistani TV dramas to explore the relationship between language and gender in a postcolonial society. The binary logic of state hatred against English as a former coloniser’s language dictates that the question of language becomes even more complicated when it interacts with the larger question of gender in a postcolonial state like Pakistan. This can be witnessed in contemporary TV dramas in the country. This paper looks at two such dramas to contend that English language in these dramas is associated with the “bad woman” and Urdu with the “good woman.” The study uses textual analysis for the analysis of Pakistani TV dramas Humsafar (2011) and Zindagi Gulzar Hai (2012). The study concludes that there is a causal relationship between the perception of women as “good” or “bad” and their use of language in these dramas.

“Fear” as a disintegration factor: conceptual view on British-European relations in light of Brexit

The article aims at contributing to discussions on British national identity and its impact on the state’s foreign policy, with British-European relations used as an example. The author provides a concept of “fear” within the constructivist approach as a tool to explain withdrawing from the integration organisation. According to it, the logic of state’s behaviour can be explained with the help of four impulses that cause fear for one’s own identity. These are generalised categories that make it easier to analyse and describe actions taken by actors while interacting with their counteragents. Given the results of the research on British-European relations, one can conclude that deeper integration and gradually empowered supranational bodies provoke conflict between national and transnational identities. For fear of being deprived of its identity, which is of paramount importance, the United Kingdom was trying to securitise the threat by leaving the Union. Accordingly, the concept of “fear” facilitates defining reasons why politicians turn to politicising a problem and developing a security scenario, which is Brexit when it comes to British-European relations. Yet, it doesn’t guarantee identity restoration and can only aggravate internal issues, which is proved by the case of Great Britain.

Children in coercive care as ‘Responsibilized Becomings’: On rights and responsibilization in the Swedish welfare state

This study explores the often-ignored relationship between responsibilization and the welfare state, by investigating the translation of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Swedish legislation. Through an analysis of official political documents and interviews with Members of Parliament, this article identifies the driving forces behind the responsibilization of children in coercive care and seeks to explain how these forces are used to conceptualize and reconceptualize the rights of children in these settings. By proposing that the responsibilization of these children is closely connected to the internal logic of the welfare state, and that this logic is working in tandem with neoliberalization (rather than against it), this article provides an important contribution to the debate regarding the welfare state and responsibilization in Sweden, and by extension in the Nordic context.

The Jew, the Arab, the Black: La Haine and the structure of Anti-Black violence

This essay places Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema and psychoanalysis in conversation with critical Black studies through an interrogation of the film La Haine (1995, France), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. I argue that while the action and dialogue that construct La Haine convey a progressive, perhaps even apparently radical, critique of race and policing towards the embrace of a multiracial coalition politics, the cinematic structure of La Haine administers what Deleuze calls a shock to thought that reveals the anti-Black structure of not simply European civil society, but the anti-Black relations among its historical and timeless Others—the Jew, the Arab, and the Black—such that the political desires and aspirations portrayed in the dialogue are rendered untenable through the cinematic structure. In other words, the critique of civil society La Haine offers on the level of structure and composition is one that exceeds and undermines any conscious desire for love, reparation, or coalition. By problematizing ethno-religious categories deployed by Kassovitz, the essay briefly asks how the representation of “religious” and “racial” bodies in La Haine operates within the same biocentric logic of the modern state to the extent that it represses the historico-material and psycho-affective origins of Jewish, Arab, and Black Enmity with regard to secular civil society and the Human. If so, then while Kassovitz’s best efforts to create a narrative arc and recuperative gesture toward reconciliation and redemption between the multiracial coalition of people and the police ultimately collapse into the flatline of anti-Blackness, the impossible reconciliation between the Black and secular civil society does not foreclose, following Selamawit Terrefe, the confluence and unflinching embrace of monstrosity, hatred, and enmity among the human’s familiar and radical Others—the so-called Jew, Arab, and Black.

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of <i>How to Survive the End of the World</i>

The strategies of counter‐secession: How states prevent independence

AbstractThe majority of states in the world today were created via secession, but a majority of secessionist movements have failed to gain independence. Counter‐secession is not only more successful than secession; it is also more common. There are over 300 nations today that lack sovereign states, as well as untold thousands more groups whose identities never became nationalist or who were never able to create robust movements in the first place. Nonetheless, counter‐secession is comparatively understudied, and a small but growing number of excellent analyses often focus on a single state strategy. Independence is rarely won quickly or cheaply, as existing states fight to maintain their borders across four phases of secession: identity formation, group mobilisation, (un)armed struggle and international recognition. This article presents the repertoire of states' counter‐secession strategies throughout the secessionist struggle, including cultural assimilation, administrative organisation, civilian displacement, banning secessionist political activity, fragmenting the secessionist movement, economic coercion, violent repression and blocking international recognition. This collective analysis of the causal logic and illustrative historical examples of state counter‐secession strategies lays the foundation for a more comprehensive research programme on counter‐secession across time and space.

