Dynamics Of State Formation Research Articles

A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul: Cultural Politics in Colombia, 1930–1946

This timely, well-organized, and highly relevant book might best be read by starting with the epilogue and working backward. Catalina Muñoz-Rojas focuses on the cultural politics of the Colombian Liberal Republic from 1930 to 1946 and the political culture of Liberal elites and bureaucrats who sought to include the popular sectors in the national citizenry. Those policies and practices also included traditional elitist, exclusionary polices to legitimize Liberal rule. The author places her home nation into a much broader and inclusive world, revealing how this paradoxical tension between inclusion and exclusion in governance and politics shapes the formation and contestation of citizenship in Colombia and in much of the Americas.The author argues and proves that Liberal reformers invented a notion of el pueblo as legitimate but static, romanticized, and essentialized campesinos, indígenas, women, and workers all in need of paternalistic direction and moral uplift by Liberal elites for Colombia to progress. Their constructions of “popular culture” revealed an elite-imagined purity lacking in reality, the gap between classes glaringly obvious when working-class families were tutored on how to achieve middle-class dreams while stuck living lives of poverty. Overall, the author finds that the Liberal reformers opened national identity for greater inclusion—especially for mestizos and indígenas—while rewarding themselves a place of privilege that legitimized their rule. Tellingly, and a lesson of universal import, inclusion and domination became two outcomes of the same process.This work started life as a University of Pennsylvania dissertation and morphed through time and experience into a polished monograph. The introduction situates the work and orients the reader in the dynamics of state formation and cultural politics during the Liberal Republic, the author citing relevant historiography from both English- and Spanish-language sources. Four chapters cover, respectively, the cultural politics of music; the forging of citizenship on stage and screen; hygiene campaigns and the healing of a population seen by elites as sick, weak, and in need of instruction on correct habits; and a reimagined past and a more inclusive notion of citizenship beyond the traditional Hispanist, Catholic, and white paradigm inherited from the colonial past. The tensions and contradictions inherent in democratic governance, and the definitions of citizenship manipulated and limited by elite authoritarians to justify their rule, could find easy comparison in contemporary Brazil and the United States.The stunning epilogue situates the book in the contemporary dramas of Colombia from 2019 to 2021, ranging from antigovernment protests, increasing poverty and immiseration, COVID-19, and a cynical tax reform met by intensifying protests and repression rather than dialogue from a government that still saw the public as unworthy of citizenship. The author makes clear that the cultural politics of the 1930s and the 1940s are part of long historical continuities that must be understood in order to build a more just, inclusive, and democratic order.Most of the book's primary sources come from archives and libraries in Bogotá, which prevents a larger national scope while illustrating the highly centralized and pocketed nature of the Colombian state. The author is a careful historian and is open to interdisciplinary insights from anthropology as well as cultural and literary studies. Professor Muñoz-Rojas moves with ease between languages, disciplines, and nations, connecting her work across a broad swath of the Americas. One hopes that a publisher will issue a Spanish translation soon, given the importance of the author's work in Colombia and across Latin America.Minor gripes include the lack of a glossary listing government acronyms for easy review and the lack of illustrations. More coverage of the state's emphasis on physical education for both males and females would have added to the author's focus on hygiene and the shaping of a healthier, more modern population. More coverage of Afro-Colombians and their views of and responses to the Liberal reformers' reimagined past and model of citizenry, which either ignored or disparaged Blackness, would also have been welcome. Finally, more discussion of Peruvian indigenista critiques—like those of José Carlos Mariátegui—of the abuses of the Indigenous population by the Catholic Church and large landowners would have provided context for the critiques of said abuses by the Colombian Left and by José Martí in Cuba and José Vasconcelos in Mexico.The writing is clear, jargon-free, and engaging. Graduate students in history and Latin American studies, specialists, and dedicated general readers will find much in this book about Colombian history as well as informed and sophisticated debates about democratic governance. Students of sociology and political science will also find useful comparative data for their work on state formation and democratic governance and on state and society dynamics in Latin America.

Shifting claim-making, shifting trenches: the AKP's changing self-presentation

ABSTRACT This article explores the dynamics of state-formation in Turkey during the AKP regime by questioning its claim of an almost two decades long continuity heading towards the centennial of the Republic of Turkey in 2023. Eclectically drawing on four different, yet related, theories of conflict, power and (visual) narrative; i.e. Gramscian ‘war of position,’ Contentious Politics perspective of (de)democratization, dialogical principle and visuality, the article presents a comparison of the claim-making of the two official publications; now defunct the Silent Revolution, and Towering Power Turkey, published in 2013 and 2018, respectively, to demonstrate the contrast between the pre-hegemonic and hegemonic self-presentation claims of the AKP regime, and indicates that its regime change is the re-entrenchment of many of the postulates of the Kemalist regime it originally aspired to challenge. The tenets of this analysis is located within the intersection of political sociology and cultural studies.

