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Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the concepts, historical trajectories, theoretical debates, and analytical frameworks of social movements, sovereignty, and state formation in world politics.

Social Movements (Flacks's Conceptualization)

Collective undertakings of varying duration and degree of organization that are directed toward systemic social and political change.

Extra-Institutional Politics

Political actions, struggles, and modes of engagement that occur outside the boundaries and formal procedures of authoritative state institutions.

Sovereignty as a Technology of Power

The strategic deployment of territorial authority by governments to legitimize specific state-mediated projects, suppress dissent, and ward off external interference through the slippage between 'the people', 'the state', and 'the government'.

Territorialising Political Authority

The practice of staking and maintaining a sovereignty claim over a bounded physical space, the population residing within it, and all flows entering and exiting that territory.

Relational Theory of the State (Jessop and Poulantzas)

The conceptualization of the state neither as a unitary actor nor a passive instrument, but as a complex social relation whose capacities are constantly reconstituted through ongoing conflicts among competing social forces.

Normative and Formal Approaches (West)

An analytical perspective in social movement studies that applies general empirical concepts to analyze movements as a distinct category of political action, emphasizing common organizational patterns and repertoires across cases.

Historical and Substantive Approaches (West)

An analytical perspective in social movement studies that employs an embedded analysis to examine the specific characteristics, substantive goals, ideologies, and contextual environments of particular movements.

Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freeman)

A classic theoretical critique of horizontal organization asserting that the absence of formal structures in social movements often masks informal, unaccountable, and unacknowledged hierarchies.