I don’t know whether to feel horribly manipulated, simply appreciate the nerd-fest humor, or both.
- Andrew Philips on the new Australian Defense White Paper.
- Dan Trombly on the efficacy of US intervention in Syria.
- Jay Ulfelder wants to restrict our use of the term “state” to, as best as I can tell, sovereign-territorial entities. His intentions are good–break unilinear understandings of state (trans)formation–but his methods are wrong: they simply re-inscribe an association between “state” and the Weberian ideal type of the “modern state.”
- Marc Lynch on anti-Americanism in the Arab world.
- I’ve been generally appalled by the lack of a paperback release for Stacie Goddard’s excellent Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland. Amazon is currently selling the harback version for under $20, so I strongly suggest buying a copy.
- Speaking of deals, Nick Kiersey and Iver B. Neumann (eds) Battlestar Galactica and International Relations has been discounted to $14.95 on Kindle. The occasion? Edward James Olmos discovering the book and tweeting Nick about it. The volume includes chapters by many Ducks, including PTJ, Charli Carpenter, and, well, me.
- Crooked Timber‘s symposium on The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City is starting to appear. I wanted to provide a piece, but overcommitments prevented me from doing so. Go read.
And also:
- It’s been too long since we checked in on “Copy, Shake, and Paste.” Guess what? More plagiarism! Oh, right. That’s the theme of the blog.
- Liberation Theology in Latin America (via).
- The “marriage penalty,” PRC-style.
- BLTN: this is wicked cool.
- Some words may be really, really old (via).
Apprently the costs for wiring the book to Europe are 5 euro- it’s 20.56 for me (Netherlands). But thanks! Looking forward to the read….
Speaking of states, a post on state recognition, in case someone here is interested in that topic:
https://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2013/05/does-process-of-state-recognition-need.html
Thanks for passing along!
I am not sure if I understand the problem with Ulfelder’s argument. Why can’t we use ‘state’ for the modern state (i.e. the polity that has existed in Europe since the Early Modern period and exists across the world today, I would say this is a polity defined by boundaries) and use other terms for other types of polities. Wouldn’t it be better to use terms like empires, city-state, feudal system, or even composite polities to describe those polities with different characteristics than what we currently call ‘states’? In fact, I thought much the same thing upon reading ‘Art of Not Being Governed’.
That said, I think there can be sovereignty without territoriality but that depends upon what appears to be a rather idiosyncratic definition of sovereignty as the practice of drawing boundaries around political authority. No reason those boundaries must be tied to territory.
We could use any term that we wanted to, but Jay’s objection conflates the term “state” with an ideal-typical account of the “modern state.” IMHO, we’d be better off adopting a thinner definition of the state and using it to cover a broader variety of polities.
Not to be obtuse, but can I ask why this is the case? Isn’t it just as useful to use the term ‘state’ for a single ideal-typical polity and not for others?
We might deal with the fact that some people think that all dinosaurs are Tyrannosaurus Rexes by restricting the term dinosaur to that large carnivore, but that would be silly, no?
Ok, so your point was more against the ‘Weberian Ideal Type’ than limiting what we call ‘states’. However, there do need to be limits, otherwise we might call all reptiles dinosaurs (or in this case all polities ‘states’). This seems, at least to me, what Scott was doing in ‘Art of Being Governed’ and what Ulfelder was reacting to. He just went too far.
I think we might actually agree a little on this then ;-)
No, Jay overcompensates by limiting states to “the modern thing.” That’s hugely counterproductive to our understanding of state (trans)formation.
But there are multiple types that could fit into the ‘modern thing’. They go beyond the Weberian ideal type and coudl all fit under ‘state’. Why not simply have them be ‘state’ and other polities (historical and ideal typical if there is any difference between the two) be given different names such as ’empire’, ‘city-state’, ‘fuedal’, etc. To me the dinosaur problem you mention doesn’t really apply here since state can fit territorial-state, nation-state, market-state, etc.
Are the ‘problems’ because by not calling them states, we end up assuming a particular type of polity whenever we see something resembling a state?
Again, sorry if I am being obtuse but the point seems to be semantic at some level and I think it might be better for the sake of clarity to limit what is and is not a state. We can argue what fits into that category (and you would probably win ;-)) but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be beneficial.
I haven’t read Art of Not Being Governed.
With that caveat, one or two remarks that may or may not be clarifying.
J. Ulfelder’s position seems close to Spruyt’s. In The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, Spruyt basically uses ‘state’ to mean the (ideal-typical) modern state with its well-defined territorial boundaries. He thinks a prototypical version of this emerged in France c.1300, in opposition to ‘feudalism’, which he says was “rule over people rather than land” (cf. J. Scott as quoted by Ulfelder on SE Asia).
But Spruyt’s ideal types are somewhat misleading. There was nothing approaching a continuous, defined boundary of the French kingdom in 1300 (or even in 1600, for that matter), whereas actual ‘feudalism,’ conversely, did have *some* elements of territorial exclusivity. More important, even if one thinks that France in 1300 *begins* to point in the direction of the modern territorial state, Spruyt obscures the fact that “medieval” and “modern” forms of territoriality co-existed for centuries. As several people have pointed out, if you read the treaties comprising the Peace of Westphalia (1648 — supposedly the dawn or the coming of age or whatever of the ‘modern’ state system), you find references to the transfer of ‘appurtenances’ and ‘annexes’ and even ‘fiefs’ — these are feudal rights and property notions, and they persist well into the ‘modern’ era. Cities in Alsace were in the kingdom of France but sent political reps. to the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. Spruyt’s narrative obscures all this.
And to the extent that restricting the term “state” to ‘the modern thing’ reinforces this rather misleading narrative, there is a case for avoiding that restrictive usage and adopting a broader one — not necessarily in as broad a way as anthropologists use “state,” i.e. to mean any kind of formal political organization — but a broader usage than the Ulfelder/Spruyt one. I take this to be, if not exactly, then roughly what Dan is saying, above.
And even if ‘state’ encompasses the different ‘modern’ varieties — territorial-state, nation-state, ‘market’-state (paging Philip Bobbitt on this last one?), that’s still too narrow.