Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Forms Of Violence

How is it that nation-states running on democratic procedures like elections engage simultaneously in extreme forms of violence towards its own citizens? While introducing this question in this chapter, I discuss the institutional, conceptual, and temporal-spatial aspects of the modern state and how it can be studied ethnographically. As a study of the violent dimension of the state, questions of legality, routinesness and the targets of violence are also addressed. The chapter also outlines how the notion of legitimacy is conceived in the work, by examining various competing theorizations, and also by showing how a distinction between the terms hegemony and legitimacy are sustained in the work. At the end, the chapter gives an outline of the rest of the book and how various chapters engage with the issue of state violence in two field-contexts.

Uses of the Past: Archaeology in the Service of the State (1987)

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don D. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
New World ◽  
The State ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Symbolic Resource

Nation states, or partisans thereof, control and allocate symbolic resources as one means of legitimizing power and authority, and in pursuit of their perceived nationalistic goals and ideologies. A major symbolic resource is the past. In this chapter I review three cases in which the past and, in particular, relevant archaeological resources were ‘used’ for such purposes, and I refer to several other well-known instances. The three cases discussed are Mexico from c.AD 900 to the present, Britain from c.AD 1500 to the present, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949. The implications of such uses in relation to archaeological theories and interpretations are discussed. In The Uses of the Past, Herbert Müller (1952) sought for ‘certainty of meaning’ in an analysis of the development of Western civilization. The only certainty he found was that the past has many uses. This chapter is concerned with some specific uses of the past: (1) how nation state rulers and bureaucrats have manipulated the past for nationalist purposes, both ideological and chauvinistic, and to legitimize their authority and power; (2) how nation states have used archaeological sites, artefacts, and theories for such purposes; (3) how these uses of the past relate to more general questions about the intellectual and socio-political contexts in which archaeology is conducted. The importance to the state of using or manipulating its past is neatly delineated in two great dystopian novels, George Orwell’s (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World. In the former, the Ministry of Truth totally revamps the past as needed to justify and lend ‘truth’ to the immediate requirements, actions, and policies of the state. In the latter, the past is blotted out. As the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, Mustafa Mond tells the Savage, ‘we haven’t any use for old things here’ (Huxley 1932: 200). In both cases, control and manipulation of the past or its complete denial is critical to state ideology and purposes.

Kurdish Women in the Zone of Genocide and Gendercide

1970 ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Shahrazad Mojab
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Kurdish Women ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The World ◽  
Forms Of Violence

The first political struggles for women’s emancipation coincide with the rise of nations, nationalism, and the nation-state during the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. This formation of modern nation states has generally been associated with the use of violence. War, massacre, genocide, and ethnic cleansing are some of the forms of violence used by both premodern and modern states throughout the world. All these forms of violence have been patriarchal. State violence and patriarchal violence have been and still are inseparable.

At the Threshold of Justiciable Violence: Configuring and Contesting Torture’s Production

2021 ◽  
pp. 174387212110187
Author(s):  
Ergun Cakal
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Forms Of Violence

“Torture” is one of law’s most charged categories—burdened with distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate, the permitted from the prohibited forms of state violence. Embedding it in its broader discursive production, I ask: how are forms of state violence configured, controlled, and contested in, through, and by legal articulations? How are anti-torture practitioners to understand the relation between law and violence and how law legitimates some forms of violence whilst not others? How does human suffering at the hands of the state even enter the “hearing” of its law? Taking psychological torture as paradigmatic, I diagrammatically discuss how such violence is “invisibilized” and falls below definitional thresholds, due to discursive processes of active occlusion as well as epistemic limitations.

