Theories Of State Formation Research Articles

Combining social sciences, geoscience and archaeology to understand societal collapse

Despite its apparently obvious conclusion that adverse environmental conditions must produce economic and institutional crises, the “collapse archaeology” literature has been criticized for its lack of a formal theory, a credible measurement strategy and a proper understanding of the roles of environmental shocks. To tackle this issue, we propose to combine a time inconsistency theory of state formation and evolution—i.e., state-building, institutional proxies based on this model and highly granular simulated climate data. To clarify our proposal, we apply it to the study of state-building in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and we show that moderate droughts shaped these economies directly via deteriorated production conditions as well as indirectly via institutional resilience.

Wisdom Is Welcome Wherever It Comes From: War, Diffusion, and State Formation in Scandinavia

AbstractProminent theories of state formation hold that states formed because of warfare and competition on the one hand, or the diffusion of organizational templates and practices through learning and emulation on the other. We propose that the two strands of theory can be linked to more accurately account for mechanisms of state formation. War, we argue, is an important source of social diffusion. War establishes contacts between political elites across borders, generates migratory flows, and establishes new economic networks. We examine the validity of the theory through a comparative case study of Nordic political units from the dawn of the Viking Age to the end of the High Middle Ages (CE 800–1300), finding that raids, settlements, and conquests by Norwegian and Danish rulers in England, Europe's most advanced kingdom, set in motion state formation processes in Norway and Denmark. In these cases, the winners emulated the losers.

Harp, Siyasi Liderlik ve Devlet Oluşumu: Zulu Krallığı

The origin and evolution of the 19th-century Zulu Kingdom are used to examine two competing state formation theories: Robert Carneiro’s circumscription theory and Elman Service’s theory of institutionalized leadership. Both theories partly clarify Zulu political developments. Carneiro’s theory explains the origin and territorial expansion of the Zulu empire, while Service’s theory can account for the beginning differentiation of political roles in the Zulu state. Two alternative explanations of the causes of Zulu state formation are discussed to integrate the diverging theoretical perspectives of Carneiro and Service. First, the role of the Zulu King, Shaka, should be considered politically relevant only inasmuch as Shaka’s wars of conquest were instrumental for the unification of the Zulu Kingdom. Second, further developments in Zulu politics involved limited structural change from dispersed tribes to a unified military state. The analysis of political formations, including their origin and further transformation, should not be conducted in unilinear evolutionary terms, but from a multidimensional processual perspective.

Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences edited by Jo van Steenbergen

<i>Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences</i> edited by Jo van Steenbergen

Interstate Rivalries and Expansions in Military Capacity

This article addresses the scholarly debate on the relationship between interstate rivalry and military capacity. We draw on Tilly's bellicist theory of state formation in early modern Europe and Thies’ modifications to predatory theory, which prioritizes the role of interstate rivalry on state building, to explain variation in military capacity. We unpack the rivalry mechanism into spatial and positional rivalries and test how these two types of rivalry affect military capacity, and how positional rivalries affect military capacity in the long-term. Using time-series cross-sectional data analysis, we find that positional rivalries increase military capacity in the long term. Also, we find that spatial rivalry influences military capacity in the long-term, but its effects are uneven across indicators of military capacity, and it has a smaller effect on military capacity in comparison to positional rivalries. We conclude that not all types of rivalries have a uniform effect on military capacity and that competition over regional dominance, that is, positional rivalries, are the most impactful on military capacity. This study offers a more nuanced test of Tilly's bellicist theory and Thies’ modified predatory theory on state capacity.

Greeks and Victorians: A Re-Examination of Engels’ Theory of the Athenian Polis

There is a paradox in Engels’ well-known theory of state formation contained inThe Origin of the Family Private Property and the State. The state in Engels’ view represented a triumph of a small elite of non-producers over the vast majority, and a world-historical defeat for the common people. Yet the Athenian state, Engels’ prime example, does not conform to the pattern: it becomes more “democratic” as the state evolves rather than less. The paper explores the way out of this dilemma, through an examination of the rise of the Athenian polis in light of the recent theory of the Early State put forward by Henri Claessen and Peter Skalnik. The analysis offers insight into the internal dynamic of early states and the role of kinship, and in the final section argues for the essential validity of Engels’ view.

Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller

Reviewed by: Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller John W. Sherman Schiller, Naomi. Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. The early historiography on the 1998–2013 Chavista project in Venezuela has been broadly positive, a trend reflected in anthropologist Naomi Schiller’s microstudy of media and the state. The basis of the book is the author’s dissertation research under Bruce Grant at New York University, which included extensive fieldwork. A first stint in Venezuela saw the author observing telenovela-watching women in a small rural town, who cared little about the emerging government of Hugo Chávez; subsequent years were spent with the cadre of Catia TVe, a community television station located in a Caracas barrio that became politically wed to the Chavista project, partly through its interaction with ViVe TV, a much larger, state-funded outlet. [End Page 245] The intellectual recipe for Schiller’s study is the familiar mainstream engaged by so many graduate students in contemporary anthropological and historical studies: large portions of James Scott and state formation theory, a smaller dose of Lila Abu-Lughod and media theory, a sprinkling of Gramsci, and a leavening of optimism about the human condition and prospects for a better world. But within this concoction Schiller’s work is wholly microfocused on the thirty staff and roughly one hundred volunteers at the Catia TVe community center. Organizationally, she walks us through the formation of Catia TVe, which predated Chávez, and the station’s pro-Chávez engagement of the 2006 election. She analyzes class dynamics—Catia TVe staff mostly from the urban working class, their Chavista interlocutors mainly middle class. She addresses gender, finding persistent barriers, despite many positive gains. Theoretically, Schiller primarily wrestles with the meaning and potential for change by way of the state, which is itself constantly morphing and resetting possibilities or imposing new limitations, as in the matter of press freedom, with Chávez’s controversial shutting down of a major commercial outlet in 2007. This book is in the mainstream of current anthropological studies and will undoubtedly be appreciated by many. This reviewer—not so mainstream—finds it far too microfocused, and ill-equipped to answer the deeper and far more pressing macroquestions relating to the obvious failure of Chavismo. In a circa 2015 redux, the author does briefly address this failure, tossing up the old mono-export complaint of bygone dependency theory. If macroeconomics can obliterate all the efforts from below to create a better world, then what is the point of studying those grassroots efforts? If positive change does not last, why is it significant? When academics make the decision to interact only with activists, they prejudice their conclusions in ways that cannot explain other critical sociopolitical phenomena. One such glaring gap is the persistent recovery and reinvention of the Latin American political Right. Where do the Álvaro Uribes and Jair Bolsonaros come from? Venezuela will almost certainly see the ascent of a neoliberal rightist regime soon—how shall we explain it? Personally, I wish that Schiller had stayed with the telenovela-watching women in the small farm town. [End Page 246] John W. Sherman Wright State University Copyright © 2021 Association of Global South Studies, Inc

The origins of the state: technology, cooperation and institutions

AbstractWe develop a theory of state formation shedding light on the rise of the first stable state institutions in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Our analysis suggests that the mix of adverse production conditions and unforeseen innovations pushed groups favored by old technologies to establish the state by granting political and property rights to powerless individuals endowed with new and complementary skills. Through these reforms, the elite convinced the nonelite that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments would be shared via public spending and, thus, to cooperate and accumulate a culture of cooperation. Different from the main alternative theories, we stress that: (1) group formation is heavily shaped by unforeseen shocks to the returns on both risk-sharing and innovation; (2) complementarity in group-specific skills, and not violence, is key determinant of state formation; (3) military, merchant and, especially, religious ranks favored state formation and culture accumulation.