Revenues on the hoof: livestock trade, taxation and state-making in the Somali territories

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between livestock taxation and local state formation dynamics in the northern Somali territories. While the economic importance of livestock in Somalia is undisputed, its significance as a source of revenue and legitimacy for public administrations and competing state-building projects has been overlooked. Drawing on fieldwork in Somaliland’s main livestock markets and the Berbera corridor, we highlight the interplay between public administrations that seek to maximize livestock revenue and traders who attempt to minimize taxation. State attempts to capture these ‘revenues on the hoof’ by both coercive and consensual means, shifting livestock trading routes and fluctuating animal trading volumes produce different taxation patterns across the Somali territories. As a result, fiscal contracts between livestock traders and public administrations are marked by various degrees of reciprocity and coercion.

The Bantustan State and the South African Transition: Militarisation, Patrimonialism and the Collapse of the Ciskei Regime, 1986–1994

This article examines the Ciskei bantustan and processes of state formation during the transition to democracy. In the Ciskei, the rule of Brigadier Oupa Gqozo rested on the continued support of the South African state: identified as the weakest link in the National Party's conservative alliance, the Ciskei became the first target for the African National Congress's mass action campaign of 1992. The struggle in the Ciskei thus had some significance for the shape of the transition. While at a constitutional level the National Party eventually conceded to the reincorporation of the bantustans in late 1992, it continued to stall change and to bolster the bantustans through covert military operations and land transfers to bantustan elites. These dynamics of state formation are critical aspects of the history of the transition and were at the heart of the emerging political conflict in the Ciskei, which by mid-1992 was escalating into civil war. This article examines mass mobilisation, political repression and the consequences of the patrimonial militarisation of the Ciskei state in the Ciskei/Border region. By focusing on processes of state formation and struggles over the fabric of the state, the article provides a corrective to the prevailing academic focus on the elite negotiations and argues for the value of social histories of the bantustan states for understanding the enduring legacies of these regimes.

At the Edges of States: Dynamics of State Formation in the Indonesian Borderlands. By Eilenberg Michael. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012. xvi, 355 pp. €29.90 (paper). - Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality, and Fellowship in Southeast Asia. Edited by Thomas Gibson and Kenneth Sillander. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 2011. ix, 310 pp. $38.00 (cloth); $27.00 (paper).

At the Edges of States: Dynamics of State Formation in the Indonesian Borderlands. By Eilenberg Michael. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012. xvi, 355 pp. €29.90 (paper). - Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality, and Fellowship in Southeast Asia. Edited by Thomas Gibson and Kenneth Sillander. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 2011. ix, 310 pp. $38.00 (cloth); $27.00 (paper).

Pastoralism and Pilgrimage

Some 600 years ago, Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn wrote a theory of history in which he suggested a cyclical model of state formation and dissolution linked to ‘aṣabīyah, translated as “group feeling.” ‘Aṣabīyah is born out of shared desert hardship among the mobile bedouin, kinship relations, and catalyzed by charismatic leadership. Ibn Khaldūn’s theory emphasizes social relations over a material economic base rooted in environmental conditions and has been largely ignored by anthropology. This theory provides an appropriate model for the emergence of Arabian complex societies in the first millennium BC, an outcome little influenced by the social dynamics of state formation in surrounding regions like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Traditional materialist models of the development of highly complex societies rely on material sources of power and authority. These models anticipate an amplification of elites’ network alliances through wealth exchanges (supported by surplus production) or competitive appropriation and...

Jekyll or Hyde: what is statebuilding creating? Evidence from the ‘field’

As a response to the dynamics of state formation, statebuilding has not created model states in the last twenty years as was intended. Instead, the states that have emerged around the world are heavily contextually contingent. This is despite international attempts to shape them according to a common pattern, dominated by neoliberal models of statehood. This raises the question of what kind of hybrid states are actually forming as a result of the encounter between international statebuilding and local political dynamics? This article argues that international statebuilding aims to create neoliberal states and treats local political dynamics as dysfunctional. Yet from a local perspective the limitations of the statebuilding model are also apparent, as is the need for any locally legitimate state to be grounded in its context.

