The processes of state formation in the agrarian states of Southeast Asia lend themselves to fruitful comparative analysis using Eliasian concepts. However, in the difficult physical environment of a region endowed with plentiful land relative to population, the control of labour was more important than control of territory, as demonstrated by the cases of Siam and Java. Moreover, the religious, ceremonial and symbolic significance of kingship remained very important even when the coercive power of the centre was weak. (...) Courts made absolutist claims, but their dominance depended on symbolic power and on complex intrigues and networks of patronage. Elias is useful to analyse these endogenous processes of state formation. However, the modern states of the region were forged by colonialism, nationalist movements and the more recent technocratic developmentalist programmes of authoritarian elites. Rapid economic transformation and industrialization have brought new classes and new tensions to test the adequacy of state structures, now far removed from the elite territorial competition of the past. (shrink)

Ibn KhaldØun’s theory of history has been extensively discussed and interpreted in widely divergent ways by Western scholars. In the context of present debates, it seems most appropriate to read his work as an original and comprehensive version of civilizational analysis (the key concept of ‘umran is crucial to this line of interpretation), and to reconstruct his model in terms of relations between religious, political and economic dimensions of the human condition. A specific relationship between state formation and (...) the broader context of civilizational processes appears as the most central theme. This civilizational approach is then contrasted with the most influential recent Western interpretation, put forward by Ernest Gellner. Gellner translates Ibn KhaldØun’s analysis into functionalist terms and thus tones down its historical and civilizational specificity. The consequences are most obvious when it comes to discussing the unity and diversity of the Islamic world, especially with regard to the Ottoman Empire. (shrink)

A perennial concern among scholars of globalization is the relationship between global social formations and national and subnational political and economic developments. While sociological understanding of “the global” has become increasingly rich, stressing the complex relationship between material and cultural pressures, an undertheorized nation state often sits on the receiving end of the sociologist’s model of globalization. The goal of this article is to help move the sociology of globalization out of the analytical trap of global-national dualism by developing (...) an account of the transnationalization of political authority. Building on neo-Marxist and Weberian theories of the transnational, or global state, which explicate the macro-structural dynamics that have led to the transnationalization of the state as such, I look at the process of the transnationalization of political authority from an institutional perspective, one that focuses on processes of transnationalization within, and across, specific state agencies. These theoretical points are empirically motivated through an historical investigation of the transnationalization of monetary authority and its relationship to the international diffusion of policies of austerity from the era of the classical gold standard through the economic crisis of 2008. (shrink)

How can we conceive of the relation between technologies of image-making and the formations of political power, without reducing the former to merely superstructural effects of a pre-existing ideology or deducing the latter from the functional determination inherent in technical apparatuses? In this article, I revisit the notion of the state as a visual form I proposed in an earlier work, arguing that in order to understand the articulation between politics and visuality in modernity we need to pay attention (...) to the performance of showing and seeing that mediates between the spectacle and spectatorship. To grasp the way in which historical change (political and technological) impacts on this constellation, in particular in the transition from photographic to cinematic regimes of visuality between the late 19th and early 20th century, I take these questions through two rather different ‘case studies’: photographer Juan Gutiérrez’s images of Brazilian state rituals in the mid-1890s and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph’ of 1949. Whereas Gutiérrez’s photographic series, I argue, announces the cinema and its ways of mobilizing actors and spectators alike, as the limit of a 19th-century visuality primed on the stability and self-enclosedness of viewers and objects, Borges’s story retrospectively enacts the transition from photographic to cinematic seeing in an intratextual battle of acts of transcription from the impossible object at the centre of the plot, which grants infinite, universal visibility to the one who beholds it. Reading the two together, or against one another, then, allows us to see the dimension of transience undercutting the apparent solidity and timelessness with which scopic regimes promise us access to the real. (shrink)

Johann Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt's social theories have remarkably different origins. Yet each has moved onto common ground with the other over a period of time. They meet in historical sociology in dialogue over theories of state formation and images of civilisation. Each is engaged in a project of revising civilisations sociology that reaches an apex with the comparative study of Japan.Their groundbreaking contributions can be read critically against a wider background of debates about postcolonialism, the reputation of (...) the notion of civilisation and the state of area studies in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

