This essay investigates the entrenchment of domestic violence against women in South Punjab, Pakistan, during the pivotal decades of 1980 to 2000. We propose that the escalation of such violence was not a mere aggregation of private, familial disputes but rather the direct and intended consequence of a state-driven project of legal and social engineering. This project, initiated under General Zia-ul-Haq's regime, institutionalized gender-based discrimination through a series of laws, most notably the 1979 Hudood Ordinances and the 1984 Qanun-e-Shahadat. These legal instruments devalued female testimony, criminalized victims of sexual assault, and fortified patriarchal control over women's bodies and autonomy. We argue that the subsequent democratic governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, hampered by political instability and conservative alliances, fundamentally failed to dismantle this discriminatory architecture. This state-level failure allowed pre-existing feudal and patriarchal norms in South Punjab to flourish, creating an environment of impunity for perpetrators. Drawing on a methodological triangulation of legal history, literary analysis of Tahira Iqbal's Neeli Bar, and qualitative interview testimonies from women in the region, this study demonstrates how the convergence of state policy, economic dependency, and socio-cultural tradition created a "perfect storm" of oppression. The findings reveal a landscape where violence was normalized, women's access to justice was systematically obstructed, and the silence of victims was enforced through both legal and social mechanisms. This research reframes domestic violence in the region not as a cultural inevitability but as a calculated outcome of modern state power.

ABSTRACT This article introduces the concept of executive spectacle policing to theorise a mode of governance in which law enforcement becomes a performative extension of executive power. Through analysis of federal deployments during the Trump administration – including Lafayette Square, Operation Legend, Operation Diligent Valor, and immigration enforcement – this paper argues that policing was repurposed as political theater. No longer merely a tool for maintaining order, policing became a public spectacle designed to convey strength, instill fear, and consolidate authority. Drawing on Deboard’s theory of state spectacle, Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, and the evolution of executive federalism as a mode of centralised and often coercive governance, the article examines how federal enforcement actions were staged for visibility and mediated through fragmented news environments. These spectacles were not isolated events, but deliberate interventions in the political-symbolic field – broadcast and amplified to signal inclusion to supporters and exclusion to dissenters. The analysis shows how executive spectacle policing thrives in a media ecosystem where virality, emotional resonance, and narrative simplicity often override procedural legitimacy. With Trump’s return to office in 2025, these tactics appear to be accelerating, underscoring the need for criminological inquiry into how power is performed, mediated, and normalised. This article calls for a critical rethinking of policing that centers its symbolic and communicative dimensions. By revealing how law enforcement operates as both message and mechanism, the concept of executive spectacle policing provides a framework for understanding the authoritarian aesthetics of modern state power.

The 1834 New Poor Law saw the reordering of local government across England and Wales. Wales experienced an imposition of reformed poor law administrative structures designed to combat changing economic and social conditions in Midland and Southern England. Such reform fed into the building of modern centralised state power against Welsh traditions of parochial management providing a deep point of conflict. As with several European states new welfare legislation was imposed where the population (including those responsible for delivering it) spoke a different language to those tasked with introducing it. However, language was more than a 'practical' consideration. Some paupers, advocates and union officers continued corresponding and translating official guidance into Welsh: it was clear this was also a means of lingering contestation against an administrative imposition.