Tree plantations, politics of possession and the absence of land grabs in Vietnam

Viewed from the lens of ‘land grabs’, Vietnam's fast-growing tree plantations look like an anomaly; many of them are tiny, owned and operated by rural households. In contrast, private companies and transnational corporations have not been able to get much of a foot into Vietnam's plantation sector. This paper identifies the practices and processes underlying the apparent anomaly. On the basis of fieldwork in four villages, it points to the concrete mechanisms by which households have gained access to land, finance, and wood markets. Government policy emerges as a critical factor enabling household access, not in the sense of a coherent policy package but understood as sedimented outcomes of everyday processes of state formation over the past three decades. A central element in contestations over the state is what I call ‘politics of possession’: possession, referring to entitlement and control, has been closely tied to ideas about the state. The paper uses these empirical observations to contribute towards theoretical understandings of land grabs and exclusion. Land grabs may have to say as much about dynamics of state formation as processes of commodification and market expansion.

Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.

Part I. Divergent National Paths of State Development: 1. State formation dynamics and developmental outcomes 2. South Korea: confrontation and the formation of a cohesive state 3. Indonesia: from accommodation to confrontation 4. Rival state formations in China: the republican and Maoist states 5. Vietnam: accommodation and arrested revolution Part II. Variants of Accommodation: Vietnam and Indonesia Compared: 6. Organizing accommodation in Vietnam: coalition government, united front, and the Leninist party 7. Organizing accommodation in Indonesia: parliament and status-based parties 8. Talking accommodation in Vietnam: nation, the people, and class struggle 9. Talking accommodation in Indonesia: nation, the people, God, and Karl Marx 10. Rethinking developmental states Bibliography.

Introduction: The Limits of Statebuilding and the Analysis of State-Formation

The ‘international community’ is not the only actor engaged in statebuilding processes; contemporaneously with external intervention, at national and local levels of non-Western societies other actors are also engaged in struggles to establish their own visions of a state. The results are ambiguous: the states built tend to be hybrid, combining formal modern state façades with informal ways of functioning. This essay introduces the Special Issue by outlining the importance of the analysis of the dynamics of state-formation: the deformation that statebuilding undergoes in the process of its implementation. This framework can provide new insights into the limits of statebuilding by highlighting how the negotiation processes accompanying any attempt at statebuilding are shaped to a great extent by non-Western states' and societies' specific embeddedness in global structures. These states are currently subject to deepening dynamics of internationalization and informalization which, despite a growing formal convergence of state institutions with Western models, structurally limit the probabilities of ensuing liberal-democratic state-formation.

Global Forces and State Restructuring: Dynamics of State Formation and Collapse by Martin Doornbos

<i>Global Forces and State Restructuring: Dynamics of State Formation and Collapse</i> by Martin Doornbos