Resisting Usefulness

Arts advocacy in the U.S. tends to cultivate state and philanthropic art support by emphasizing art’s potential to increase productivity and generate revenue in various ways. Even musicologists often take this rhetorical route, arguing for the continued relevance of our work, for example by noting that studying music cultivates the kind of creative thinking skills that make workers attractive to corporations like Google. This way of promoting music and musicology thus reinforces the logic of state and capital by demonstrating music’s usefulness within that logic. I argue that we should instead embrace and pedagogically center music’s uselessness as its most potentially radical quality. Doing so could help us construct a new political imaginary that might more robustly resist the antisocial logics of capital.&#x0D; My argument circles around the question of musical autonomy. While a certain version of autonomy undergirds our discipline’s tools and assumptions, today this value is dismissed by almost everyone, including leftists and liberals, activists and academics. In salvaging the autonomous ideal, I attempt to resituate it firmly within collective practice, an orientation it has traditionally been seen as transcending. My exploration of collective autonomy weaves together work from musicology, political theory, anthropology, feminist theory, and Black studies, as well as from radical activist traditions that develop outside of any institutional framework. I think with and through these diverse perspectives, arguing that celebrating music’s uselessness might aid our collective ability imagine a radically different world.

What’s love got to do with it? Marriage and the security state

ABSTRACT This article explores how marriage animates the racial logic of the security state. While the pursuit of romantic love culminating in a wedding is considered to be a universal good, arranged marriages are viewed as a dangerous anachronism which threaten the state’s authority. By revealing the animating force of arranged marriage in the UK immigration regime and the War on Terror, we can see the central role of love marriage within the principles of choice, autonomy and individuality around which the liberal subject organises their moral economy. The legalisation of gay marriage – constructed as a kind of love marriagepar excellence – becomes the means through which the nation state can uphold this moral economy and be renewed and reinvigorated in the process. By putting gay marriage in dialogue with arranged marriage, the gendered and racial configuration of the UK as a security state becomes visible.

The Politics of Azusa: Transforming Citizenship at the Margins

ABSTRACT The Azusa Street revival of 1906 is one of the most important revivals in early Pentecostalism and offers resources in rethinking the Christian political imagination. I want to offer sustained reflection of this revival, as it resignifies the nature of what is political. I argue that Azusa embodied a non-statist idea of the citizen, encouraging radically inclusive practices of political belonging. Members of Azusa did not trust the institutional logic of the modern state, as Azusa believed that white supremacy over-determined the American state. This paper explores how Azusa challenged American democracy and its statist idea of the citizen-subject, as this political idea created the very conditions of black subjugation. Examining how Azusa rejects the statist idea of the citizen, this paper reflects on questions of the democratic, moral and political agency, citizenship, and political belonging. This paper poses questions such as: Why is it essential to foreground forms of political agency that are not in service to the state? What is the shape of the democratic in light of non-statist political practices? What does Azusa’s ecclesial life teach us about political practices of human belonging?

About the specificity of the impact of communicative technological innovations on political processes in the Republic of Kazakhstan

A complex of various technological innovations, which, first of all, have information and communication content, among which it is necessary to mention news and analytical Internet portals, messengers like Whatsapp, hybrid and convergent media tools such as Telegram and Facebook, video hosting and editing services (Youtube and TikTok), streaming platforms, and numerous other technological solutions have a great impact on political processes in Central Asia, transforming them and reformatting them. Their influence is most pronounced in Kazakhstan, for a number of reasons, among which a higher standard of living of the population and, accordingly, the paying capacity of the audience, the depth of Internet penetration, the development of the communication sphere, etc. In this regard, the situation in Kazakhstan presented to be largely as a model for the entire region of Central Asia. The impact of communicative technological innovations in the Republic of Kazakhstan is manifested through the intensification of socio-political processes, the restructuring of society, through the emergence of new groups of influence, as well as the creation of dialogue and discussion platforms, often of an informal plan, which contribute both to the unification and differentiation of the social organism. This gives rise to various dilemmas in the choice of state approaches to the use of communicative technological innovations, which is expressed both in encouraging the development of the information and communication sphere, and in attempts to limit civic activity if it goes through the channels of new means of communication. The author suggests that in the coming years, the impact of communicative technological innovations on political processes in Kazakhstan will be under the sign of the two indicated contradictory tendencies (striving for freedom and control), especially considering the neighborhood with the two powers, China and the Russian Federation, with their predominantly repressive logic of interaction state with society.

