Logic Of State Research Articles

American power preponderance and the nuclear revolution

AbstractThe theory of Power Preponderance put forward by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth is poised to replace structural balance-of-power theory as the leading American Realist interpretation of international politics. Power Preponderance argues that would-be rivals to the US are not balancing against it because they are dissuaded from doing so by geopolitical and structural factors, rather than because they love the US or are cowed by it. This article shows why the central analytical claim of Power Preponderance would be substantially enhanced by incorporating the logic of the nuclear revolution, but that its main policy recommendation – indefinite and magnanimous American preponderance – is undermined by the spectre of nuclear war. In the nuclear age, normative solutions to the problem of anarchy invariably gravitate toward the logic of a world state.

Killing Children with Impunity: From Mississippi to Gaza

This article situates the recent killing of children in Gaze by Israeli forces with images of racial violence and neglect that extend from the murder of Emmett Till to the Bush government's failure to care for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The article argues that all three events are held together by racialized logic of disappearance and disposability implemented under the logic of the modern racial state. It poses the question of why the images of suffering against innocent children in Gaza have not provoked the same public outcry as did the representations that followed the Till and Katrina events.

Another kind of Gewalt: Beyond Law Re-Reading Walter Benjamin

AbstractThis article is the first in a series of discussions of the essay 'Violence' by Balibar from the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, published in this issue of Historical Materialism. The article revisits Walter Benjamin's reflection on the concept of violence, attempting to rethink its semantics in the tension between right and justice. After examining the continuum of juridical violence in relation to the logic of the modern state, it attempts to delineate the possibility of another type of violence: a violence that is not a means in order to attain an end, but which finds in itself the criterion of its own justice. Research into this kind of violence has been a particularly urgent and complex problem in modern politics which, together with the foreclosure of justice, has rendered unthinkable qualitatively different types of Gewalt, types that lie beyond the sterile opposition between violence and non-violence. Rethinking the question of justice means that, in a conflict, however violent it might be, a non-teleological criterion is possible, starting with the extent to which some part of the struggle can be defined as just.

SHAMANEN, JOMFRUEN OG SKATTEVÆSENET: Portræt af en mirakelmager fra det sydlige Chile

This article presents the case of the shaman José Karipan, who is considered one
 of the most powerful and popular shamans in southern Chile. The article explores
 the success of his practice as a healer, by analyzing the relationship between healing,
 identity and the socio-economic and political context of Southern Chile. It is
 argued that shamanistic medical practice is so popular among patients in Southern
 Chile due to its sensitivity to their historical past and socio-political reality. The
 shaman’s practice and figure build upon symbols and aspects of his social environment;
 the shaman is Roman Catholic and claims to receive his healing power
 from the Virgin of Carmen, the national saint of Chile. Furthermore, he is publicly
 known for a conflict with the local taxation authorities, who accuse him of
 failing to claim tax for his income as a healer. These factors serve to challenge
 the logic of the Chilean state but also show how the shaman’s personal practices
 are embedded inside the logic of the state, and draw upon national symbols as
 a source of power.

Valuing children: rethinking the economics of the family

Nancy Folbre challenges the conventional economist's assumption that parents have children for the same reason that they acquire pets - primarily for the pleasure of their company. Children become the workers and taxpayers of the next generation, and investments in them offer a significant payback to other participants in the economy.Yet parents, especially mothers, pay most of the costs. The high price of childrearing pushes many families into poverty, often with adverse consequences for children themselves.Parents spend time as well as money on children. Yet most estimates of the of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.She also emphasizes the need for better accounting of public expenditure on children over the life cycle and describes the need to rethink the very structure and logic of the welfare state. A new institutional structure could promote more cooperative, sustainable, and efficient commitments to the next generation.

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre-colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouesse). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre-colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post-colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out- and in-migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non-state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post-colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state-led forms of ‘villagization’.

