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State Power (state + power)
Selected AbstractsCentral State Power and its Limits in Bulpitt's Territory and PowerGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 3 2010Peter John This article assesses Bulpitt's treatment of the centre or central state. It begins by reviewing Bulpitt's argument that the UK centre elite developed a detached style of territorial management and recognized the limits to the state's power. The argument is that the elite at the centre sought to avoid the costs of intervention in the periphery so it could retain its autonomy over decisions affecting the economy and international affairs. The article then assesses Bulpitt's claims against extant evidence from the study of UK politics. It concludes that, in spite of Bulpitt's failure to appreciate the interest of the centre in the detail of local administration, the account holds up surprisingly well and could be adopted as a comparative framework for analysing how central elites seek to keep their grip on power by managing territorial politics successfully. [source] The German Democratic Republic: State Power and Everyday LifeHISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2007Gregory Witkowski Scholars continue to debate the relationship of state and society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) over fifteen years after the demise of that communist state. After briefly tracing the western historiography during the Cold War, this article concentrates its analysis on conceptual frameworks employed after the fall of the East German regime. Historians who emphasize the totalitarian power of the state argue that no independent society existed as the regime played an important role in all sectors of society, while those who focus on everyday life declare there was more individual agency in the former GDR. I argue that a more useful paradigm than state and society may be a breakdown between center and periphery as at the local level, state representatives often had more in common with their neighbors than with leaders in Berlin. [source] Exploring "Illegal" and "Irregular" Migrants' Lived Experiences of Law and State PowerINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 3 2007Sarah S. Willen First page of article [source] Toward a Critical Phenomenology of "Illegality": State Power, Criminalization, and Abjectivity among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, IsraelINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 3 2007Sarah S. Willen ABSTRACT Given the vast scope and magnitude of the phenomenon of so-called "illegal" migration in the present historical moment, this article contends that phenomenologically engaged ethnography has a crucial role to play in sensitizing not only anthropologists, but also policymakers, politicians, and broader publics to the complicated, often anxiety-ridden and frightening realities associated with "the condition of migrant illegality," both of specific host society settings and comparatively across the globe. In theoretical terms, the article constitutes a preliminary attempt to link pressing questions in the fields of legal anthropology and anthropology of transnational migration, on one hand, with recent work by phenomenologically oriented scholars interested in the anthropology of experience, on the other. The article calls upon ethnographers of undocumented transnational migration to bridge these areas of scholarship by applying what can helpfully be characterized as a "critical phenomenological" approach to the study of migrant "illegality" (Willen, 2006; see also Desjarlais, 2003). This critical phenomenological approach involves a three-dimensional model of illegality: first, as a form of juridical status; second, as a sociopolitical condition; and third, as a mode of being-in-the-world. In developing this model, the article draws upon 26 non-consecutive months of ethnographic field research conducted within the communities of undocumented West African (Nigerian and Ghanaian) and Filipino migrants in Tel Aviv, Israel, between 2000 and 2004. During the first part of this period, "illegal" migrants in Israel were generally treated as benign, excluded "Others." Beginning in mid-2002, however, a resource-intensive, government-sponsored campaign of mass arrest and deportation reconfigured the condition of migrant "illegality" in Israel and, in effect, transformed these benign "Others" into wanted criminals. By analyzing this transformation the article highlights the profound significance of examining not only the judicial and sociopolitical dimensions of what it means to be "illegal" but also its impact on migrants' modes of being-in-the-world. [source] Campaigning Against Government in the Old Dominion: State Taxation, State Power, and the Virginia 1997 Gubernatorial ElectionPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 3 2002Stephen J. Farnsworth James S. Gilmore III (R) credited his election in 1997 as governor of Virginia to his attacks upon the size and taxation authority of state government, a twist on recent Republican attacks upon the size and taxation authority of the national government. Gilmore's plan to eliminate the personal property tax for nearly all cars and trucks was also seen as the key to his victory by independent analysts and by Virginia legislators. This quantitative analysis finds, however, that Gilmore's support was primarily the result of partisan orientations, evaluations