State-making Process Research Articles

Between Narratives of Solidarity and Othering in Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Local Resistance to Tibetan Refugee Rehabilitation in Arunachal Pradesh

ABSTRACT Tibetan refugee rehabilitation in Arunachal Pradesh, India, has become a site of contention, with strident local identity narratives agitating against refugee presence in this Himalayan borderland state. This paper maps the processes of state-making, citizenship and identity that produce a collision between encompassing notions of citizenship/identity and territorialized discourses of belonging premised on ethnicity in the West Kameng and Tawang districts of Arunachal. This is a multi-factoral analysis of how pressures of land commoditization and competition for economic opportunity interact with religious solidarities and social histories of migration to produce simultaneous narratives of belonging and othering between the dominant local Monpa Buddhist community and the exiled Tibetans in Monyul in the Indo-Tibetan borderland. The post-colonial state’s failure to dismantle the ethnicity-based colonial spatial order in the Himalayan region has created a crisis of exclusionary ethnopolitics that is inherently hostile to refugees.

The Borders of Migrant and Refugee Activism in South Africa

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the activities of civil society organizations (CSOs) on migration and refugee issues with state-making processes and discourses in South Africa, based upon key informant interviews, discourse analysis, and ethnographic research. It argues that this relationship brings attention to the defining and reinforcement of national borders set against the backdrop of the ‘corporate pact’ between the South African government and CSOs that has necessitated public participation in social movements and voluntary associations involved in a range of different xenophobic activities that are legitimized by political parties seeking popularity, and the state. Financial resources operate as ‘material disciplines’ by influencing the kind of problems that are visible, and, in turn, categories that non-state actors like philanthropies, charities, and donors consider worthy of protection. Those affected by shifting categories and their influence on NGO support like Zimbabweans have taken matters into their own hands to counter this novel border from below.

Law-making activity in modern conditions: essential dimensions and functional orientation

The article emphasizes that the effectiveness of state-making processes in any democratic state is determined by a number of factors, among which law-making occupies an important place as one of the main directions of state activity. Law-making is the result of the objective development of social relations, directly aimed at their regulation. The purpose, content and results of law-making activities are determined by various factors. Among them, the following ones are traditionally distinguished: professionalism of law-making subjects and their objectivity; the degree of influence and nature of the interests of individual social groups (the so-called lobbying); level of development of state legal institutions; legal culture of the population; form of government, government and regime; the nature of society’s mentality, etc.
 It is substantiated that law-making is based on law-making policy. The task of law-making policy is to ensure the system, integrity and consistency of legislation, to eliminate gaps in the latter. Attention is drawn to the fact that law-making characterizes the development of law and is a legal form of activity of the state and authorized subjects in the development, adoption, change, suspension and cancellation of legal standards.
 On the basis of clarifying the essential and meaningful features of law-making functions, their concept was formulated. It is emphasized that the functions of law-making should be understood as the directions of its influence on the development of social relations, which reveal its essence, nature and purpose in society and the state and are aimed at fulfilling certain of its tasks. Particular attention is paid to the types of law-making functions and their features are characterized.

Negotiating Religion and Power: Quotidian Conflicts between the Ahom State and neo-Vaishnavism

Religious beliefs are enmeshed in the state-making processes. This theme is relatively understudied in the context of medieval Assam. Older historical works by scholars such as S.N. Sarma, Maheswar Neog, Amalendu Guha and D. Nath have enriched our knowledge on Vaishnavism and the Ahom state but there remains a scope for further exploration of the interlinkages between state, power, and religion in the broader state-making process. Religious beliefs impact existing power relations. Earlier scholars, by focusing on the persecution of Vaishnavite monasteries under the Ahom King Gadadhar Singha (1681-1696) and the later Moamaria rebellions, largely ignored the more quotidian attempts of the Ahom state to regulate religious beliefs which appeared prejudicial to its authority. This paper seeks to emphasise the significance of everyday tension and conflict which characterised the relation between Neo-Vaishnavite institutions and tribal configurations, and between the State and the Neo-Vaishnavite order; thereby shedding light on the quotidian processes of state-making in medieval Assam. State regulation extended beyond religious beliefs to religious leaders (through persecution of religious preachers, surveillance of monasteries, intervention in inter-monastery conflicts) lest they became the focal point for harbouring disaffected elements and thereby become a threat to the authority of the state. The Ahom state did not limit itself to regulation but would, at times, even come into negotiated arrangements with various disparate elements to maintain its authority. The state also attempted to nudge different social and religious groups towards state-sanctioned orthodox practices (such as idol worship) through long-term negotiations. Thus, the paper argues that the state tolerated, and at times encouraged, Neo-Vaishnavism and attempted to restructure religious beliefs to fit its viewpoint of a hierarchical society at whose apex stood the king, who ultimately made decisions regarding the legitimacy of religious traditions.