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Sally, Graham, (ed.) A Man about Town: The Letters of James Graham, Victorian Entrepreneur 1854‐1864Pamela, Jeanne Fulton, (ed.) The Minerva Journal of John Washington Price: A Voyage from Cork, Ireland, to Sydney, New South Wales, 1798‐1800Susan, Lawrence, Dolly's Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields CommunityDon, Garden, Theodore Fink. A Talent for UbiquityJohn, Ritchie, (ed.) Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 15. 1940‐1980. Kem‐PieKay, Saunders and Roger, Daniels, (eds) Alien Justice. Wartime Internment in Australia and North AmericaMark, Johnston, Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War IIFrank, Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical TraditionBrian, Costar and Nicholas, Economou, (eds) The Kennett Revolution. Victorian Politics in the 1990sMichael, Thompson, Labor Without Class: The Gentrification of the Labor PartyIan, Hancock, National and Permanent? The Federal Organisation of the Liberal Party of Australia 1944‐1965Ian, Cook, Liberalism in AustraliaJohn, Chesterman and Brian, Galligan, (eds) Defining Australian Citizenship: Selected DocumentsSue, Richardson, (ed.) Reshaping the Labour Market: Regulation, Efficiency and Equality in AustraliaS., Bell, (ed.) The Unemployment Crisis in Australia: Which Way Out?Bain, Attwood and Andrew, Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary HistoryTony, Coady (ed.) Why Universities MatterJohn, Wiseman, Global Nation? Australia and the Politics of GlobalisationDonald, Denoon, (ed.) with Stewart, Firth; Jocelyn, Linnekin; Malama, Meleisea and Karen, Nero, The Cambridge History of the Pacific IslandersRichard, Price British Society, 1680‐1880: Dynamism, Containment and ChangeKathleen, Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715‐1785John, Brewer and Eckhart, Hellmuth, (eds) Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth‐Century State in Britain and GermanyJörn, Rüsen, (ed.) Westliches Geschichtsdenken. Eine interkulturelle DebatteJohn B., Hattendorf, (ed.), with a foreword by Paul Kennedy Naval Strategy and Policy in the Mediterranean. Past, Present and FutureJean‐Claude, Favez,, (eds and trans by John and Beryl Fletcher) The Red Cross and the HolocaustIstván, Deák; Jan T., Gross and Tony, Judt, (eds) The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its AftermathPeter, Grose, Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron CurtainHira, Sing, (foreword by André Béteille) Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance. Princes, Peasants and Paramount PowerMartin, Doornbos and Sudipta, Kaviraj, Dynamics of State Formation, India and Europe Compared. Indo‐Dutch Studies on Development Alternatives, 19Marie‐Claire, Bergère, (Janet Lloyd trans) Sun Yat‐SenSherman, Cochran, (ed.) Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900‐1945Frederick C., Teiwes with Warren, Sun, China's Road to Disaster, Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 1955‐1959Richard J., Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret ServiceDr Maung, Maung, The 1988 Uprising in Burma. Monograph 49Manoranjan, Mohanty and Partha, Math Mukherji with Olle, Törnquist, (eds) People's Rights: Social Movements and the State in the Third WorldDiane B., Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine and the Nature‐Nurture DebateJoseph, Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and ControlApril, Carter and Geoffrey, Stokes, (eds) Liberal Democracy and its Critics: Perspectives in Contemporary Political ThoughtJudith N., Shklar, (ed. by Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson) Redeeming American Political ThoughtJennifer, Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920‐1960

Dynamics of State Formation: Europe and India Compared (review)

Dynamics of State Formation: Europe and India Compared (review)

Islam, Gender, and Slavery in West Africa Circa 1500: A Spatial Archaeology of the Kano Palace, Northern Nigeria

Abstract Using field data from the Kano palace, this paper highlights the utility of a reworked Foucauldian mode of spatial analysis (spatial archaeology) in understanding the dynamics of state formation in Islamicized West Africa. It is argued that the palace was built circa 1500 as an Islamic palace within which North African political cultural innovations were intorudced and given material force. The most important of these were seclusion, massive concubinage, a state council and treasury, and the use of male slaves (including eunuchs) as important state functionaries. These innovations established a new and gendered spatial dynamic of state formation that registered clearly in palace design. Most notably, gender constructions were mediated through spatial oppositions which emphasized the importance of paternity and royal motherhood in increasing the authority of the king. Accordingly “male”“state” affairs were sited in or near public domains while female “state-household” activities were located in th...

Dependent state formation and Third World militarization

The relationship between militarization and state formation in the West has been the subject of considerable scholarship,1 and there is thus some temptation to simply transfer concepts and arguments from that domain to the study of Third World militarization. Yet state formation dynamics in the two contexts were and are quite different, with important implications for the nature of national security threats. In the West threats tended to be external, rooted in anarchical competition between relatively equal states possessing domestic legitimacy, which meant that militarization could be understood primarily in terms of the political realist focus on security dilemmas and action-reaction dynamics. In contrast, Third World state formation has occurred in a largely dependent context in which relative external security contrasts with domestic insecurity.2 In this case the external environment, rather than being a source of threat, becomes a source of opportunities for elites lacking domestic legitimacy to gain support against internal security threats. In short, national security problems look very different in the First and Third Worlds because of different trajectories and contexts of state formation. Very different mechanisms may therefore account for militarization, suggesting the need for concepts and theories different than those that dominate security studies in the West.

Marital Alliance in the Political Integration of Mixtec Kingdoms

Analysis of pictographic and conventional documentation from Prehispanic and Colonial times reveals mechanisms of succession and alliance operative in the formation, expansion, and integration of Mixtec kingdoms. It is suggested that marital alliance be considered, along with other coercive and voluntaristic forces, in the dynamics of state formation and development. Royal marital alliances were exceedingly important not only in the maintenance of individual Mixtec “ministates” or kingdoms, but also in the creation of a social, political, and economic network that linked numerous communities and political domains into a broad social field bridging varied geographical zones ranging from tropical lowlands to highland valleys.