In recent decades, state power has become a multilayered, multi-component, and multilevel system in which various structures and mechanisms interact with each other and sometimes compete for influence. This requires a revision of traditional approaches to the analysis of public power and is associated with the necessity of developing new theoretical and practical models capable of adequately reflecting the real picture of state activity in the context of modern political and legal transformations. Constitutionalism, in its classical interpretation, is based on universal and abstract principles such as the rule of law, separation of powers, protection of human rights, and guarantees of legal order. However, in light of the growing complexity of the modern state apparatus, the universality of these principles is undergoing adaptation and specification, which necessitates reflecting on specialized forms of constitutionalism, such as judicial, administrative, financial, and others. These specialized forms become not just technical means of implementing a general constitutional order but also important indicators of deeper transformations occurring within the constitutional framework. In this regard, the subject of research is the specificity of the emergence and functioning of these specialized forms in the context of adapting universal principles of constitutionalism to changing conditions and the differentiated structure of modern state power. The methodological foundation of the work consists of systemic, institutional, and comparative-legal approaches that allow for the identification of patterns in the evolution of public legal mechanisms. The application of methods of legal dogmatics and critical analysis ensures a theoretical depth in the understanding of specialized forms of constitutional regulation. The novelty of the research lies in the conceptualization of specialized forms of constitutionalism as stable adaptive mechanisms that support the integrity of the constitutional order in conditions of its complexity. It is indicated that these specialized forms are not opposed to classical constitutionalism, but represent its institutional development. Emphasis is placed on the fact that such forms contribute to strengthening legal guarantees, improving the balance of powers, and increasing the flexibility of the public governance system in modern society. Their manifestations in various legal systems are analyzed. Within the framework of the research, the thesis is substantiated that functional specialization is a necessary condition for actualizing the basic values of the constitutional legal order. It is concluded that specialized forms of constitutionalism should be considered as indicators of the maturity and adaptability of public authority.

Technocratic Sovereignty 2.0: Architecture, Crisis, and the Transformation of Modern State Power

The purpose of this article is to discuss two thinkers who stand out with their theoretical approaches to the capabilities of modern state power. Michel Foucault and Michael Mann provide important roadmaps to understand the current skills of the state through their conceptual developments. In this context, contemplating Foucault's "governmentality" alongside Mann's "infrastructural power" will offer an enlightening reading on the modern state. Accordingly, the first section explains Foucault's theoretical approach and specifically elaborates on the concept of governmentality. The second section delves into Mann's concept of infrastructural power. The final section discusses the similarities and differences between the concepts. The original contribution of the article lies in this exploration. In conclusion, the article attempts to provide a comprehensive definition of modern state power in the context of "capacity" and "rationality" by highlighting the similarities and differences between the concepts of the two thinkers.

Village regulations, as an informal institution, can only function when embedded in specific social networks. In traditional times, village regulations were endogenous, embedded in the “cultural governance network” of traditional rural society, forming an important part of the rural governance system. Since modern times, especially since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the “cultural governance network” supported by Confucian ethics, gentry, and clans has been replaced by an “organizational integration network” supported by modern state power, administration, institutions, and modern culture. The current village regulations are constructed by modern state forces and are detached from the current rural social network, thus their role in rural governance is limited. As an important form of “three-governance” integration in grassroots governance, village regulations need to be adjusted according to rural social networks to play their expected governance functions, activate autonomy to cultivate endogenous subjects, practice moral governance to revitalize the cultural foundation, and promote rule of law to optimize the state’s presence.

Power revealed as a multidimensional phenomenon in the political, sociological, ideological, axiological, legal, ethical sense. Modern State power in a democratic transition of a society acquires conflicting potential for violation, so it requires the cre

Book Review: <i>Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – A Global History</i> by Miles Glendinning

In recent years, architectural historians have started to move beyond a negative appreciation for modernist mass housing architecture that has been dismissed because of its lack of architectural ambitions, or has been cast aside as ideologically compromised. This rising interest for modern mass housing estates and the government policies that shaped them have led to various insightful publications, such as Fourcaut and Dufaux’s Le monde des grands ensembles, Florian Urban’s Tower and Slab, Bl...