Aliens within homeland: Ethiopian Muslims and their request for “Ethiopianness”

ABSTRACT Being and becoming an Ethiopian has been one of the debating points for Ethiopian Muslims. Throughout the imperial periods of Ethiopia, Muslims were not seen as Ethiopians. They were labeled aliens in their homeland and called ‘Muslims living in Ethiopia.’ Accordingly, for centuries, Islam has not been recognized for its central role in Ethiopia’s socio-political landscape, and Muslims have been regarded as second-class citizens. However, Ethiopian Muslims are indigenous peoples like their Christian fellows. This article assesses the place of Ethiopian Muslims in Ethiopian history and how Ethiopian Muslims have been portrayed in the Ethiopian past by the elites of the country and the state from the 1850s until the 2010s. This article, therefore, focuses on modern Ethiopia’s nation-building and state-making process from the 19th century onwards. A comparison is made regarding the treatment of Ethiopians of Muslims among the imperial Ethiopia, the socialist military, the EPRDF “secular” state, and beyond.

Unfulfilled Promises and Desires: The British South Africa Company (BSAC), Settler Politics and the Development of Southern Rhodesia’s Fiscal System, 1890–1922

This paper examines how the British South Africa Company (BSAC; the Company), the founding administrator of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, navigated the creation of a fiscal system of the colony from 1890 to 1922 and how the fiscal system shaped political decisions regarding the colony’s administrative structure. It casts light on the early efforts of the colonial state-making process under the BSAC and how it established its administrative structure. Once occupation was completed, the Company’s ability to finance the cost of governance and administration was the most critical factor facing it. Whereas earlier scholarship has discussed various aspects of Southern Rhodesia’s early economic endeavors and political evolution, this paper demonstrates the significance of the fiscal system in shaping both the economic and political trajectories of the early administration. Through analyzing the Company’s revenue collection and expenditure patterns, the paper reconstructs the contours of shifting notions of what constituted the Company’s commercial and administrative revenue. It argues that the BSAC’s fiscal and budgetary administration approach was gradual, experimental, and sometimes ad hoc, resulting in continuous conflicts between the Company administration and the settlers. The paper relies on a wide range of sources that include the BSAC annual reports, historical manuscripts, Legislative Council debates, newspapers, and other political pamphlets to unpack the tensions between the Company government and white settlers over the fiscal and administrative evolution of the colony.

General foundations of the mechanism of (non) implementation of the principle of sovereignty in Soviet Ukraine 1922–1991

The principle of sovereignty is one of the most fundamental principles of organizing the internal and external life of the state. Studying the operation of the principle of sovereignty during the period of the Soviet Union (USSR) is particularly difficult given the sometimes conflicting assessments of this state-legal phenomenon. The article attempts to form a conceptual approach to the consideration of mechanisms for the implementation of the principle of sovereignty during the period of Ukraine’s stay as part of the USSR in the context of the state-legal processes of the middle of the 20th century. An analysis of Chapter 1 of the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR of 1978, which established the results of Ukrainian Soviet state-building for 60 years and determined the foundations of the political system, gives grounds for asserting that there was an actual dichotomy in the organization of power: the Soviets were the nominal subject (carrier) of sovereignty, and the CPSU acted as its administrator. In fact, a state was created with two verticals of power - the Communist Party and the Soviet, when the exercise of power in the Soviet-parliamentary manner enshrined in the Constitution was actually an imitation of parliamentarism. Taking this into account, it was necessary to propose some conceptual approaches for researching the mechanisms of implementation of the principle of sovereignty in the Ukrainian SSR. It is argued that sovereignty is a qualitative, not a quantitative category, one of the characteristics of which is inalienability and indivisibility. At the same time, the sphere of exercising the sovereign rights of the state can be limited in acertain way (self-limited). The analysis of the constitutional norms of the Ukrainian SSR indicates a significant limitation of the material content - the possibilities and means of realizing sovereignty - due to the transfer to the union center of a significant range of fundamental sovereign rights, which, in turn, does not allow us to speak aboutthe Ukrainian SSR and other union republics as full-fledged states. On the other hand, there was the declaration of sovereignty and the realization of a certain part of sovereign rights, their formalization. Therefore, it can be argued that the sovereignty of the Ukrainian SSR is state sovereignty, which was ensured by the state-legal mechanism, had formal and legal grounds and itself was the basis for the realization of legal opportunities, which are recognized as inalienable, should be common and equal for every country, which she endows herself with her will. Their actual implementation became possible in 1991. The foregoing gives reason to consider the Ukrainian SSR (URSR) as an integral component of the integral Ukrainian state-building process, which was characterized by the establishment of formal and legal institutions and mechanisms, which allowed them to be used, in particular, in the implementation of the sovereignty of Ukraine as a Ukrainian national state. Key words: Ukraine, history of law, sovereignty, sovereign rights of the state, state-legal mechanism, state-making process.

