PLSC 3387 Political Geography Chapter 2

State

Rather than trying to find a central unifying principle shared by all states, we prefer to understand states as '(1) complex networks of relations among a (shifting) mixture of institutions and social groups, and (2) the product of their own processes of institutional development and historical change' (p. 21). Alternatively, the state is 'not an object, an entity or a unified political actor. Rather, it is the name we give to the effect of the social process that make such an object, entity or actor appear to exist' (p. 25).

Frontier zones

Frontier zones are regions 'where the weak influence of one or more states overlapped, or state power petered out into areas not occupied by any state' (p. 22).

Borders

Borders are 'precise boundaries' that 'emerge with modern states' and 'are associated with the capacity of states to spread their power relatively evenly throughout a territory' as 'symptoms of states’ ability to “project” their administrative capacity across the whole of their territories' (p. 21-22).

Strong theory of the state

A strong theory 'would provide an integrated account of the state in terms of a single set of causal mechanisms' and 'explain all the institutional and operational features of a state in a given conjuncture' (p. 23).

Weak theory of the state

A weak theory is 'a useful set of guidelines and principles which will assist analysis of particular states, but which do not assume that everything can be explained by a single set of mechanisms' (p. 24).

Strategic-relational approach

An approach developed by Bob Jessop along three axes: 'First, the state system is seen as a site of strategy; as the place, if you like, where political strategies “happen”.' 'Secondly, the state “is also the site where strategies are elaborated”' by state officials. 'Thirdly, the state apparatus and the conventional ways of acting of state officials and institutions are themselves the products of past strategies' (p. 26).

Institutional materiality

A term from Nicos Poulantzas referring to the 'mix of institutional forms and practices' that constitute the physical structure and operation of the state apparatus (p. 25).

Institutional ensemble

The mix of institutional forms and practices (the state's institutional materiality) described as 'a specific institutional ensemble with multiple boundaries, no institutional fixity and no pre-given formal or substantive unity' (p. 25).

High politics

High politics 'refers to the politics of war, peace, diplomacy, the state’s claim to sovereignty and constitutional change' which 'touches on the very existence of the state, and the ways in which it deals with threats to that existence' (p. 26).

Low politics

Low politics 'refers to more “mundane issues” such as economic policy, public health, education, routine administration, welfare benefits and environmental protection, the kinds of issues over which states rarely, if ever, go to war, but which today occupy a large part of their attention and resources' (p. 26-27).

Governmentality

A Foucauldian concept where 'the management of the state comes to be understood in the same way as a father’s management of a family. That is, that the governor (father) comes to be concerned with the ordering of the people, activities and things of the state (household) and with their interrelations' (p. 28).

Population

The people of the state conceptualized 'as a population, which was understood as the proper focus of the art of government' and 'the objects of government: the population of a particular territory' (p. 28).

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is 'not a fact. Rather it is a concept or a claim about the way political power is or should be exercised' to assert 'being the highest authority within an area, or over a particular group' (p. 31).

Interstate system

A system where sovereignty is 'constructed in practice through a system of mutual recognition' such that 'a state’s claim to sovereignty is “made to stick” as it were by showing that other states regard it as a legitimate claim' (p. 33).

Coercion

The use of force to gain compliance, based on the tragic fact that 'coercion works; those who apply substantial force to their fellows get compliance' (p. 33).

Capital

Tangible resources concentrated in cities, which act as 'the home of banks, merchants, traders, markets and craft workers' (p. 34).

Capital-intensive path

A state development path where 'rulers relied on compacts with capitalists — whose interests they served with care — to rent or purchase military force, and thereby warred without building vast permanent state structures' (p. 36).

Coercion-intensive path

A state development path where capital was scarce, and 'rulers squeezed the means of war from their own populations and others they conquered, building massive structures of extraction in the process' (p. 36).

Capitalized coercion path

An intermediate state development path that 'involved aspects of each, and included “incorporating capitalists and sources of capital directly into the structures” of the state' (p. 36).

National state

A predominant form of state that triumphed in Europe because of 'the increasing scale of war and the knitting together of the European state system' which 'gave the war-making advantage to those states that could field standing armies; states having access to a combination of large rural populations, capitalists, and relatively commercialized economies won out' (p. 36).

Moral regulation

Moral regulation 'refers to the processes by which the state tries to represent itself as the neutral guardian and protector of a unified “whole” people, which is actually a heterogeneous mixture of different and often conflicting social groups and interests' (p. 37).

Despotic power

Despotic power 'refers to the power of state elites to do things without reference to the rest of society' (p. 38).

Infrastructural power

Infrastructural power 'is the ability of the state to “penetrate” society and reach out across geographical space to influence events throughout its territory' (p. 38).

Surveillance

The monitoring and governing of the population which 'requires a high level of infrastructural power' and 'depends on a spatially dense and comprehensive set of institutional practices through which whole populations… can be drawn into the knowledge circuits of the state' (p. 39).

Internal pacification

The expression of administrative power in Giddens' work describing 'increased emphasis on the state suppression of what gradually came to be defined as “deviance”' through Giddens' two developments: rural unrest from dispossessed populations and the state's concern with the 'separation and treatment of specific social groups constructed as “deviant” or “abnormal”' (p. 39-40).

Flag nationalism (State nationalism)

Flag nationalism is 'the attempt to develop a sense of nationhood and national belonging on the basis of nothing more than residence in the same state’s territory' (p. 41).