The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel

The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel

The Origins of the State: Technology, Cooperation and Institutions

espite the vast evidence on the economic relevance of the state's institutional capacity to provide public goods and incentivize risk-sharing and innovation, we lack an organic and empirically sound theory of its origins. To help fill this gap, we develop a theory of state formation shedding light on the rise of the first stable state institutions in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Our analysis suggests that the mix of adverse production conditions and unforeseen innovations pushed groups favored by old technologies to establish the state by granting political and property rights to powerless individuals endowed with new and complementary skills. Through these reforms, the elite convinced the nonelite that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments would be shared via public spending and, thus, to cooperate and accumulate a culture of cooperation. Different from alternative theories, we stress that: 1) group formation is heavily shaped by unforeseen shocks to the returns on risk-sharing and innovation; 2) complementarity in group-specific skills is key determinant of state formation; 3) military, merchant and, especially, religious ranks favored reforms towards stronger nonelites' rights and the spread of a culture of cooperation; 4) access to violence is not a crucial institutional engine.

Agency and geopolitics: Brazilian formal independence and the problem of Eurocentrism in international historical sociology

The main narratives that explain the development of the modern international order fall short of incorporating the historical peculiarities of processes of state-formation in non-European contexts. To overcome that limitation, this paper argues that class agency must be taken as a core element to understand the social and geopolitical struggles that shape each case of transition towards modern sovereignty in its historical particularity. This is informed by the Brazilian historical experience. In that case, statehood can only be understood as an outcome of the disputes of its ruling landowning class against Portuguese colonialism, mediated by the British informal empire throughout the 19th century. In order to bring all these elements together, I follow the tradition of political Marxism to reconceptualize the very notion of “geopolitics” by grounding it in class-based strategies of reproduction and spatialization. The result is an agency-centred and radically historicist theoretical framework that rejects structuralist transhistorical logics of development. It also argues against the latent Eurocentrism present in theories of state-formation that are grounded on the European experience and simply transposed to other contexts by stressing the agency of non-European subjects in the making of their own history.

GRAMSCI'S REVOLUTIONS: PASSIVE AND PERMANENT

Antonio Gramsci's notion of “passive revolution” has often been understood as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation. This article proposes to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula” within the “lexical architecture” of thePrison Notebooks. Based upon a diachronic and contextualist analysis of the usage of the formula, I argue that Gramsci's research on passive revolution emerged as a critical element within the development of his own distinctive conception of the “sublation” and “actualization” of the slogan of “the revolution in permanence.” Attending to this dialectical relationship allows the political and strategic dimensions of passive revolution to be highlighted, and suggests new paths of research for the debate about its analytic fertility and contemporary relevance.

The Advantage of Legal Diversity for State Formation: Bourbon Reforms and Aragonese Law in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Most theories of state formation emphasize the advantages of legal uniformity for the development of early modern states. The Bourbon monarchy in eighteenth-century Spain demonstrates alternative possibilities because Philip V created a more unified legal system in the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon in 1707 only to reinstate the distinctive Aragonese civil law in 1711. Philip pursued this change in policy because the difficulties caused by changing Aragonese civil law undercut his support among the local elite, while reinstating these laws increased the dependence of these elite upon the success of the king in the War of Spanish Succession (1700–1714). Philip V’s policies following 1711 demonstrate a consistent interest in securing the support of the local elite over the desire to unify the divergent civil laws throughout his kingdoms. For these reasons, selective legal diversity proved a compelling approach to governing. The persistence of these regional variations in law contributes to broader theories of state formation by demonstrating the potential benefits of legal diversity.

Images of the Arctic: visualising Greenland as an indigenous people and a modern nation

This article examines the photo project and exhibition, Isi-Øje-Eye (2014), using nation building and state formation theories to cast light on the national elements of the project. It addresses the question of how visual images (photographs) are employed to unite Greenland across vast geographical distances and distinct ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic differences – in an effort to build a nation and construct a national community. In engaging with this issue, the article offers a critical perspective on the concepts of national borders and boundaries in an era of climate change. Drawing on the ecological aesthetics of nature presented by Gernot Böhme (1937–), the article uses his (re)conceptualisation of the relationship between human and nature to discuss issues relating to national borders and boundaries as they pertain to Greenland.