GESTURE BEYOND TOLERANCE: generosity, fatality and the logic of the state

GESTURE BEYOND TOLERANCE: generosity, fatality and the logic of the state

Soviet Jewish Emigration to Israel: Measure of the Impacts on Jerusalem and on the Settlements of theWest Bank and Gaza Strip

With the migratory awakening of the Soviet Jewish population shortly after the events of 1989, Yitshak Shamir, the then prime minister of Israel, affirmed that “a great immigration requires a large Israel.” This declaration has underlined the permanence of the close bond linking population and territorial strategy in Israel. State-born from the Jewish immigration (Aliya) Israel has always supported the idea that the new immigrants represent a force making it possible to ensure its security and its geo-strategical options. After more than a decade of a demography revivified by the immigration of almost a million of Soviet Jews, it seems pertinent to measure the results of the relation established between population and territorial control in Israel. To carry out this project, this paper will compare the logic of the state and the logic of the migrants by analyzing the dynamic of the immigrant population in Jerusalem and the West bank: high points of the crystallization of this relation.

Racisms compared: Fascist Italy and ultra-nationalist Japan

This article tries to compare the racisms of Fascist Italy and ultra-nationalist Japan as evidenced by foreign policy, attempting to categorize them into three dimensions: the inner logic of the nation state; the justification of expansionist foreign policies; and as an accelerator of cruelty in war. It also surveys Italo-Japanese relations by choosing some points of contact to scrutinize how different racisms reacted to each other.

Rethinking the Punitive Turn

This article examines the thesis that the recent punitive shift taken by western states can be explained in terms of what Christie calls the `subordination of law and order systems to the purposive logic of the rational bureaucratic state' (Christie, 1996). While accepting that this `subordination to modernity' thesis has considerable explanatory power, this article argues that it is nevertheless limited in terms of providing an adequate explanation of the punitive shift. While it is true that it can help explain how punitive solutions may evolve out of rationalizing tendencies integral to the modern state, this thesis cannot account for what Garland (1996) terms the `criminology of the other' and the contribution of this to the current punitive turn. Not only is this `criminology' irreducible to the rationalizing forces specific to modernity, it is also a form of `criminology' the appearance of which marks a decisive attack upon other attributes of modernity around which modern penal systems were also constructed; in particular, as this article will examine, the `restricted economy of limits' that historically established the normative parameters within which modern penal systems emerged. To interpret the punitive turn, this article argues that it is necessary to trace its genesis not only to a purification of modernity, but also and in a different respect to its dissolution and replacement by what, after Bataille, will be termed an `economy of excess'.

A Discourse of Legitimacy

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, P.O. Box 607, FIN33101 Tampere, glowe@acnet.fi A zealous and time-honoured commitment to cultural concerns is a cornerstone of public broadcasting in the comparatively small Nordic countries (Hujanen and Jauert, 1998). The preservation and nourishment of Finnish culture has long been a central plank and supporting beam in the legitimacy platform that justifies Yleisradio’s [YLE] position in and demands on their society (Enden, 1996). Compelling contemporary evidence is found in the 1993 Act on YLE which legislatively reaffirms the company’s mandate to frame the services of public broadcasting here in culture-centred terms. This Act complements and extends a cherished historic devotion to such concerns, and has been suggested as the clearest unbroken thread of continuity in YLE’s institutional history (Lowe and Alm, 1997). Culture services in Finland and elsewhere in northern Europe are tightly linked with the legitimating logic of the Nordic welfare state wherein democratisation of broadcast programming is rooted in the ethic of providing “universality” in access to signals and content (Hujanen, 1995). That “public service” ethic, its presumed and incumbent values, as well as its institutional complexion and practical operation, have been challenged and critiqued (e.g., Raboy, 1996; Avery, 1993; Foster, 1992). Today’s competitive context is strikingly dissimilar when compared with monopoly arrangements twenty years ago. The differences are largely a function of increasing competition with the private, commercial sector, and the more general influences of market-oriented rationale in political, social and economic spheres of interest. The Nordic setting has been similarly construed (Kemppainen, 1998). Here as elsewhere, the legitimacy of a public service approach to and practice in broadcasting continues to be vigorously challenged. This is fundamentally a debate about legitimacy that is keyed to differences of opinion in social, political and cultural perspectives. “Some debaters think that public service broadcasting remains a historical relict, while others argue that in the new environment its unique features will be more important than ever” (Hujanen and Jauert, 1998:124). The essence of such conflict hinges on the degree to which public service broadcasting remains socially relevant and legitimate. To the extent that it does enjoy continuing or strengthening legitimacy, a decisive element is rooted in the strongly cultural agenda that tends to frame the enterprise (Radio and Television Systems in the EU Member States and Switzerland, 1998). The situation in Finland is relevant to this more encompassing “discourse of legitimacy.” Yet for all its evident centrality, “culture” has largely flourished under an assumed identity. It is summoned as a god-term to explain and justify what is and isn’t done, but in the institutional setting it is rarely explicitly defined. The meanings and values of ”culture” can, however, be ascertained and critically analysed. There are, of course, a variety of ways to describe this area of media studies, here it is framed as a three-dimensional construct: production, texts and reception. In this article, the author focuses on the first of those dimensions by investigating the ways culture is defined in professional discourse and for practical reasons. The analysis critically investigates “culture” as a defining element in the legitimacy discourse that characterises YLE in the 1990s. It is framed by a heuristic proposed by Lowe and Alm (1997) in which the envi-