Mobility control as state-making in civil war: Forcing exit, selective return and strategic laissez-faire

This paper addresses the question of how different actors attempt to control mobility during civil war, and how mobility control and processes of state-making interact in such settings. Mobility in civil wars is often considered a political act by the various actors involved: Leaving the country can be perceived as an act of opposition, as can moving between territories which are controlled by different, opposing factions. Drawing on literature on strategic displacement and migration politics and combining this with empirical insights from the ongoing wars in Libya and Syria, the paper identifies three mechanisms of mobility control in civil war settings: forcing exit, selective return as a form of expulsion, and strategic laissez-faire as the intentional absence of regulation regarding displacement and return. The analysis reveals that all three mechanisms are employed by state actor(s), rebels, and militias, and can be understood as elements of a new (post)war order that includes some citizens while excluding others depending on perceptions of political threats. We interpret the three mechanisms as ways in which actors in civil war settings attempt to manipulate a country’s demography in their own favour in a process of state-making. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2021 in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Tunisia.

The entangled geographies of responsibility: Contested policy narratives of migration governance along the Balkan Route

This article examines some of the contested geographical imaginaries of the so-called “Balkan Route” as part of the wider Mediterranean migration complex. More specifically, we interrogate how such varied imaginaries of the Route contribute to shaping conflicting geographies of responsibility for migration in the region among a shifting set of international and state actors. We highlight how the attribution of responsibility for the governance of migration is shaped by numerous geographical and historical entanglements, including on-going processes of post-conflict state-making and the geopolitics of European Union accession, with migrants becoming pawns in the negotiation of preferential relations between the countries of the region and the European Union. Focusing in particular on the framing of migration policy responses along the Croatia–Bosnia and Italy–Slovenia sections of the Route, we examine the perspectives of both policy-makers and solidarity networks active in the area, noting how their divergent narratives contribute to the proliferation of conflicting formal and informal practices of border control.

Territorial Nationalism, Confessional Islam and the Conundrum of State-Making in Early Postcolonial Pakistan

The interplay of the question regarding the nature of postcolonial citizenship and the limits of religious belief considerably moulded the processes of the structuring of the political community in the early years of Pakistan’s history. Such an interplay manifested in the form of a normative contest between two distinct conceptualisations of nationalism. One was based on the notion of fixity of political territoriality that was defined in terms of the cartographic identity of Pakistan, and the other was premised upon the phenomenon of confessional Islam which tended to interpret the political identity of the Pakistani state in terms of the religion of Islam as a faith. This article is an attempt at mapping as to how such a contest strongly underpinned the competing public discourse on the modes of structuring of the political community in early postcolonial Pakistan. By doing this, the article discusses how this kind of a public discourse factored deeply in shaping the circuitous course of the processes of state-making in the initial years of the country’s creation.