Circumscription Theory of the Origins of the State: A Cross-Cultural Re-Analysis

In the paper we express some doubts about one of the assumptions of Robert Carneiro’s model on state (and chiefdom) formation, namely the role of circumscription. In our opinion, the main flaw of Carneiro’s original theory of state formation is that it implicitly assumes that every community dreamt to conquer its neighboring communities. We test the presence of various types of warfare (such as conquest warfare, land acquisition warfare, and plunder warfare) in societies with different degrees of political centralization. Quantitative cross-cultural tests reveal a rather strong correlation between political complexity and the presence of conquest warfare suggesting that conquest warfare was virtually absent among independent communities. Newer works by Carneiro propose a model explaining how simple chiefdoms could appear in the absence of conquest warfare. This model also includes circumscription, but our analysis suggests that it is unnecessary.

Is Diversity Detrimental? Ethnic Fractionalization, Public Goods Provision, and the Historical Legacies of Stateness

Existing research has shown that highly diverse countries tend to provide less public goods. This article argues, by contrast, that the relationship is spurious: both contemporary ethnic heterogeneity and low public goods provision represent legacies of a weakly developed state capacity inherited from the past. Classical theories of state formation are then tested to show that favorable topography and climate, high population densities, as well as a history of warfare are conducive to state formation. Using an instrumental variable approach, I show that previous ethnic diversity is not consistently an impediment to the formation of indigenous states and thus to contemporary public goods provision. Empirically, this article uses three different measurements of public goods provision and data on pre-colonial levels of state formation in Asia and Africa to test these various hypotheses.

Local government, the Standard Employment Relationship, and the making of Ontario’s public sector, 1945–1963

This article examines the unionization of local government workers in Ontario during the 1940s and 1950s. While these workers played a central role in consolidating a standard employment relationship across the public sector, the advancement of collective bargaining rights, regular hours of work, and wages and benefits was fractured and spatially uneven. Bringing together theories of state formation with recent debates in labour geography, this article explores the politics of scale in the unionization of local government workers. Through the 1950s, it is argued that local government workers were able to effectively mount campaigns for recognition, develop shared bargaining capacities and establish federated labour organizations across the province, building from their embeddedness in a rapidly expanding metropolitan environment. Moreover, it is shown that the ‘scaling up’ of collective bargaining in this way provoked civic officials to establish new governance structures with the aim of containing the explosive growth of public sector unions. This entailed both the professionalization of labour relations practices and the development of more centralized administrative capacities. In this sense, it is argued that state formation through the 1950s and 1960s advanced through the efforts to normalize the demands of local government workers within a wider economy of service.

The Incas, Second Edition by Terence N. D’Altroy (review)