The Henry James novel The American (1877) is analyzed on the basis of a conflict between the twoforms of liberty, which Isaiah Berlin in the end of the 1950s designated as negative and positive. Theconcept of negative freedom is in this interpretation of the novel connected to a contrast between thestate and the clan. With starting point in Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011),and Mark S Weiner in The Rule of the Clan (2013), modern rule of law is in the analysis of the novelregarded as something radically different from clan society.Based on an understanding of the modern state as a guarantee for individual autonomy and liberty, inBerlin’s negative meaning, James depicts in The American, the problems of maintaining liberty, in thenegative sense, in a community organised around the clan.In the novel, the American protagonist Christopher Newman with his lack of prejudices represent forhis French fiancée Claire de Cintréa possible way to freedom. What Newman does, is to offer Claire theopportunity to move from the French aristocracy to the economically strong Americanbourgeoisie—from a kind of feudalism to capitalism. The proposed move coincides with thedevelopmental curve of the novel, which with respect to Claire runs from clan to state.In striking contrast to Newman’s optimized sort of freedom, where neither any internalized norms norany economic limitations prohibit the protagonist from acting in the way that he desires, Claire is thedaughter of a family that represents the old world, with all its limitations and restrictions on negativeliberty. In a highly concrete manner she is prohibited from acting as she wants. This is emphasized inthe question of who to marry.The analysis connects Claire’s family to the ultramontanists and legitimists circles of 19th centuryParisian aristocracy. The terms refer to the ultra-conservative and fiercely anti-liberal movements that,after the French revolution, turned against the modern state power that allegedly forced on the French Catholics secular values.Legitimism and ultramontanism are in the novel intimately connected to maintaining an organisationaround the clan. In contrast to the clan, rule of law, democracy and individual freedom is seen asconsequences of the framework of the modern, liberal state.

Abstract Surveillance studies have long argued that electronic databases are designed to maximize state surveillance as a “superpanopticon” or “surveillant assemblage.” But how are databases being implemented in practice, and do they actually enhance control? This article addresses these questions by examining the case of the German Central Foreigners Register (Ausländerzentralregister [AZR]). Established in 1953, the AZR was one of the first databases on migrants in the western liberal world, and remains a pillar of Germany's migration control system today. By analyzing internal ministerial records from the 1950s to the 1970s – the time when this database was introduced, expanded, and automatized while still relatively free from legal or public constraints – this article examines whether, or how, databases enhance state control. I argue that the AZR did not provide the “perfect surveillance” it was intended to deliver; rather, it produced major bureaucratic and political challenges and a series of malfunctions. This case study confirms that database surveillance, such as the German AZR in the 1970s and European databases today, depends on three basic conditions: shared expectations regarding data usages, cooperation in data supply, and capacities of data storage and maintenance. Moreover, databases serve the additional symbolic function of reassuring the self‐imagination of sovereign, modern state power.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the mobilization of knowledge as an adjunct to modern state power became essential to imperial projects worldwide. As traditional empires consolidated colon...