The Exclusionary Logic of the Welfare State

This article examines the ways in which exclusionary practices with regard to Palestinian citizens were institutionalized in one of the most central components of the Israeli welfare state: the child allowance scheme. Different child allowance programmes are studied in a historical perspective, analysing patterns of implicit and formal exclusion. Following theories which refer to the political economy of the welfare state, the article focuses on the connection between exclusionary practices and the shaping of the stratification structure in advanced capitalist societies. It is argued that the partial exclusion of Palestinian citizens has been patterned by the interaction between two analytically distinct logics: the Zionist logic of the Israeli state, and the inner logic of the welfare state as a stratificatory mechanism.

Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State. Bo Rothstein

Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State. Bo Rothstein

Just institutions matter: the moral and political logic of the universal welfare state

Just institutions matter: the moral and political logic of the universal welfare state

Problemas de las reformas de política en la economía haitiana

El presente artículo intenta seguir la operación de la lógica del estado depredador en Haití durante el último siglo y medio. Luego señala algunas de las consecuencias principales, en particular la separación de la mayoría de la población de los órganos de toma de decisiones y la ciénaga macroeconómica legada por el gobierno de Jean-Claude Duvalier, en 1986. Por último, ofrece un breve relato de lo que ha ocurrido desde 1986, destacando varios esfuerzos de reforma y reveses; y comenta las perspectivas de reformas económicas en el futuro.

Robin M. Williams Lecture, 1994: Taking society seriously

Civil society provides essential balance to the rising power of national states and market economies. Particularly in the United States, however, the economy and state are squeezing civil society, with negative consequences. One result is that market rationality supplants other moralities, with attendant changes in social practices. Examples are offered from education, health care, and federal tax policy. All three legs of the metaphorical social tripod of civil society, economy, and the state need to be strong. Institutions of civil society sustain individuals and societies, but require structural and cultural support if they are to complement and counterbalance the logic and practices of economy and state.

The rise and fall of the Eugenics empire: recent perspectives on the impact of biomedical thought in modern society