En 1945, 51 países firmaron la Carta de San Francisco, que dio nacimiento a las Naciones Unidas. Veinte eran latinoamericanos; catorce, europeos. En 2022, la ONU se ha expandido hasta abarcar a 193 miembros. Veinte son latinoamericanos, los mismos que en la fundación, pero hoy 51 son europeos. Este libro monumental pretende explicar, entre otras cosas, por qué los estados europeos viven fusionándose y dividiéndose mientras los latinoamericanos, una vez consolidados, duran para siempre – pero funcionan peor. Las causas, se (...) aduce, hay que buscarlas un siglo y medio atrás…. (shrink)

Uses modernist and postmodernist theoretical perspectives to examine the formation and reformation of states throughout history and around the globe.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Molding the institutions of governance: theories of state formation and the contingency of sovereignty in fragile polities; 2. Imposing states: foreign rivalries, local collaboration, and state form in peripheral polities; 3. Feudalizing the Chinese polity, 1893-1922: assessing the adequacy of alternative takes on state-reorganization; 4. External influence and China's feudalization, 1893-1922: opportunity costs and patterns of foreign intervention; 5. The evolution of foreign involvement in China, 1923-52: rising opportunity costs and convergent (...) approaches to intervention; 6. How intervention remade the Chinese state, 1923-52: foreign sponsorship and the building of sovereign China; 7. Creating Indonesia, 1893-1952: major power rivalry and the making of sovereign statehood; 8. Siam stands apart, 1893-1952: external intervention and rise of a sovereign Thai state; 9. Domesticating international relations, externalizing comparative politics: foreign intervention and the state in world politics. (shrink)

In the proposed article by Maxim Isaenko "Ukrainian Christian tradition of state creation... "on the question of application A comparative methodological approach is presented in the analysis conceptual dispositions available in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian types of state-building and organization of power institutions. Studying socio-legal models that are characteristic of three Slavic peoples, vectors of kinship and distance are outlined understanding of the phenomena of the state, power, law.

This article considers concrete manifestations of the politogenesis multilinearity and the variation of its forms; it analyzes the main causes that determined the politogenetic pathway of a given society. The respective factors include the polity's size, its ecological and social environment. The politogenesis should be never reduced to the only one evolutionary pathway leading to the statehood. The early state formation was only one of many versions of development of complex late archaic social systems. The author designates various (...) complex non-state political systems as early state analogues. The early state analogue posed a real alternative to the state for a rather long period of time, whereas in many ecologically marginal regions they could compete quite seriously with the state sometimes until recently. Thus, it was only in the final count that the state became the leading form of political organization of complex societies. The very pathways to statehood had a few versions. One may group them into two main types: ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’. Within the ‘vertical’ model the state formation took place in a direct way, i.e. directly from small pre-state polities to primitive statehood. Within the ‘horizontal’ model we first ob-serve the formation of early state analogues that were quite com-parable to the state as regards their complexity, whereas later those analogues were transformed into states . (shrink)

This book represents a unique endeavor to elucidate the story of Kosovo's unilateral quest for statehood. It is an inquiry into the international legal aspects and processes that shaped and surrounded the creation of the state of Kosovo. Being created outside the post-colonial context, Kosovo offers a unique yet controversial example of state emergence both in the theory and practice of creation of states. Accordingly, the book investigates the legal pathways, strategies, developments and policy positions of international agencies/actors (...) and regional players (in particular the EU) that helped Kosovo to establish its independence and gradually acquire statehood. Although contested, Kosovo, and its quest for statehood, represents a unique example of successful unilateral secession. The book therefore explores and analyses patterns of state formation and nation-building in Kosovo, and its transition to democracy. It presents a three-level assessment. First, seen from a historical perspective, the book examines the validity of the right of Kosovar-Albanians to self-determination and remedial secession. Second, from a legal positivist perspective, it scrutinizes all of the legalist arguments that support Kosovo's right to statehood, and claims that both traditional and legality-based criteria for statehood remain insufficient to determine whether Kosovo has achieved statehood. Third, from a post-factum perspective, the book analyzes the scope and extent to which the internationally blended element was decisive in Kosovo's state-formation and state-building processes. It explains how the EU's involvement as an 'internationally blended element' in Kosovo's efforts to achieve statehood was instrumental and played a crucial role in shaping the emerging state. In particular, the book elaborates on how the EU was able to streamline its mode of intervention in the context of state-building and reform. (shrink)