of his character, the performance of the incumbent Republican gubernatorial administration, and background measures like the respondent's education and age. Variables that measured an individual's interest in smaller state government, his or her knowledge of which candidate proposed the car tax cut, and the importance he or she placed on tax issues did not achieve statistical significance. [source] THE FACE OF MONEY: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto IndonesiaCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2009KAREN STRASSLER ABSTRACT In the period of transition following Suharto's resignation as president of Indonesia in 1998, the image of the 50,000Rp bill bearing his face became a visual shorthand for the corruption and abuse of power that had characterized his regime. Accessible, decentralized consumer technologies enabled people to alter money's appearance, transforming it from a fetish of the state into a malleable surface available for popular reinscription. As the medium of money was "remediated",absorbed into other media, refashioned, and circulated along new pathways,it became a means by which people engaged questions of state power, national integrity, political authenticity, and economic relations opened up by the crisis of Reformasi (Reform). The essay argues that remediations of public forms play a crucial role in times of political transition by enabling people to materialize alternative visions of political authority and authenticity. Moreover, remediated forms have become a characteristic modality of political communication in the post-Suharto period under conditions of democratization and an increasingly diversified media ecology. [source] Longing for the Kollektiv: Gender, Power, and Residential Schools in Central SiberiaCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2005Alexia Bloch Interpretations of post-Soviet subjectivities have tended to emphasize the ways in which subjects experience these with a sense of liberation from a monolithic socialist state; however, local responses to post-Soviet forms of power have varied widely. In the case of indigenous Siberians in the 1990s, an older generation of Evenk women expressed positive feelings about their experience as students in the Soviet-era residential schools that continue to shape their subjectivity in the post-Soviet present. Evenk subjectivities, as with those of other indigenous Siberians, have been significantly formed through the institution of the residential school and, by extension, through a range of interactions with state power as it has been locally remade and interpreted in the 1990s. In this article, I explore the widespread nostalgia associated with the residential school. Drawing on the narratives of elderly Evenk women, I argue that such expressions of Evenk nostalgia for the socialist era are a form of critique of the neoliberal logics emerging in Russia today. In this respect, Evenk women's accounts allow us to explore negotiations of power in a post-Soviet era and to examine how ideologies shape conceptions of self and the social order more broadly. [source] A Heterotopian Analysis of Maritime Refugee IncidentsINTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Michele Budz Given the persistent significance of states in the determination of legal identities of people on the move, a consideration of the construction of people as legal (or illegal) migrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers must also recognize that these determinations take place in conjunction with the simultaneous processes through which spaces such as sovereign states or ships carrying asylum-seekers are constructed. A heterotopian analysis of the Tampa and the SIEVX of 2001 allows for a consideration of the ways in which notions of sovereignty, territory and governmentality work to stabilize ambiguous situations produced by the conflictual discourses of human rights and state power. [source] The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian MetropolisINTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008Loïc Wacquant This article examines the workings and effects of the penalization of poverty in urban Brazil at century's turn to uncover the deep logic of punitive containment as state strategy for the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of triumphant neoliberalism. It shows how ramifying criminal violence (fed by extreme inequality and mass poverty), class and color discrimination in judicial processing, unchecked police brutality, and the catastrophic condition and chaotic operation of the carceral system combine to make the aggressive deployment of the penal apparatus in Brazil a surefire recipe for further disorder and disrespect for the law at the bottom of the urban hierarchy and steers the country into an institutional impasse. The policy of punitive containment pursued by political elites as a complement to the deregulation of the economy in the 1990s leads from the penalization to the militarization of urban marginality, under which residents of the declining favelas are treated as virtual enemies of the nation, tenuous trust in public institutions is undermined, and the spiral of violence accelerated. Brazil thus serves as a historical revelator of the full consequences of the penal disposal of the human detritus of a society swamped by social and physical insecurity. Drawing parallels between penal activity in the Brazilian and the U.S. metropolis