Lecture 2.docx

Lecture 2 – January 16 2013 Lecture Outline 1. What is ‘the state’ (in theory)? 2. What has ‘the state’ been (in practice), especially throughout much of the Global South? 3. What has state formation looked like in the Global South? 4. What is clientelism and why has it been so prevalent? The coming Anarchy? - An article that was published and very popular • Growing numbers of people in poverty – even as growth increases… • Flattening age pyramids and rising rates of unemployment and unemployed youth… - Much of the population is under 25; strain in economy to produce jobs • Deteriorating social and environmental conditions in many areas of the Global South… • Rising power of the transnational informal economy – evading state controls… • Emergence of failed states in some parts of the Global South…. Measures Used by the FSI ( failed state index) - What is looked at to determine if a state has failed overall a) Social = demographic pressures, refugee flows, presence of vengeance seeking groups, internal displacement b) Economic = uneven economic development, sharp economic decline c) Political = delegitimization/criminalization of the state, deterioration of public services, arbitrary application of rule of law, rising power of private security provision, factionalization of elite political class, increasing penetration of external actors… What is an ‘ideal type state?’ • The modern state as a relatively new phenomenon in global affairs… • States also vary quite significantly throughout the world – they all have distinct histories… • Emerged in modern Europe as a result of a long, drawn-out, violently competitive process… State formation in Europe • Europe initially typified by high degrees of social and political fragmentation… • Political units competed violently with each other… • Winners began to accumulate power, resources, and territory – which created a demand for more… • Eventually, these growing political entities needed to regularize the manner in which they ruled over their populations – moving from the predatory extraction of resources to taxation by consent… • This is why Charles Tilly argues that, historically “war made the state”!!! - Modern states are created by violent wars - Africa had more states before (smaller) than present days - Africans had no say in how states were changed. Europe changed it. State formation was probably caused by violent ways before. What is the ideal type state? • States as being distinct from regimes, and governments… • States as having a monopoly over the use of violence… • States as having control over a defined territory and people… • States as having a centralized set of ‘rule-bound’ institutions (extraction, regulation, distribution, enforcement)… • States as being widely accepted/legitimate (Weber and the ‘rational-legal’ order)… • States as sovereign…. - Control whats going in borders, independent from other states, State regimes and governments 1. States – basic institutions of a political system; indicates the ‘raw power’ or the ‘infrastructural power’ of the state; a state’s ‘hardware’… 2. Regimes – indicates how this ‘raw power’ is organized around a set of fundamental rules; those rules found are ideally formal – found within constitutions and bills of rights; the ‘software’ of the state… 3. Governments – indicates how power is used.. - Canada’s basic institutions are: judiciary and beaucracy; Canadian has a democratic, constitutional monarchy; and a parliamentary democracy ( our regime) the rules are found in charter of rights and freedom, constitution, rules passed from the parliament; elected officials are our government, organized by political parties States vary tremendously in form and capacity • Different origins (organic/imposed)…. • Different regimes (authoritarian/democratic)… • Different ways of distributing power (centralized/decentralized)… • Different forms and degrees of legitimacy (rational-legal/charismatic/nationalist)… • Different degrees of autonomy – how separate is the state from society as a whole… • Different capacities – levels of centralized ‘infrastructural power’… Features of weak states in global south 1. States as central to questions of power. 2. Sovereign states as “fictions” (weak states, quasi-states, collapsed states)… 3. States as “overdeveloped”… 4. States as having “blurred” rules and lines of authority… 5. States as being “captured” by particular groups – with weak institutionalzied links to society… 6. States as paradoxically ‘strong’ and weak’… States as central question of power How central is the state to our lives in Canada? Does politics attract the best people? In which sector do you think the best jobs are? State as central.. • Power often leads to wealth, not visa versa… • Great social dependence on access to state resources… • State as crucial intermediary between society and the global arena – huge opportunities for ‘rent-seeking’… • Stakes are huge – politics as a ‘zero-sum’ game… • Hence, social actors representing private interests seek to ‘penetrate’ and ‘capture’ the public resources of the state… • In societies characterized by scarcity, this is often even more so the case…. • Clapham: “the quest for state power takes on a pathological dimension” – especially in weak that are more vulnerable to the penetration of private networks and interest group… State as a “fiction” • Sovereignty – all states as being legally equal within the UN system. Yet… • Wide disparities between legal sovereignty and reality. There are clearly widely different ‘degrees of stateness’… • How many states have a monopoly over the use of violence….? • How many states have control over a defined territory…” • Spawned notion of ‘quasi-states’… State as over developed • Institutions of control more developed than institutions of social/political representation – Clapham refers to “the structure of control”… • Powerful militaries, police forces, security forces, p