Guarding the colonial woodlands: A genealogy of forest conservation discourses in late Bourbon's period in new Spain (Mexico)

Facing a dramatic depletion of forests in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, throughout the last decades of colonial rule (between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) the Bourbon administration wrote and published a considerable number of laws, reports, surveys, and ordinances on forest management and conservation. In this paper we examine discourses of forest conservation and the measures applied to preserve this critical resource by colonial official and experts. Drawing on forest laws, ordinances, and reports from national archives in Mexico City, we argue that conservation became part of the concepts which defined how forests were conceptualized and managed, but also that conservation was intrinsic to colonial processes of state-making and territorialization. This paper aims to approach Bourbon officials’ understanding of conservation as a complex interrelation between renewed discourses of nature and the practices of colonial forest administration through the idea of indeterminacy. Likewise, it sheds light on patterns that have defined the ways in which forest conservation has been constituted in modern Mexico, addressing a little-studied period in forest management in this country.

Energy justice for whom? Territorial (re)production and everyday state-making in electrifying rural Indonesia

This article seeks to examine the material implications of the emergence of an energy justice (energi berkeadilan) vision in Indonesia, paying particular attention to the state’s spatial practice to achieve such a vision in the form of rural electrification programs including the deployment of off-grid decentralised renewables. Informed by semi-structured interviews, participant observation and secondary data analysis, we contribute to the growing conversations on geographical political economy of energy transitions by closely attending to the multiple space-making processes characterising the Indonesian government’s pursuit of their energy justice vision. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on state space and territory, we begin by unravelling the historical connection between the rise of energy justice vision and the Indonesian state attempts to maintain and expand its territorial reach through rural electrification, as evidenced throughout the country’s contemporary political economies and its earlier history of postcolonial struggles. We simultaneously unpack various legal mechanisms and instruments underpinning the government’s efforts to deliver energy justice promises by way of universal electricity access, demonstrating the centrality of such strategies in the (re)production of state territories. Through inquiring how energy justice is mobilised by (and for) the Indonesian state, our study illustrates that such everyday state-making processes entail a calculative technique as another form of territorial intervention that obscures the reality of socio-spatially uneven and fragmented electricity access in rural Indonesia. Such findings, we suggest, reveal the contradictions in the state’s repositioning as a main enabler of energy access provision and, more broadly, a socially just energy transition.

Birth Legacies and State Failure

We argue patterns of state failure are influenced by variation in how states emerged as independent political actors. In particular, states with positive birth legacies, those whose emergence required relatively high levels of capacity and legitimacy, should be less likely to experience state failure than countries that experienced less auspicious births. We assess this claim on the universe of states in the international system between 1950 and 2002 with multistate duration models that estimate the probabilities states transition into and out of periods of failure. We find that states with positive birth legacies are less likely to experience state failure and that this relationship is driven by states with positive birth legacies being able to more quickly transition from failure back to being functioning states. Our findings offer evidence that state failure is usefully thought of in the context of state-making processes and show that how states emerge as independent actors influences phenomena central to comparative and international politics.

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVITY OF STUDENTS

The purpose of the study is to determine the approaches to the concept of social activity on the basis of theoretical interdisciplinary analysis, to reveal the importance of the formation of social activity in student youth. Research methods: interdisciplinary analysis, synthesis, systematization, comparison and generalization - to determine the content of the concept of social activity of student youth. This article provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the concept of «social activity» in the following areas: philosophy, psychology, social work (social pedagogy), sociology, pedagogy - the result of which is summarized in the table. The concept of "student youth" is analyzed and 4 approaches to this concept are suggested by A. Murzin and N. Solodyuk. The relevance of the formation of social activity in the student youth, as a significant part of society, which has an impact on the state-making processes is investigated. The statistical data of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine. Student youth as a social group is a separate sphere of society with its own peculiarities, which only confirms the importance of studying the formation of social activity in this target group. The article considers volunteer activity as a component of social activity. Presented the project "Online School of Volunteering for Students", which was developed as part of the Winter School of Young Scientists of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine within the framework of the implementation of the British Council project «Active Citizens» in cooperation with the CS «International Foundation for Development». The project was developed by an interdisciplinary, nationwide team of experts. 10 themes of interactive lessons - that are divided into 5 blocks and focus on the topic of volunteering and social activities - are described. The basics of volunteer activities, proper and effective communication with customers, as well as information on working in communities is presented. Attention is paid to emotional sensitivity and the topic of resolving conflict situations is addressed. We believe that the prospect of further research is the implementation of thematic interactive classes with elements of training in institutions of higher education, to increase social activity and to provide students with relevant information on volunteer activities and their effective implementation.