further reveals that the neighborhoods of urban relegation wherein the marginal and stigmatized fractions of the postindustrial working class concentrate are the prime targets and proving ground upon which the neoliberal penal state is concretely being assembled, tried, and tested. Their study is therefore of urgent interest to analysts of international politics and state power at the dawn of the twenty-first century. [source] Political Consequences of the New InequalityINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2001Craig N. Murphy This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities. [source] ,Europeanizing' Civil Society: NGOs as Agents of Political SocializationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 4 2001Alex Warleigh As a strategy for tackling the ,democratic deficit', attention is increasingly shifting towards the ,Europeanization' of civil society, the latter being traditionally viewed as a means both to limit state power and to promote intra-citizenry solidarity. However, this attempted change requires in turn actors who are both able and willing to act as agents of political socialization in the context of EU policy-making. This article examines the emphasis placed by both EU actors and the current academic literature on NGOs as such agents. Drawing on an analysis of similar claims made in development policy, I isolate the main indicators of NGOs' ability to foster the Europeanization of civil society via political socialization and put forward seven key tests of their ability to carry out this function in the EU context. These are then evaluated against the results of original empirical investigations. I argue that NGOs are currently unsuited to the task of Europeanizing civil society thanks to their inability to promote the political socialization of their supporters. As a consequence that task requires EU-level institutional reform informed by iterated public dialogue, as well as change in the working practices of NGOs. [source] "The Whole Extent of the Evil": Origin of Crime Statistics in the United States, 1880,1930JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008SARAN GHATAK Due to the federal nature of the polity and decentralization of state power, the historical process of "governmentalization" of the state in the US differed markedly from other Western European nations. The path to the establishment of a national archive of crime statistics in the US was especially tortuous, and its trajectory was shaped by strategic alliances as well as conflicts between various institutional actors involved in the process. [source] The Dual State: The Unruly "Subordinate", Caste, Community And Civil Service Recruitment In North India, 1930,1955JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1-2 2007WILLIAM GOULD It argues that social relationships between different cadres of the revenue and police services effectively created a bureaucratic space in which citizens' approaches to the state recreated forms of ambiguity in the reach and authority of state power. In this sense, it provides a deeper historical basis for anthropological and sociological work on the nature of the "fuzzy" everyday state in postcolonial India. But it develops this literature further, arguing that important structural changes over independence in 1947, also transformed the ways in which caste and community lobby groups represented their corporate interests through bureaucratic recruitment. These lobby groups, as a result of disjunctions in state power and discourses, between centre, province and locality, were often able to subvert systems of caste and community reservation. In the process, their actions emphasized the inability of the state at central and provincial levels to adjust to local political identities that depended on hybridity. [source] Assembling the "Empire of Morality": State Building Strategies in Catholic Ecuador, 1861,1875JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2001Derek Williams This article studies the efforts of the Ecuadorian government between 1861 and 1875 to construct a "truly catholic nation". It examines the implementation and engagement of centralized initiatives of morality and religiosity, and reflects on its implications for the repositioning of state-society boundaries. Specifically, it considers the government's efforts after 1869 to centrally coordinate the institutions of municipal government and Church, and to redeploy them for national moralizing ends. It assesses the substantial achievements and limits of this model for strengthening state power and for disseminating "national" meanings of citizenship and progress. [source] The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in EcuadorLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2007Leon Zamosc ABSTRACT This article examines the implications of the Ecuadorian Indian movement for democratic politics. During the 1990s, the movement successfully fostered indigenous and popular participation in public life, influenced government policies, and became a contender in power struggles. But in the institutional domain, the participatory breakthrough had mixed effects. While the movement fulfilled functions of interest representation and control of state power, its involvement in a coup attempt demonstrated that its political socialization had not nurtured a sense of commitment to democracy. The evidence is discussed by reference to the proposition that civil society actors