Household and State-istics: Cornerstones of Society in Population Censuses (Belgium, 1846–1947)

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaat Louckx ◽  
Raf Vanderstraeten
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
The State ◽  
Scientific Representation ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Family Household ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Residential Units ◽  
Belgian Population ◽  
The Welfare State

Statistics originally meant state-istics, a scientific representation of the state for governmental purposes. It did not just cover the growing need for information in the emerging nation-states, but also contributed to establishing a new idea of government. This paper analyzes the rearticulation of the household within modern state-istics. The Belgian population censuses, which were first organized by Adolphe Quetelet, provide the material for our analyses. More particularly, we focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, when the welfare state started to develop alternatives to household dependence. We discuss how the orientation shifted from the de facto to the de jure population; the state became involved in redefining the conditions for household membership. Two types of co-residential units were distinguished: family household and collective household. But inmates of collective households caused much concern; statisticians tried to reassign them administratively to households considered more appropriate. We also discuss the articulation of intrahousehold relations. Changes in the notion of “belongingness” show how the state articulated its expectations regarding the proverbial cornerstones of society.

Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Criminal Law Bill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Penal State ◽  
State 1

Part III of Dual Penal State uses dual penal state analysis to generate a comparative-historical account of American penality. With comparative glimpses at Germany and, to a lesser extent, England, it distinguishes between two responses to the shared challenge of legitimating state penal power in a modern liberal democratic state: (1) the failure to appreciate the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power in particular (United States) and of modern state power in general (England); and (2) the failure to address the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power as an ongoing existential threat to the legitimacy of the state (Germany). Chapter 6 undertakes a critical analysis of Jefferson’s 1779 draft of a criminal law bill for the State of Virginia, concluding that it fell well short of a criminal code that reflected the ideals of the American legal-political project as spelled out, for instance, in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurens van Apeldoorn ◽  
Robin Douglass
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
State 1

This volume investigates the complex and rich intersections between Thomas Hobbes’s political and religious thought. Hobbes is often credited with being one of the first great theorists of the modern state,1 but the state he theorized, as the title of his most famous work announces, was a commonwealth ecclesiastical and civil. One of the main goals of ...

Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
International Courts ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Supranational Institutions

This collection brings together scholars of jurisprudence and political theory to probe the question of ‘legitimacy’. It offers discussions that interrogate the nature of legitimacy, how legitimacy is intertwined with notions of statehood, and how legitimacy reaches beyond the state into supranational institutions and international law. Chapter I considers benefit-based, merit-based, and will-based theories of state legitimacy. Chapter II examines the relationship between expertise and legitimate political authority. Chapter III attempts to make sense of John Rawls’s account of legitimacy in his later work. Chapter IV observes that state sovereignty persists, since no alternative is available, and that the success of the assortment of international organizations that challenge state sovereignty depends on their ability to attract loyalty. Chapter V argues that, to be complete, an account of a state’s legitimacy must evaluate not only its powers and its institutions, but also its officials. Chapter VI covers the rule of law and state legitimacy. Chapter VII considers the legitimation of the nation state in a post-national world. Chapter VIII contends that legitimacy beyond the state should be understood as a subject-conferred attribute of specific norms that generates no more than a duty to respect those norms. Chapter IX is a reply to critics of attempts to ground the legitimacy of suprastate institutions in constitutionalism. Chapter X examines Joseph Raz’s perfectionist liberalism. Chapter XI attempts to bring some order to debates about the legitimacy of international courts.

Closing the Circle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnic Minority Group ◽  
Role Of The State

In the concluding chapter, I discuss the various strategies that the Tangsa use in Assam to survive as a small ethnic minority group and how performing identity and ethnicity at festivals can be considered to be yet one more such strategy. This leads to a discussion of Tangsa identity, ethnicity, and culture as well as the role of the state and the Assamese ‘other’ in defining what it means to be Tangsa. In a ‘Taking Stock’ section, I list all my shortcomings, and also all that that still needs to be done before some amount of clarity can be achieved in understanding the complex Tangsa picture. The concluding section summarizes my findings to make clear the underlying and undeniable connection between performing ethnicity and negotiating marginalization.

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