Who Speaks for Water in Times of Crisis? A Case for Co-production of Engineering and Governance

Studying the relationship between water expertise and the state's governance is important as it helps to explain the mechanism by which a certain group of experts rise to power, speaking for water—its challenges, and opportunities. This is particularly of concern in the times of crisis when the society does not know where to turn, and who to trust. Some aspects of this relationship have been addressed in the literature through now-familiar notions such as hydraulic bureaucracy and the hydraulic mission, in which the prevailing role of water engineers in problem framing and communicating solutions has been brought into the spotlight. However, the reciprocal nature of this relationship, particularly in difficult times when the society is fraught with fear of an uncertain future, has remained heavily under-researched. To fill this gap, this paper suggests we can productively draw on the concepts of “co-production” and “epistemic community”. Using Iran's looming water crisis, the paper provides an example of how governance and water engineering co-produce one another through an ongoing process of mutual constitution. On one hand, engineering artifacts are integral part of state-making process; while on the other hand, water engineers become the gatekeepers of knowledge-making processes. This creates a hegemonic power for water engineers, their epistemic practices, and institutions of power. This research also illustrates how this co-production reinforces the epistemic injustice in water governance by marginalizing non-engineering communities most particularly indigenous knowledge-holders. This is, of course, a great concern as it can lead to depoliticization of the water crisis, monopolization of water science, and demonization of participation in water governance.

Camps and counterterrorism: Security and the remaking of refuge in Kenya

This article examines the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. The spectre of “terrorism” and its supposed remedy—“counterterrorism”—have loomed large in Kenyan politics since the 1990s and gained further traction since the country’s military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia in 2011. Few other spaces have been associated as persistently with threats to Kenya’s national security and sovereignty as the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the country’s Northern belt, which are popularly depicted as “wombs” of terror. In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. We provide a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. The article concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya’s counterterror state is (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid.

Migration and State Making: A Beiyang Settlement Scheme Along the Amur in 1921

This article revisits Anglophone scholarship on Manchuria over the last two decades through the lens of official settlement schemes along China's northern frontier. It observes a difference between the way this key part of state making has been handled in histories of the Qing (1644–1912) and histories of the period of the Guomindang and the Japanese occupation (1928–1949) as opposed to histories of the early Republican or Beiyang era (1912–1927), in which state actors are notably absent from the literature. Bringing a 1921 refugee colonization program coordinated between authorities in North China and Manchuria back into the picture, the article broadens the range of agents involved in the strategic and developmental calculations underpinning modern China's state-making process.

From Celebration of Independence to Disintegration: The Somaliland Experience in the Post-Failed Union with Somalia

The state-making of Somaliland has been borne out of the experiences gained from the aborted union between the British Protectorate of Somaliland and Italian Somalia. The driving aim behind the proclamation of statehood was to reinstate Somaliland’s sovereignty and independence that was lost in 1960. Somalilanders were galvanized by the euphoria of Somali nationalism in the pursuit of the greater Somali Republic in the Horn of Africa that all five Somali territories unite into one nation-state. Their zeal merely earned them destruction. Such destruction includes the tyranny and genocide which was inflicted upon the land and people for over the thirty years whilst the failed union lasted. Therefore, this article re-examines historical mistakes in the post-colonial period and the negative consequences of the union of thirty years with Somalia. It explores Somaliland’s experiences of this failed merger, and Somaliland’s achievements and challenges over the past thirty years since Somaliland regained its sovereignty. The article compares and contrasts how Somaliland fared during each of the thirty-year periods. The article also analyses the challenges posed by the non-recognition on political grounds that prevented Somaliland to attain its sovereign rights. Despite the critical and difficult conditions that confronted the state-making process of Somaliland, the interplay between state and non-state actors had become the means and methods to create durable peace and political stability which prevented vengeful acts, anarchy, and political turmoil in Somaliland. The historical backdrop of the unsuccessful merger, too, has become a salient factor and thriving agenda for Somaliland to prove its internal sovereignty, statehood, and a workable political system based on multiparty, competitive elections, and a check and balance of the state organs. The Republic of Somaliland has likewise become a potent regional and international player for the fate of peace, security, and regional economic integration.

