Nature Of State Power Research Articles

Power Lines: The Rhetoric of Maps as Social Change in the Post–Cold War Landscape

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, cartographers were faced with choices on how the new post–Cold War political landscape would be mapped. One such group called the Pluto Project had been producing atlases since 1981 with a progressive point of view about the nature of state power in the Cold War. This essay examines two of the Pluto Project's atlases as they function to identify a radical cartographic style that animates the social control of space by subverting traditional cartographic forms and defying scientific expectations and standards.

Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects*

Abstract In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam‐building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development. I start by showing how the concrete case of dispossession in the Narmada Valley is expressive of how the development strategies that defined the postcolonial nation‐building project have been moulded in such a way as to create a de facto transfer of productive resources to the country's dominant proprietary classes. I then move on to argue that these features of the political economy of India's postcolonial development project can be understood as the sediment of struggles between social movements from above and below in the decades immediately prior to Independence. Arguing that the postcolonial development project has unravelled, I outline the fundamentals of an analysis of the characteristics of social movements from below in the conflictual field of force which is emerging in its wake. Finally, I draw on the trajectory of resistance to dam‐building on the Narmada to articulate a series of reflections on the nature of state power in India and the possibilities that might exist for the state to function as an enabling space for the struggles of subaltern social groups.

Cultural Policy Studies and the Problem of Political Representation

Since the 1980s, writers in cultural policy studies have used Michel Foucault\\rquote s writing on governmentality to rethink the relationship between intellectuals in the humanities and liberal (or neoliberal) states. One of the founding members of the Australian cultural policy studies school, Tony Bennett, has argued for a model of intellectual as a cultural technicisn who works with the state bureaucracies. This article uses Bennett\\rquote s work as an entry-point into questions about the role of critical intellectual, the nature of state power and bureaucracy, and function of culture. It argues that if cultural policy studies is going to claim to be doing bureaucratic work for the sake of politics (rather than for purposes of self-interest), then it will have to supplement governmentality with other theories that help sort our relationships among intellectuals, political constituencies, and the state.

Deadly Words: State Power & the Entanglement of Speech and Violence in Hate Crime

Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘free speech,' thus addressing the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law’s response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime’s investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions that they are themselves bigots.

Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies

Since the early 1970s, debates have raged throughout the social sciences concerning the process of ‘‘globalization’’ ^ an essentially contested term whose meaning is as much a source of controversy today as it was over two decades ago, when systematic research ¢rst began on the topic. Contemporary globalization research encompasses an immensely broad range of themes, from the new international division of labor, changing forms of industrial organization, and processes of urbanregional restructuring to transformations in the nature of state power, civil society, citizenship, democracy, public spheres, nationalism, politico-cultural identities, localities, and architectural forms, among many others. 2 Yet despite this proliferation of globalization research, little theoretical consensus has been established in the social sciences concerning the interpretation of even the most rudimentary elements of the globalization process ^ e.g., its historical periodization, its causal determinants, and its socio-political implications. 3 Nevertheless, within this whirlwind of opposing perspectives, a remarkably broad range of studies of globalization have devoted detailed attention to the problematic of space, its social production, and its historical transformation. Major strands of contemporary globalization research have been permeated by geographical concepts ^ e.g., ‘‘space-time compression,’’ ‘‘space of £ows,’’ ‘‘space of places,’’ ‘‘deterritorialization,’’ ‘‘glocalization,’’ the ‘‘global-local nexus,’’ ‘‘supra

Women and the democratization movement in Tonga

Abstract A political crisis has emerged in the constitutional monarchy of Tonga (southern Pacific). A movement of commoners pressing for democratic reforms includes women as participants, although gender issues are not central to the reformist agendas. It is argued that, alongside the recognized form of political opposition, stands a deeper set of oppositional practices now associated with commoner women, namely the production and exchange of indigenous wealth objects that mark life transitions and other special events. The circuit of these women's goods carves out a respectable place for women in public, a place from which they make claims about national issues while acting in accordance with what is seen as tradition. In addition, women have spearheaded official protests against governmental development agendas and general corruption. These occasions show commoner women's insistence upon governmental accountability in ways consistent with prestate forms of social hierarchy. In the process, in a society where kin identity has traveled traditionally through men, women are coming to represent the nation. In defending and mobilizing their customary sources of authority, commoner women are also calling into question the nature of state power.

Les Paysans, le marché et l'État en Anatolie au XVIesècle

Les recherches récentes consacrées à l'agriculture ottomane suggèrent que l'ouverture sur le marché de l'économie rurale ne s'est pas accompagnée d'une concentration des terres ou de la formation de grandes propriétés. Elles montrent également qu'il n'y aurait pas eu de tendance générale à l'expropriation des paysans et à leur transformation en travailleurs serfs ou salariés sur de grands domaines. Au contraire, dans une large mesure, la production destinée au marché proviendrait de petites parcelles cultivées par des paysans libres. Dans cette étude, j'examinerai principalement de quelle façon l'économie rurale ottomane au nord de l'Anatolie centrale a réagi face à une demande croissante des villes et à une augmentation de la population au XVIesiècle.

State Power in Countries of Socialist Orientation

One of the major questions in the Marxist-Leninist theory of noncapitalist development of formerly backward countries is that of state power. In such countries, state power has come into being under conditions of distinctive relationships of class forces (primarily in the absence of the hegemony of any particular class); in turn, it exercises an enormous influence upon the processes of development of classes and their regrouping. The social nature of many phenomena and institutions is indissolubly linked to the character of state power. Moreover, the revolutionary establishment of the new power is the starting point of noncapitalist development itself. Therefore, a correct solution of the question of the nature of state power holds fundamental significance for the evaluation of the principal aspects of sociopolitical life in the countries of socialist orientation.