Reviewed by: The Incas, Second Edition by Terence N. D’Altroy Gregory Knapp The Incas, Second Edition. Terence N. D’Altroy, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, xiii + 547 pages, US$ 36.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4443-3115-8. In the pursuit of sustainable development, societies around the world look for parallels and reference points in past transformations in human environment relationships. This is nowhere more apparent than in the Andes, where indigenous concepts and terms have been incorporated in modern constitutions, and ecotourism is increasingly married with cultural and historical tourism. Inca culture looms large in this context, and Terence D’Altroy’s overview of the Inca Empire provides a superb and up to date overview of this influential civilization. This is a substantially revised and expanded (40 per cent longer) version of his book, which became the standard text when first published in 2002. It takes full advantage of the recent, renewed waves of research on Andean archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnography, while building on the accomplishments of previous generations of researchers. Thus it can serve both as an introduction to the topic for novices, as well as an overview of recent findings for those familiar with the classics. D’Altroy is a UCLA-trained professor of archaeology and anthropology at Colombia University who has specialized in the comparative study of empires; his archaeological research in the central Peruvian highlands and in northwest Argentina are touched on in this book, but most of the volume attempts to synthesize and make accessible a wide range of information about the Inca Empire. The Inca state itself receives the bulk of the attention: its antecedents, formation, urban design, ideology, politics, military, expansion, and methods of territorial rule. D’Altroy does however also devote attention to aspects of Inca life beyond the state, including the natural setting, methods of farming, and local community life, and local variations in policy and practices. This edition places more emphasis on contributions from ethnography than the first edition did. A new chapter on “Thinking Inca” explores the concepts of vitality and the unity of space and time in Andean thought, and the discussions of material culture place greater stress on the animate character of objects. The respect for natural materials and settings, and the avoidance of representational art (including representations of rulers) brings to mind the aesthetics and spirituality of Shinto traditions in Japan, for example. Recent research on khipu knot-records by Salomon and Urton is detailed, and conflicting alternative narratives of events and processes are laid out. For the Inca, narratives of history and genealogy served social goals in particular contexts, and thus it may never be possible to arrive at precise chronologies of imperial events. D’Altroy situates the empire in its broader context of pre-existing empires and chiefdoms, and stresses its brevity. There is no effort to discuss competing theories of state formation (whether Carneiro or Wittfogel), perhaps in part because this is not a pristine civilization, and in part because D’Altroy is an empiricist (in the good sense of the [End Page 205] term). The Inca were able to build on the legacies of the Tiahuanaco, Wari, and Chimu states, as well as large-scale chiefdoms and proto-states. The Inca state itself expanded through the strategic exertion of overwhelming force, combined in many cases with enticements and rewards for collaboration. This expansion was made easier by the previous demise of the Tiahuanaco and Wari; other authors have (problematically) suggested climatic reasons for the demise of these states and for the rise of the Inca associated with, for example, warming, cooling and/or drying trends. D’Altroy, perhaps wisely, avoids discussing these climate scenarios and hypothetical discussions of collapse. He is also skeptical about the role of the Moray terrace site as an agricultural microclimate research station or macroclimate early warning device, and is generally positive about the ability of farmers in the empire to locally adapt to environmental conditions and changes. The book discusses the widespread relocations of individuals and groups of people in the empire, drawing upon new evidence from archaeology and analysis of human remains as well as from ethnographic sources. These relocations and the suppression of inter...

The Regional Dimension of Statebuilding Interventions

In the post-cold war era, liberal statebuilding interventions have become a major tool of global governance. Yet, the variation in outcomes is still poorly understood. This article draws on state formation theory to elaborate a causal mechanism that can explain the successful monopolization of the means of violence in statebuilding interventions. Insights from the state formation literature suggest that the regional political system is crucial for state formation and statebuilding. In order to test the hypothesis, a novel process-tracing method is applied to the case of Sierra Leone. The case study suggests that only a cooperative regional setting enables interventions to succeed.

Army and society in Ptolemaic Egypt

This is the only substantial and up-to-date reference work on the Ptolemaic army. Employing Greek and Egyptian papyri and inscriptions, and building on approaches developed in state-formation theory, it offers a coherent account of how the changing structures of the army in Egypt after Alexander's conquest led to the development of an ethnically more integrated society. A new tripartite division of Ptolemaic history challenges the idea of gradual decline, and emphasizes the reshaping of military structures that took place between c.220 and c.160 BC in response to changes in the nature of warfare, mobilization and demobilization, and financial constraints. An investigation of the socio-economic role played by soldiers permits a reassessment of the cleruchic system and shows how soldiers' associations generated interethnic group solidarity. By integrating Egyptian evidence, Christelle Fischer-Bovet also demonstrates that the connection between the army and local temples offered new ways for Greeks and Egyptians to interact.