The State

Critique of the State: Abrams (1988)

-lack of consensus on what a state is, taken for granted

-Marxist thinking: state at once an illusion and an ‘organ superimposed on society’

-recognition that state is ideological in nature and yet failure to fully move away from the idea of a real state structure

-political institutions assumed to perform the function of a state

What is the state? (Abrams 1988)

-actually studying two distinct things: state-systems and state-ideas

-state-systems: nexus of practice and institutional structure centered in government

-state-idea:social-ideological understandings of the state

Mystification of the state (Abrams 1988)

-state mystifies itself through the secrecy shrouding governmental institutions

-creates the assumption that there must be something really important that resists discovery hidden within them

-typically enacted through complicated bureaucracy

-serve to legitimize the state while protecting it through scrutiny as it is difficult to critique that which is not fully known

NREGA (Mathur 2017)

-NREGA of 2005 which promised jobs on public works schemes to rural individuals

-before the act public work schemes often part of Contractor Raj in which money given to a village head person to do a project

-headperson took sizable cut to distribute amongst government officials then used the rest to hire a private contractor

-contractor then took large cut, used cheap materials and exploitable migrant labor to do project

“Eating of Money” (Mathur 2017)

-concept in India of “eating” or “leaking” of money to describe corruption

-NREGA instituted policies that require official muster rolls at jobs sites, job cards carried by employees

-dual record that auditors could compare, reducing potential for corruption

-in reality led to drastic reduction in public works

Paper Truths (Mathur 2017)

-state official documents are both how the state implements its function and how it monitors such projects

-creates circular system that affirms its own legitimacy, regardless of the actual outcomes of such projects

Foucault’s (1991) “conduct of conduct”

primary concern of governmentality the ‘conduct of conduct’, the many ways in which social and individual behavior’s is directed and policed

MCC’s Market of protection (Shah 2006)

-Maoist Communist Center: extreme left wing armed guerrilla movement in Jharkhand, India

establishes its influence through approaching rural elites, playing a role in arbitrating village disputes, then if unsuccessful, through more coercive means

-appeal of involvement with the MCC double-edged– one of protection as the MCC had access to power, weaponry, and even state resources, but also through fear of MCC retalitation

-in this way promises protection in exchange for power in a way typical of government

World Bank in Indonesia (Murray Li 2005)

-Spent 1 billion in loan funds on development in Indonesia, mostly focusing on village infrastructure like roads, bridges, and irrigation

-in order to access funds villagers must conform to a set of prescribed practices imposed by the World Bank designed to prevent corruption, collusion, and waste

World Bank as a state (Murray Li 2005)

-World Bank and its “expert planners” hold power over conduct of its beneficiaries in a way similar to states

-existence of multiple governmentalities in which the state is only one actor

Single Mothers and the British Benefit System (Koch 2018)

-citizen-state relation gendered even where policies claim to be gender neutral: “the state has just replaced the man”

-’single mother’ constructed as anti-mother and anti-citizens who bear children in order to acquire access to public resources and services

-in order to qualify for benefits opened up their lives to state’s minute scrutiny to prove their ‘need’ to the agents of the state, everyday ‘performance of being poor’

-’bedroom tax’: a colloquial name for a policy that imposes penalties on social housing tenants occupying properties deemed too large for their needs

-penalized for living with others/lose benefits, have to live by rules that prioritize individual claimants over shared households

The Art of Not Being Governed (Scott 2009)

-defines upland border area of Zomia as one of the world’s longest standing and largest refuges of populations who live in the shadow of states but who have not yet been fully incorporated

-initially, entire population of mainlaind SE Asia Zomians in the sense of not being the subjects of the state

-those on the plains who wanted to evade state moved to hills: Zomia effect of state-making

-studying Zomia a global history of populations trying to avoid the state

Critique of Scott (2009) by Brass (2012)

-Scott devises hill=”good”, valley=”bad” paradigm

-part of resurgent populist historiography that has become academically entrenched over the past three decades

-regards development, progress and modernisation as three historical evils

-bases his account on publications by the Karen Human Rights Group ignores that in 1940s fighting for separate ethnically specific Karen state, not “state-repelling”

-unclear about his timeline, extent to which it still exists

-acknowledges that state/unfreedom vs. non-state/free dichotomy does not hold which breaks down his central argument

Afghan state as a “Useful Fiction” (Coburn 2011)

-ethnography of Istalif after the fall of the Taliban

-government officials had severely limited powers yet emphasized state as a rational, bounded entity

-performance of state in spatial forms of separation of government building, government employees wore hats, contributed to state-society divide

-questions of sovereignty and power had the potential to raise real conflict so instead left unanswered

-allowed political actors to take advantage of the masterly inactivity that masked true tensions in area, contributed to continued flow of aid

The British welfare state (Koch 2018)

-prior to emergence of post-war welfare state social security administered through disparate measures

-post-war social security to be a central tenet of a paternalistic welfare state in which worker-citizens paid contributions in return for benefits

-original post-war welfare system set up on the basis of the male worker-citizen, most benefits claimed by men

-however old system of Poor Law provisions (collected taxes for support of ‘impotent poor’) never fully abolished, system of means-tested benefits labeled national assistance continued for those unable to pay into national insurance fund

-logic of means tested assistance makes entitlement to benefits contingent on proof of need

-needy individual rather than working household unit imagined to be proper object of welfare