Reviewed by: Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang Aminda Smith Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 380. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book. I recently attended a lecture by a well-known China watcher who is often cited for her expertise on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies related to women and gender equality. When an audience member asked whether there were contestations, over antifeminist policies, between the Party leadership and officials in the Women's Federation (Funü lianhehui 妇女联合会, or Fulian), the speaker responded by claiming that the Fulian cannot be considered a feminist organization as it is simply an arm of the Party. While this claim is not entirely false, it is misleading. Moreover, such a position is all too common in the reportage and scholarship on the People's Republic of China (PRC): the CCP is often portrayed as a thoroughly patriarchal, Borg-like monolith, just as masculinist and oppressive to women as any other modern state power, despite its early claims to the contrary. Thus, Zheng Wang's forceful and convincing argument to the contrary makes her new book a crucial intervention in the fields of PRC history and the history of Chinese feminism. As her title suggests, among [End Page 408] Party members and PRC state leaders, Wang finds committed feminist women, who truly endeavored to bring about a socialist feminist revolution. Finding Women in the State, organized into two parts and eight chapters, considers the work of Chinese Communist feminists through a series of cases. Because Wang's argument requires the close reading and unpacking of extremely rich and detailed source materials, her chapters are quite dense. And her discussion is so wide-ranging that one sometimes senses at least two different books in this one volume. But in the end, all of the pieces coalesce around Wang's answer to an important historiographical question: how do we evaluate the CCP's famous claim to have liberated women, epitomized in Mao Zedong's all-too-oft-quoted pronouncement that "women hold up half the sky"? The research conducted over the past several decades suggests one answer: Chinese women were, and remain, partially liberated—thanks to the whims of a male-dominated and patriarchal Communist Party that nevertheless maintained its rhetoric supporting gender equality and thus sporadically promoted women's rights when doing so did not undermine other Party goals. Wang shows, however, that what appears to be a series of half-hearted and superficial concessions made by a masculinist state are actually evidence of hard-won victories achieved by women working in the Women's Federation and other Party-state units; these feminists were truly committed to the Maoist claim that women's liberation was central to China's socialist revolution. Wang does not deny that the sites in which state feminists worked, such as the Women's Federation, were inseparable parts of the Communist Party. Indeed, it was enthusiasm for socialism's liberatory promise that led these women to join the revolution. Those feminists who held positions within the PRC state certainly demonstrated their loyalty to the Party. Crucially, however, Wang shows that cadres and leaders who did women's work (funü gongzuo 妇女工作) also saw themselves as quasi-independent actors, dedicated to opposing patriarchy in Chinese society and in the Communist state. And their pursuit of a bona fide feminist agenda caused repeated clashes between state feminists and other Party members, including those in the central leadership. This book traces the histories of those state feminists committed to women's work. It demonstrates that while their battles were all uphill and against strong opposition from many Party men, [End Page 409] state feminists fought hard and sometimes successfully fomented real change for Chinese women. Wang reveals that the effects of state feminism can be seen everywhere during the socialist period, even in high-level Party policy and propaganda. She also argues, however, that historians must search for feminism in PRC history because it...

Reviewed by: The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 by Jonathan Vincent Alex Vernon Jonathan Vincent. The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964. Oxford UP, 2017. xii + 312 pp. $78.00. One of the pleasures in teaching my American War Literature course at the introductory level—for many students, the only literature course of their college careers—is how evident it becomes to them that the texts we study matter. The students are quick to realize that the way we talk about war—particularly the stories we tell—influences how we think about soldiering and war, how we make personal and collective decisions. It has real consequences. [End Page 569] The relationship between stories about past wars and the ongoing exigencies of the nation-state during the so-called long modern period of American letters is the subject of Jonathan Vincent's excellent new book, The Health of the State. As Vincent describes the book in his introduction, "it traces, in the rhetorical space between self and society, between past and present forms of historical consciousness, between public and private registers of civic authority, critical evolutions in attitudes toward political associations that modern war discourse so persistently induces, deepening and thickening the interdependence between modern citizens and state power. And it is a story of didactic futurists that modernist writing makes legible in the most vivid of ways" (7). One of the great strengths of The Health of the State involves how thoroughly it interweaves the evolving ideological ideas regarding the role of the nation-state; societal attitudes toward war, preparedness, and a professional military; and, of course, literature (Vincent's book focuses almost entirely on novels, with a handful of essays and short stories). How does a society rooted in allegiance to the local and to liberal laissez-faire individualism, with a foundational distrust of state power, transform into a society that embraces the regulatory principles of a standing military? And how has literature contributed to and critiqued this transformation? Vincent smartly calls out the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as the supreme symbol of the nationally incorporated self, where allegiance to the local and insistent individualism are superseded by a nameless body interred in federal land. Had his study gone beyond 1964, it might have noted that the country's first national war memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, appropriated for the nation-state an approximately century-old practice of local memorials listing the hometown dead. Vincent has immersed himself in primary and secondary material, from historical figures writing about war, citizenship, and the state such as Samuel Huntington and Emory Upton, to contemporary literary critics such as John Limon and Margot Norris in addition to the literary texts. Indeed, The Health of the State is as much a work of recovery as it is of sharp analysis. Anyone researching or teaching American war literature would be wise to consult this book. Looking for something to pair with The Red Badge of Courage? Try Ellen Glasgow's The Battle-Ground—or, even more lost on today's readers, the Civil War novels of Mary Johnston. For African American perspectives, in addition to Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, there's Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion. One of the advantages of Vincent's method is his equal and integrated treatment of texts by [End Page 570] veterans and those by civilians, by men and by women, by whites and by blacks. War is everybody's business, and war narratives contribute to the social imaginary regardless of their source. The heart of the book is its first part, which covers representations of the Civil War beginning in the 1890s, when the United States found itself increasingly on an overseas war footing, through the wake of the Great War. As Vincent argues, the stakes go beyond military preparedness: "Writers in the early ferment of the Progressive Era embraced [the Civil War's] socializing prospects, particularly its story of collective sacrifice" (16). "They exploited it," he explains, "for its many models of social amalgamation, for its visions of self-integration and political intensification...