This article asks how state formation processes informed the normative frameworks of late-Medieval and early-Modern Latin European and Muslim Middle Eastern regimes. The question at hand is not why pre-Modern regimes discriminated against religious minorities (as well as other groups) during the pre-Modern period, but why Western European states consistently engaged in mass expulsions of their non-Christian subjects from the late thirteenth century onward and the neighboring states of the Middle East did not. Rather than addressing these peculiar (...) policies as a function of religion, culture, or law the article adopts a comparative, contextual method. With the aid of Charles Tilly’s theoretical perspectives it isolates critical variables in pre-Modern Middle Eastern state formation. These variables are then used to shed light on the circumstances and relationships that led to Latin Europe’s mass expulsions of Jews and Muslims between 1290 and 1614. (shrink)

This essay explores four questions through a critical dialogue with Black Marxist, Decolonial, and Political Marxist accounts of racism. First, is it possible to speak of racism before the advent of colonisation in the Americas? Second, what were the determinants for the production of these earlier modalities of racism? Third, who were the key actors responsible for the production of such racism? And fourth, what were the linkages between these developments and racisms that would unfold with the capitalist colonisation of (...) the Americas? I contend that the historical formation of racism as a material force lies in the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. By demonstrating how elite political cultures of Western European societies were suffused with the logic of racialisation prior to the colonisation of the Americas, the essay helps render transparent hitherto occluded connections between histories focusing on the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of the European exterior. And in doing so, it establishes the constitutive part racism played in the emergence of capitalist modernity. (shrink)

According to the traditional textbook account, the coming into existence of States is a fact, depending on the realization of effective government over territory and people. Against this background, the present contribution argues that while the formation of States is a predominately fact-based phenomenon, it is not limited to a mere test of effectiveness. The formation of States has always incorporated elements of legitimacy and even more so by virtue of the development of international law in the wake (...) of World War II. Issues of legitimacy become relevant in particular in extreme situations, i.e. in the event that the foundational principles of the contemporary international legal order as manifested in the concept of peremptory norms of general international law are at stake. (shrink)

The processes of reform and crisis phenomena in the Ukrainian society at the end of the XX - the beginning of the XXI century suggest that a stable ideological and theoretical foundation is lacking for the stable functioning of the modern Ukrainian state and the formation of civil society. On the basis of this, the state-building concepts of the prominent Ukrainian thinkers of the 20th century become very important. The personal place among them is the creative heritage (...) of Vyacheslav Lypynsky, who, despite the dominant socialist approaches to the transformation of Ukrainian society at that time, advocated an alternative conservative-monastic idea of ​​state-building in Ukraine. (shrink)

The themes of this volume represent major extensions of and reflections upon the ideas first advanced in Elias' The Civilizing Process.

This paper outlines the history of Hungarian ethnography and anthropology and their role in the construction of the nation and Hungarian liberalism in the Dualist period . Affected by the specific socio-political conditions of this ethnically most diverse country of contemporary Europe, the disciplinary trajectories of Hungarian ethnography and anthropology diverge considerably from the models offered by the historiography in the British, French and German contexts. The paper argues that the pluralistic, cultural and strongly integrative ethnographic tradition that prevailed in (...) Hungary in the last decades of the nineteenth century did not notably wane and shift towards a biological, hierarchical and racialist thinking by the end of the First World War. Furthermore, Hungarian liberalism did not simply provide the milieu for these disciplines to flourish, but was itself partly the result of these disciplines’ attempts to formulate the very concepts of ethnicity and race. (shrink)