Social Forces and Street-level Governance in Shanghai: From Compliance to Participation in Recycling Regulations

AbstractThis article interrogates the operating logic of China's street-level regulatory state, demonstrating that residents’ committees (RCs) assume a role as regulatory intermediaries to enhance the efficiency of local governance. Using Shanghai's new recycling regulations as a case study, it explores the mechanisms by which RCs elicit not only citizens’ compliance but also active participation. We show that the central mechanisms derive from the RCs’ skilful mobilization of particular social forces, namely mianzi and guanxi, which are produced within close-knit social networks inside Shanghai's housing estates (xiaoqu). We advance three arguments in the study of China's emerging regulatory state. First, we show how informal social forces are employed in regulatory governance at the street level, combining authoritarian control with grassroots participation. Second, the focus on RCs as regulatory intermediaries reveals the important role played by these street-level administrative units in policy implementation. Third, we suggest that the RCs’ harnessing of informal social forces is essential not only for successful policy implementation at street level but also for the production of the local state's political legitimacy.

Countering corruption in modern Russian legal life (Review materials of the “Round Table” of journals “State and Law” and “The legal culture”)

The “Round Table”, being essentially interregional, is due to reflect the main aspects of countering corruption considered as the mostly destructive phenomena of modern legal life of many societies including the Russian one. These aspects contain the following activities of state power bodies, municipalities, institutions of civil society, organizations and citizens aimed to: a) prevent corruption and to indicate and eliminate causes of corruption (corruption prevention); b) indicate, prevent, suppress, solve and investigate corruption crimes (countering corruption); c) minimize and (or) liquidate the consequences of corruption offenses. Overall conclusion based on combined analysis of speeches and reports assumes that countering corruption must be permanent and leaded by such priorities as introducing appropriate standards for state and municipal bodies' services and reduction of corruption capacity of the Russian laws. The authors claim to face strict necessity to create state anti-corruption legal policy represented by reasonable, logic and systematic activities of state and society institutions of countering corruption. The general purpose of such policy is to minimize corruption practices in legal life of the society

Студент(к)и-політологи України і Молдови: політико-ідеологічні самоідентифікації

The article is devoted to the identification of political and ideological self-identification of students of political science communities of Ukraine (Lviv, Kharkiv, Simferopol) and Moldova (Chisinau) in the period 2012–2013. This work is part of a larger study that captures the state of Ukrainian political science in 2012-2013 and provides a better understanding of the political, social, ethnic, economic, gender and disciplinary views of students on the eve of the Revolution of Dignity. The empirical basis of this article is a survey of bachelors, specialists and masters at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, the V. Vernadsky Tavriya National University and the State University of Moldova. In total, more than 350 people were surveyed.The answers of the respondents allowed revealing several tendencies related to the prevalence of certain ideologies in different student communities, the presence of a gender dimension of political and ideological self-identification of students of Ukraine and Moldova, etc. One of the most symptomatic trends is the prevalence of nationalist ideas, especially among first-year students. As an explanation, it was suggested that the demand for national-democratic and nationalist ideologies among students is a protest reaction of the new generation to (geo)political and other challenges. Generally, despite the expectations, the ideological preferences of the Ukrainian and Moldovan students do not reflect the sympathies of the population of Ukraine and Moldova as a whole or their respective regions.The final part of the article reveals the connection and internal coherence of the ideological orientations of students based on foreign policy issues. As a result, it was concluded that political science students in Ukraine (and Moldova) demonstrate what can be called the logic of a border state. Its essence encapsulates the mode of interaction as the most rational, which helps avoid direct pressure. It envisages cooperation at the level of configurations of states and/or international organizations capable of resisting the pressure of individual actors, no matter how powerful they might be.

A brief constellation towards a ruderal futurism

This article serves as a brief constellation of thought working towards a ruderal futurism. Proposed as an alternative of the granary logic of state and capital, the ruderal is positioned as a force functioning in the aftermath of – and in opposition to – the composite human/state/cereal-turned-capitalist ordering of nature. The role of agriculture and cereal crop production in early states as well as its exalted status within modern nation state and attendant culture is examined as a departure point for experimental approaches to their negation.