In the last decade or so scholars have begun to develop a series of new strategies for understanding and explaining the creation and popularity of biomedical modes of thinking in modern European societies. In a certain sense these strategies are designed to supplement, if not replace, an older form of intellectual history that was content to trace the spread of racist ideas and theories of biological determinism from the founding fathers (Count Arthur de Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain, and Paul de Lagarde among many others) to the anti-semitic or racist movements they inspired, culminating in the holocaust and the genocide of the I930S and I940s.1 There was a kind of cosmopolitan quality to this history of ideas approach that treated racial ideas as so many interchangeable parts and racists as fanatical but politically effective propagandists. Because their focus was fixed on the pseudoscientific and ideological aspects of their subject, few of these older histories tried to assess mainstream science and medicine for evidence of collusion or resistance to racist ideas; if they did discuss the science of their day it was to document support for aryanism or anti-Semitism in one or another of their nationalist manifestations in pre-war and wartime Europe. Though echoes of the murderous racism of the World War II era are not absent from the work under review, genocide no longer dominates the research agenda of the history of biomedical thought. Historians are now more willing to explore aspects of biological and racial thought that did not end in holocaust, to follow the variations biomedical concepts have taken in different national settings, and to consider the relationship of mainstream science and scientists with pseudoscience and with the zealots who have until recently received the lion's share of attention. As some of these authors wish to demonstrate, a passionate concern with race hygiene and the identification of dangerous human pathologies did not, accordingly, end in I945, but has been subsumed into the logic and practices of the modern welfare state, though in forms more compatible with contemporary sensibility on these matters. Despite the fact that these books are mostly concerned with Great Britain and France in the period I880-I945, there is enough discussion of the United States and Italy to illustrate fully the point that biomedical thinking about the human population and its pathologies flowed in channels dictated by the situation of particular nationstates. There was wide medical and scientific agreement, for instance, about the threat of an inheritable and worsening biological degeneration, but this notion was interpreted uniquely in each national setting, so that, depending on local conditions, experts

Neoliberalism

Why have East Asian tigers -South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong-succeeded in their economic development while Latin American countries have failed? Why can't Latin American countries emulate East Asians and reproduce their success? Two recent works examine these questions, comparing and contrasting East Asian and Latin American development experiences, sketching different historical-structural features of two regions, and detailing different development strategies employed by states. On basis of these differences, both cast doubt upon simplistic notion that Latin Americans can or should emulate East Asian development strategies. Further, both suggest that conventional wisdom that Latin America has failed because of its statist policies and East Asia succeeded because of its free-market model is not sustained by facts. Ziya Oni? argues in Logic of Developmental State that the East Asian model of developmental state is product of unique historical circumstances with logical corollary that there exist major constraints on its transferability to or replicability in alternative national contexts (1991: 120). Various contributors to Gereffi and Wyman's Manufacturing Miracles point out that in Latin America penetration of transnational corporations has been more significant (leaving a narrower range of choice for states) and both class structures and geopolitical interests and policies of U.S. government have differed. The substantial evidence presented seems to strengthen some aspects of dependency perspective and call neoliberal model into question. For example, whereas East Asian states have made their own decisions regarding company export policies, Latin American countries have often had to struggle with transnationals entrenched in region and making corporate decisions on basis of global market strategies rather than national development -to direct their economic development. While some criticisms of dependency

The Logic of the Developmental State

The Logic of the Developmental State

Croissance et répression, la double logique de l'Etat deépendant: le cas du Brésil

Growth and Repression, the Ambiguous Logic of the Dependent State: The Case of BrazilThe often intuitive association between the army and foreign capitalists alters the analysis of the condition of dependency and the nature of the dependent State. We intend to shed light on the importance of the Brazilian State's autonomy, in the face of foreign domination and local capitalists. This autonomy is strengthened by the fundamental shift noticed between the economic decision-making system and the method of political control. The link between political domination and economic decisions is found in the State; it lies in the association between the army and the civil technocracy. Our study shows that this association is based on a distribution of power within the state, that it is characterized by conflict, and thus that it requires bargaining. The difficulties encountered by the government, led by General Geisel (197479), reflect the contradictions of that association.Our purpose here is not to improve a typology and to advance subtle distinctions that would allow us to measure the present gap between the Brazilian regime and a democratic system, or the slight divergence that distinguishes it from a totalitarian government. Such an exercise appears to be of limited interest. The objectives of this study are to determine the nature of the Brazilian State—by a careful study of its political structure—and to identify social changes resulting from dependent dēvelopment.