In 2013-2022, the Ukrainian ethnic group faced numerous external and internal challenges, which were largely the result of its previous historical development and profound transformations in the public consciousness.These changes, in turn, have become a natural reaction to a number of historical processes and phenomena that have taken place in the territory of the people from ancient times to the present. In this article, the author aims to analyze some factors of stress genesis of the ethnic legal mentality of the (...) Ukrainian ethnic group and show their impact on the content of its behavioral stereotypes. The methodology of this study is comprehensive and is based on socio-philosophical and philosophical and legal analysis of behavioral attitudes of Ukrainians in the field of legal understanding.Results. In the course of analyzing the scientific works of a number of researchers, we found that during its historical existence, the Ukrainian ethnic group has experienced a number of events, phenomena and processes of objective reality, which led to the transformation of the content of its behavioral stereotypes. Factors of stress genesis can be divided into endogenous and exogenous. Exogenous sources of Ukrainian ethnopsychologists include, for example, continuous invasions of various aggressors (Tatar, Polish, Russian, German) and various attempts to acculturate Ukrainians.According to them, endogenous factors include various migration processes that have generated marginality and betrayal by Ukrainian leaders of their people. In the future, the established guidelines play or may play a destructive role in the process of nationbuilding.Conclusions. We found that the stress genesis of domestic political and legal can be defined as the process of creating political and legal mentality of the Ukrainian ethnos under the influence of events, phenomena, processes of its sociohistorical development, as well as factors of geographical location and environmental conditions. community and, as a consequence, cause transformations in the content of its guidelines. In addition, the border situation of Ukrainian lands, long statelessness of the ethnic group, serfdom in the homeland and other factors of socio-historical development of the national ethnic group have led to the emergence or deepening in the people’s consciousness such destructive stereotypes as anarchism, legal nihilism, freedom “, absenteeism and civic passivity, deep corruption traditions and nepotism, low status of state property, etc. (shrink)

Although any typology of constructivism might be arbitrary, there are, broadly speaking, two distinctive constructivist approaches in security studies as well as International Relations (IR) according to their different meta-theoretical stances: conventional constructivism, on the one hand, and critical constructivism on the other. Indeed, regarding how to understand state identity which is integral to national security, there has meta-theoretically been fierce contention between conventional and critical constructivist security studies. In not ignoring but slightly toning down this contention operating at (...) the abstract level, this article aims to present a pragmatic application of the two different (or conflicting) constructivisms to capturing a more complete picture of state identity formation in substantive empirical research of constructivist security studies. The pragmatic approach is that, without being immersed heavily in the meta-theoretical strife between the two seemingly conflicting constructivist camps, both constructivisms should be treated as different analytical frameworks for examining different (internal and external) faces of state identity formation: the external construction of state identity can be well addressed by conventional constructivism, while the internal one by critical constructivism. In this sense, the relationship between conventional and critical constructivism can be understood as not conflicting but complementary in empirical research, as both constructivisms enrich and deepen our understanding of state identity formation in different ways. (shrink)

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, (...) namely the double oversight of subjecthood. Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period. Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

Se realizó la revisión bibliográfica con el objetivo de que los jóvenes profesionales de la salud conozcan acerca de la historia, origen y significado del distintivo que representa a la Medicina en todos sus campos con un carácter humanista y elevados valores éticos y morales: el emblema de Esculapio, al que se le atribuyen dotes para calmar o apaciguar. Esta imagen del bastón con la serpiente es la que ha quedado como un atributo del dios curativo y ha llegado hasta (...) la actualidad como símbolo de la Medicina. The literature review was made in order to young health professionals know about the history , origin and meaning of the emblem that represents the Medicine in all fields with humanist and high ethical values and moral character : the Aesculapius emblem, the feats attributed to him to calm or appease . This image of the snake with the cane has remained as a healing attribute of God and has come to the present as a symbol of medicine. (shrink)

This study discusses the formation of national identity and the nation state in the modern Middle East in comparison with Turkey, one of the earlier models of national state formation in the region. The basic aim of the study is to examine the position of religion and religious identity as the source of legitimacy in the modern state. In order to have a better understanding of the relationship between nationalism and religion in the Middle East, (...) the study attempts to look at the development of Egyptian nationalism and the role of religion in the making of modern state in Egypt. The study also attempts to make a comparative historical work by analyzing the history of the early Republican Turkey and the consolidation of the modern Turkish state by legitimacy other than religion hitherto the basic source of authority. (shrink)