Nationhood,Communism and State Legitimation

Abstract. Four states have disappeared as a result of the collapse of communism and many others have come into being. I want to look at the reason why these states have disappeared, what this says about the nature of state-sustaining ideologies and what the disappearance tells us about the relationship between statehood and nationhood. I will also look at the effectiveness of communism as a state-sustaining ideology. The four are, obviously, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. In each case, the survival of the state was linked to communism and the end of communism brought their continued existence into jeopardy. I shall not be looking at the Soviet Union in detail. Broadly, the construction of political identities can come about in two ways – by ethnicity or by the state. Each gives rise to a different set of loyalties, creates its own panoply of rituals etc. When the two coincide, the mythical nation-state can be said to be in being, but this hardly exists in reality (Iceland may be the sole exception in Europe).     

Marxism,Access and the State

I am grateful to Dave Kaplan for helping me to sharpen the argument at a number of points, and indeed for raising major theoretical issues which I have been unable to tackle adequately in this context.     

Revolution, State Building, and Foreign Policy

Book reviewed in this article:
Daniela Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in 1920s     

Today's State of Exception: Abu-Jamal,Agamben, JanMofiamed,and the Democratic State of Emergency

Abstract

This essay engages the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and the literary criticism of Abdul R. JanMohammed in critically exploring the contours of the present arrangement of democratic politics in the United States. Giorgio Agamben's exception theory of sovereignty and bare life are deployed in order to grasp the political meaning of surprisingly unprecedented and exceptional recent court rulings in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982. Abu-Jamal's experience of exceptional rulings also requires a critical elaboration of the racialized nature of American democracy. Thus, Agamben's theory finds a critical complement with the work of literary theorist Abdul R. JanMohammed, particularly JanMohammed's formulations of "social death" and the "dialectics of death" for "death-bound-subjects." The theories of Agamben and JanMohammed make clear the nature of Abu-Jamal's political struggle and the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exception into the rule, specifically in the case of the marginal and dispossessed. The significance of Abu-Jamal's case thus becomes one of understanding the production and reproduction of the state of exception and the (im)possibilities of political transformation and liberation from the arrested state of democracy in the modern world.     

Enlightenment,Haskalah, and the State of Israel

ABSTRACT

This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel’s government, judiciary, and political discourse. It traces this complex legacy using a semantic distinction between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne’orut, that illustrates their importance in the political and discursive legacies of the State of Israel. The article then explores the recent populist and nationalist assaults against some of these legacies.     

The State,Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis

In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-grave datasets. Such longitudinal approaches to the past can be powerful, especially where they involve the analysis of multiple life course events for a large number of individuals. The first part of the article explores ways in which quantitative approaches can be used to reconstruct the circumstances that shaped the creation of record groups. The second part examines the way in which longitudinal analysis can be used to analyse the impact of state action on the lives of convicts.     

Convictions,Loyalties and the Secular State

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between communal religious identity and the secular, liberal state. It addresses the concern that religious allegiance undermines an individual's or group's political loyalty. The liberal secular state is threatened when a religious community participates in public discussion because this challenges the positioning of religious belief as personal and private. Currently this issue is brought into sharp focus by the identities of Muslim people although it is by no means restricted to this religious group. The early Christians negotiated the difficulties of loyalty to the empire and worship of the one true God as uniquely divine. The work of William Cavanaugh and Maleiha Malik is utilized to argue that religious communities can participate in public discussions in secular liberal states while living by narratives not shared by these polities. In fact religious communities can deepen the moral discussions of liberal secular states by bringing to its instrumental rationalism convictions established on alternate beliefs and narratives about the human condition. The recognition of the public role of religions need not induce panic in the liberal secular state and may secure religious communities sufficiently to allow mature, critical debate and discussion of their loyalties.     

Church,State and the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

This article takes a critical look at the experience of the Christian Churches during the time of the Rwandan genocide between 6 April and mid July 1994. It is established that in about 100 days about one million people faced death at the hands of soldiers, militias and ordinary civilians. Most victims were killed in churches and other church premises where they had gathered in hope of protection. The genocide in Rwanda was extensive both in its scale and execution. In this article we attempt to understand why and how the churches were involved in the killings, and the implications of such involvement in contemporary efforts towards reconciliation.     

Science, the Cold War, and the American State

Harvey M. Sapolsky. Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval Research .
Stuart W. Leslie. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford .
Robert A. Divine. The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet Satellite .
D iplomatic H istory , Vol. 20, No. I (Winter 1996).     

State Absence and State Formation in Solomon Islands: Reflections on Agency,Scale and Hybridity

This article engages ethnographic research on perceptions of disputation, justice and security in rural Solomon Islands to reflect on issues of agency, power and scale in areas of limited statehood. Set against widespread popular perceptions of state retreat in Solomon Islands, the authors situate their study within the literature which addresses engagements with conflict‐affected and fragile countries and, in particular, literature with an interest in the spaces created by prolonged state absence as potential sites of innovation and transformation. The article examines the role of agency and power at different scales in the highly contested processes of state formation underway in post‐conflict Solomon Islands. Taking issue with the presumed privileging by local actors of non‐state over state forms that runs through much of the hybridity literature, the authors suggest that international ‘state‐building’ interventions, such as that recently experienced in Solomon Islands, require a more nuanced and historically informed understanding of local agency vis‐à‐vis the state in fragile and conflict‐affected settings.