THE QUESTION OF IMPLEMENTATION OF AUTONOMY OF SUBCARPATHIAN RUS’ IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SECOND CZECHOSLOVAK CRISIS OF 1938

Summary. The purpose of the study is to analyze the process of implementation of the national-state autonomy of Subcarpathian Rus’, its gradual nature during the Second Czechoslovak Crisis of 1938. The research methodology is based on the principles of historical method and scientific objectivity. The system-analytical approach was applied, which allows consider the sources, essence and specificity of the state-making processes and phenomena of the pre-war period. The scientific novelty of the article is in the analysis of the factors of the autumn 1938 Czechoslovak crisis that influenced the deployment of the state movement in Subcarpathian Rus’. The press revealed the provisions of public and unofficial policy makers and their contributions to the establishment of Carpathian Ukraine as an autonomous part of Czechoslovakia. Conclusions. In the late 1930s, the Subcarpathian press extensively covered the national search for Ukrainians in the Transcarpathian region. Newspapers covered international events, known as the Munich Crisis that took place during the short-lived existence of the Carpathian Ukraine. The Ukrainian state in Transcarpathia emerged for a short time in difficult international political circumstances on the eve of the Second World War. According to the press, this process was natural and historically grounded. In general, newspapers of Subcarpathia were a significant means of informing Ukrainians about the current events in the world, as well as the social arena of cultural, spiritual and national-state life of the region.

ЛЕКСИКО-СЕМАНТИЧНІ НОРМИ У ФОРМУВАННІ МОВНОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТИ ДЕРЖАВНОГО СЛУЖБОВЦЯ

The new stage of Ukrainian literary language development began in the late 20th century, because state-making processes had legitimated the status of the Ukrainian language due to the law, following the main goal – to facilitate self-expression of the national genotype, raising prestige and full-fledged functioning of the state language in independent Ukraine. Since the reality is formed on the basis of personal activity, one of the leading tasks is upbringing the need of every speaker to use the state language fluently as the means for communication, as the means of forming intellectual culture, national self-awareness, which thus has direct impact on mentality and moral qualities of a person. The situation concerning the languages in the communicative environment of Ukraine obliges all speakers to accept the issues of the language and the speaking in a systematic and complex way. Command of a normative native language is the assignment for every aware citizen, who is obliged to know how to use the entire lexical heritage. A language is a weighty part of professional competency, a sensitive indicator of general culture, that is why every speaker should care about the high culture of their language. Perfect usage of a language becomes an important component of training experts in any field, particularly in the field of state governing, since the use of a language promotes their self-expression. Official activity definitely requires not only professionalism, but also thorough language competency. Our research is actual because we constantly need to work on the problems of language culture in the field of state governing, since, as a social phenomenon, the Ukrainian language reflects precise historical peculiarities, typical to a certain social and historical period: the development of new word constructions, the emergence of new words, a number of borrowings from other languages, etc. The purpose of our investigation is to find out and analyze the violations of lexical and semantic norms in official and business communication of state officials, to justify the ways and means to correct the violations of the lexical and semantic norm. Reaching the set purpose meant carrying out the following tasks: to analyze the official and business language of state officials; to single out the most spread lexical and semantic mistakes and downsides in speaking, to give recommendations on eliminating mistakes in order to improve the speaking culture of state officials in the field of their professional activity. In the investigation, there is applied a wide range of contemporary methods and approaches of research: language facts are considered from the position of the functional approach; by means of the methods of the generalization and classification analysis the types of mistakes met in the language of state officials were singled out; the comparing and contrasting analysis has allowed to find out the facts of interfering influence of the Russian language on Ukrainian, to single out the types of the interference consequences at the lexical and semantic level. In the proposed research, there is the analysis of the official and business language of state officials, different consequences of interferencial interaction of closely native languages (Ukrainian and Russian) are realised and typified by comparing the language of state officials to the current norms of the modern Ukrainian literary language. The most spread lexical mistakes and downsides are found to refer to: not motivated usage of words which results in “surgick”; usage of so-called words-parasites with no need; usage of the words which are inappropriate from the point of view of the literary norm and the etiquette rules; abuse of the words derived from foreign languages, especially from English; irrelevant tautology in oral speech, redundancy of words ( pleonasm ); confusing paronyms. Due to the analyzed language material there are linguistic explanations and recommendations on the ways and means of preventing, correcting and eliminating realised mistakes in the language of state officials. It is proved that state governors are obliged to obey communicative features of language culture, namely: its correctness, accuracy, logic, purity, pithiness and relevance. R