Trajectories Of State Formation Research Articles

:Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences

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

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

Jo Van Steenbergen (ed.), Trajectories of State Formation across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences

Jo Van Steenbergen (ed.), Trajectories of State Formation across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences

Conquerors, Employers, and Arbiters: States and Shifts in Labour Relations 1500–2000, Introduction

AbstractThe introductory article to this volume offers an analytical framework for the capacities in which states have historically affected labour relations. The framework captures the full range of possible manifestations of state power, including early states, empires, regional authorities, and city states. It distinguishes between the state as a direct actor or participant, carrying out tasks deemed essential for its functioning, and the state as an arbiter, redistributor, or regulator. As conquerors or employers, states are confronted with a basic dilemma: how to extract and allocate the labour resources required to accomplish state tasks. Borrowing from Charles Tilly, the two broad categories of capital and coercion are used as a heuristic device to bring order to the ways in which states have solved this dilemma. Contrary to Tilly’s trajectories of state formation, states’ reliance on capital or coercion is subject to a great degree of flexibility, both over time and across space. In their capacities as mediators and regulators, modern states came to have an even more profound impact on labour relations, as state building moved away from the single focus on organizing the extraction of resources to a wider mission of fostering welfare, economic development, and human capital formation.

The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique by Juan Obarrio (review)

Juan Obarrio, The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 280 pp.This is an important book not only for Mozambique or Africa, but for any anthropologist concerned with law, politics, sovereignty, and statehood. Engaging the vast canvas of legality, trajectories of state formation, and broader dimensions of sociality in Mozambique, Juan Obarrio oscillates between painting with broad strokes and deploying a more pointillist style. Nevertheless, the book ends comprising a surface that is ethnographically colorful, rich in analytical interpretative possibilities, and reflective of broader contemporary theoretical trends in its literary aesthetic. Simply, Obarrio's book will make a lasting contribution to the of post-colonial law and statehood. There are at least two main reasons why this is so.First, a book entitled The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique-without any subtitle-necessarily evokes being something of an engagement with the ideas of Montesquieu's classic work, The Spirit of the Laws (L'esprit des lois) (Secondat 1989). Although Montesquieu is only briefly treated in the book, Obarrio nonetheless writes:The of the laws is an image-concept that has constituted the kernel of state sovereignty since early modern times, from its inception in Europe to its dislocated implementation in colonies (and postcolonies) such as Mozambique...Through formulaic rhetoric, theatrical performance, and fetishism, the spirit of the laws reveals the magicality of the mythological genealogies of the state itself. (12)Being a milestone in the development of not only Enlightenment political thought but also shaping legal and political understandings for centuries, Montesquieu's work still attracts considerable scholarly attention revolving around questions of the nature of the state, the division of power, and the essence of sovereignty. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Montesquieu's seminal tome also informs Obarrio's analysis of the complex workings of law and governance in the post-colonial context of Mozambique. However, Obarrio's turn to Montesquieu and the Enlightenment origins of legal thought also mirrors a broader trend in anthropology (and, indeed, the social sciences) in the last few decades, namely the rediscovery of law. For one, this has meant that old classics within the discipline- such as Bronislaw Malinowski's Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1976 [1926]), Henry Sumner Maine's Ancient Law (1963 [1861]), or Max Gluckman's Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (1967 [1965])-have been revisited in a discipline that seems increasingly to recognize legal orders and practices, and questions of sovereignty, statehood, and justice, as central. One may only mention here the works of Aihwa Ong (2006) or Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2005) on sovereignty, the contributions made by John and Jean Comaroff (2006) or Benda-Beckmann et al. (2009a, 2009b) to understanding the dynamics of law and the vagaries of justice in settings of dynamic change (e.g., Goldstein 2012) or in increasingly plural legal orders (Sieder and McNeish 2013). Obarrio's work is definitely keeping with such anthropological reorientation and, indeed, running through the entire book is a desire to engage law at all relevant levels: from the swanky offices and air-conditioned workshop locales of Western NGOs operating in Maputo to transform the government and the legal sector (mainly examined in Part I), to the everyday life of justice and law as they are performed, negotiated, and negated in community courts in and around the city of Nampula, Northern Mozambique (mostly presented in Part II). Throughout, law is seen as integral to all aspects of politics and sociality. Such a legal-centric perspective of historical transformations and contemporary perturbations in Mozambique is, as Obarrio demonstrates, highly useful.Second, Obarrio's book is a successful attempt to not only do research from below but also to heed the by-now-classic call to study up (Nader 1974 [1969]); the text moves deftly between such hierarchical levels on analytic, theoretical, and empirical grounds. …

Undermining the State? Informal Mining and Trajectories of State Formation in Eastern Mindanao, Philippines

ABSTRACTBuilding on critical perspectives on the state and the informal economy, this article provides an analysis of the “state of the state” on the eastern Mindanao mineral frontier. In the first instance, the author explains that the massive expansion of informal small-scale gold mining, instead of undermining state rule, has given rise to joint institutions of extraction that promote the interests of local politicians and informal miners, amongst others. Relying on the coercive and legitimizing strengths of local state institutions, local politicians have created an environment conducive to the persistence and arguably the further expansion of small-scale gold mining. In the process, they not only beef up their personal authority and the state's fiscal revenues, but also contribute to the consolidation of state rule on the upland frontier. Transcending the local level, this parallel process of small-scale mining expansion and state consolidation, the author argues, can be understood as the result of a long-standing tradition of decentralized state building through local strongmen-politicians. Finally, attention is drawn to the expansion of large-scale mining and how it is highly likely to upset the sociopolitical stability built around joint extraction regimes in the informal small-scale mining economy.