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.

&lt;p class="1Body"&gt;This paper focuses on Li Hung Chang (1823-1901)’s visit to England and America in 1896, to rethink and revaluate the importat role Li played at that historical time. Li Hung Chang toured Europe and America in 1896 as an imperial envoy of the first rank. Although some aspects of Li’s career and evaluation have been given monographic treatment, there is yet little study on his comments on his attitudes toward Western science and technology. This paper augues that if modernization is a matter of modern state power as an army, navy, or diplomatic corps, then Li was certainly a modernizer. But if modernization is a deeper process of organizational and institutional change, Li was not a determined modernizer. In fact, Li relied heavily on patronage even when he could exercise legitimate political power, in order to adovocate Self-Strengthening Movement.&lt;/p&gt;

The King’s Two Bodies is, as has long been recognized, a genealogy of modern state power. But it is also something else less clearly recognized. The King’s Two Bodies is a lamentation. In Kantorowicz’s poignant eulogy, the sovereign that medieval lawyers had made in the imago dei, was revealed at last to be an idol. Profound reverence for the rule of law crumbled into absent-minded legality. The lawful sovereign became diabolical power, forever deciding exceptions but incapable of justice or grace. In The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz mournfully shows how the death and tragic afterlife of a particular medieval concept of sovereignty helped to make possible the horrors of modern political absolutism and state idolatry.

ABSTRACTThe Hexi Corridor is an important region of irrigated agriculture in an arid area of China. Prior to 1949, a large number of Dragon King Temples played a key role in irrigation activities in the Hexi Corridor. Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, these temples have undergone a three-stage process of evolution. They gradually evolved from sites of sacrifice and prayers for rain to become the sole embodiment of the regional hydraulic order. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the symbolic role of the Dragon King Temples declined, and they degenerated into crucial spaces for violent contests over control of water resources in times of hydraulic crises. Finally, Dragon King Temples faded from the sociopolitical scene after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The unique natural environment of the Hexi Corridor reduced local people’s awe of the Dragon King, yet the social environment compelled them to identify with the state. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the state maintained its presence in local irrigation activities by introducing and promoting the cult of the Dragon King and the building of temples, which were revered as symbols of state power. With the decline of the state in modern times, local society’s worship of the Dragon King also dwindled. After the Communist regime began to exert all-around control of irrigation, Dragon King Temples were quickly replaced by the government at the grassroots level, and the cult finally disappeared as modern state power expanded.

This article explores the violent geographies of the Vietnam War. It argues that the conflict is crucial for understanding the security logics and spatialities of U.S. state violence in the war on terror. An overarching theme is that U.S. national security has inherited and intensified the atmospheric forms of power deployed across Southeast Asia, including ecological violence, the electronic battlefield, counterinsurgency (the Phoenix Program), and drone surveillance. All of these attempted to pacify and capture hostile circulations of life and place them within the secured and rationalized interiors of the U.S. war machine. The article thus expands on the concept of atmospheric warfare. This is defined as a biopolitical project of enclosure to surveil, secure, and destroy humans and nonhumans within a multidimensional warscape. Since modern state power is becoming ever more atmospheric—particularly with the rise of drone warfare—dissecting the origins of that violence in the Vietnam War is a vital task.