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State's Ability (state + ability)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

Emotional Bureaucracies: Emotions Civil Servants, and Immigrants in the Swedish Welfare State

ETHOS, Issue 3 2002
Mark Graham
This article examines how Swedish emotional expression is both reflected in and helps to reproduce the ideology of the welfare state. A Swedish ideal of emotional compatibility and continuity between welfare bureaucracies and their clients has been challenged in the wake of refugee immigration. The resulting multicultural society is understood by civil servants to translate into an emotional complexity that has consequences for the levels of emotion in meetings with refugee clients, emotional barriers between staff and clients, emotional reciprocity, and the gendering and mobilization of emotion in bureaucratic encounters. The presence of refugee immigrants is shown to have consequences for the welfare state's ability to ensure emotional reproduction in society. How Swedish civil servants respond to refugee clients provides insights into the emotional dimension of bureaucracies in multicultural welfare states and bureaucratic work more generally. [source]

International rivers and national security: The Euphrates, Ganges,Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris, and Yarmouk rivers1

NATURAL RESOURCES FORUM, Issue 4 2008
Neda A. Zawahri
Abstract To understand a state's incentives to invest in conflict or cooperation over their international rivers, this paper argues that it is necessary to appreciate the relationships a river can create and the national security threat riparians may confront. Rivers impose interdependent and vulnerable relationships, which can compromise a state's ability to respond effectively to floods and droughts, meet its domestic food and energy needs, dredge the river, maintain its drainage systems, and allocate its domestic water budget. The inability to accomplish these tasks can contribute to social, economic, and political losses that may threaten a state's territorial integrity. Regardless of whether a state is upstream or downstream, from these relationships it acquires leverage to manipulate the interdependence and vulnerability to inflict losses on its riparian neighbour. This argument challenges several assumptions within the existing literature, including the belief that a shortage of freshwater is the initial force producing a national security threat and that an upstream,downstream river bequeaths all advantages on the upstream state and leaves the downstream state purely dependent. As the paper shows, riparians confront a more complex relationship than captured by the existing literature. [source]

Dynamic Display, Propaganda, and the Reinforcement of Provincial Power in the Inca Empire

ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Issue 1 2004
Dennis Ogburn
A primary objective of the Inca state and other early empires was to maintain control over the inhabitants of conquered territories. In addition to overt tactics such as military force, resettlement, alliance formation, and cultural and economic integration, I suggest that many other activities of the Inca state also served to reinforce state power in the provinces. This was achieved by establishing and maintaining a "psychology of submission" in subject peoples through frequent reminders of imperial power, that is, advertising state control over labor. Display in this form was a major implicit element in various activities of the empire, such as the movement of armies, the transport of building stones from Cuzco to Ecuador, and the construction of imperial temples and palaces. These activities served as potent public demonstrations of the state's ability to mobilize large armies and control enormous amounts of labor. Propaganda also played a major role in maintaining the psychology of submission by disseminating information about those activities having an element of display and about other accomplishments of the state to people who did not witness them firsthand. Considered in light of these mechanisms of display and propaganda, many of the apparently wasteful activities of the Inca state can be understood as deliberate and integral to overall imperial strategies for maintaining control in the provinces. [source]

Challenging the developmental state: Nature conservation in Singapore

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 2 2007
Harvey Neo
Abstract: Nature conservation efforts are often reactive to encroaching development plans and systematic conservation planning that is integral with development is not only uncommon, but is often fraught with difficulties even where it is actually attempted. Such obstacles to conservation are especially apparent in developmental states where state legitimacy is largely derived from the state's ability to develop the country. Among other things, developmental states place a premium on physical and economic development. This paper critiques, through the standpoint of nature conservation, the inadequate conceptualisation of ,development' in the developmental state thesis. Specifically, this paper argues that the seemingly value-free (but ultimately economically based) underpinnings of development goals pushed by the developmental state needs to be tempered with a broader concern for the ethics of development. To that end, I draw on two case studies of nature conservation tussles in Singapore to show how alternative extra-economic visions of development have been articulated, notwithstanding the developmental state's monopoly on the discourse (and practice) of progress and development. The case studies, set in the heady economic growth of the early 1990s, will critique two related aspects of the developmental state: its ,amoral' economistic conception of development and its use of growth and materialism as legitimacy. [source]