may or may not contribute to democracy. The article argues that the study of the democratic spinoffs of civil activism requires a context-specific approach that considers the particularistic orientations of civil associations and pays attention to their definition of means and ends, the institutional responses evoked by their initiatives, and the unintended consequences of their actions. [source] Beyond Therapy: Problem-Solving Courts and the Deliberative Democratic StateLAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 4 2008Rekha Mirchandani Problem-solving courts (drug courts, community courts, domestic violence courts, and mental health courts), unlike traditional courts, attempt to get at the root of the individual and social problems that motivate criminal behavior. Theoretical understandings of problem-solving courts are mostly Foucauldian; proponents argue that these new institutions employ therapeutic techniques that encourage individuals to self-engineer in ways that subtly increase state power. The Foucauldian approach captures only some elements of problem-solving courts and does not fully theorize the revolution in justice that these courts present. Problem-solving courts, domestic violence courts in particular, orient not just around individual change but also around social change and cultural transformation. Combining the Foucauldian idea of a therapeutic state (as developed by James Nolan) with an understanding of the deliberative democratic mechanisms of larger-scale structural transformation (found in Habermas and others) leads to a more balanced and empirically open orientation to the actual motivations, goals, and achievements of problem-solving courts. [source] Judicial Activism in Perilous Times: The Turkish CaseLAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 2 2009Murat Tezcür Under what circumstances do courts act in ways that challenge the political hegemony of the military in countries with weak democratic institutions? This article addresses this question by focusing on a critical case of judicial activism in Turkey. It argues that lower courts unexpectedly can be centers of judicial activism that contributes to expansion of civil liberties and restrictions on arbitrary state power when the high judiciary supports the political status quo. This is because lower courts provide greater access to legal mobilization pursued by civil society actors. At the same time, judicial activism in lower courts is sustainable only when political power is distributed among elites with conflicting interests, and the civilian government offers support and protection to activist members of the judiciary. [source] Sovereigns and citizens in close encounter: Airport anthropology and customs regimes in neoliberal GhanaAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 4 2008BRENDA CHALFIN ABSTRACT Through the examination of encounters between Customs officers and travelers at Ghana's international airport, I pose a series of arguments regarding sovereignty and citizenship within a developing state deeply enmeshed in processes of liberalization. Supporting the contention that transnational flows and supranational interventions restructure rather than undermine state power, the Ghanaian case reveals neoliberal conditions to facilitate the expansion of administrative authorities oriented to the cross-border mobility of persons, capital, and commodities. Such bureaucratic realms emerge, in turn, as key arenas for an expression of state sovereignty that is not founded on social alienation and absolute distinctions between rulers and ruled. Because of the multiplicity and ambiguity of regulatory orders at play, sovereignty here hinges on intimacy, emotion, and identification as much as on force and legal sanction. [sovereignty, citizenship, aviation, customs regimes, transnationalism, neoliberalism, travel, affect] [source] Hungarian Nonviolent Resistance against Austria and Its Place in the History of NonviolencePEACE & CHANGE, Issue 4 2007Tamás Csapody The Hungarian nonviolent resistance campaign against the Austrian absolutist rule in the 1850s and 1860s has been credited with being the "first mass or corporate form of non-violent resistance," yet it has received little scholarly attention in the nonviolence literature. In its usual portrayal, the movement is epitomized as a forerunner of Gandhi's later mass satyagraha campaigns, and its leader Ferenc Deák as a prototype Mahatma. In reality, the campaign was far more complex and less organized. However, it did demonstrate that even such campaigns can lead to the achievement of the aimed for goals when outside events and deeper internal economic and social drivers come together to unite the oppressed and weaken the position of the oppressor. As recent major studies of nonviolent struggle have shown, the Hungarian example illustrates what can be achieved when the oppressed withdraw their consent to be ruled and undermine state power by targeting areas of particular vulnerability of their oppressor. [source] The Idea of Deliberative Democracy.RATIO JURIS, Issue 4 2001A Critical Appraisal The deliberative conception of politics seems to be necessary for the legitimation of state power through democratic will-formation and decision-making. However, the author maintains that a complex theory of democracy cannot merely consist in procedural prerequisites for organizing the concomitant institutional settings. In particular, such a theory must comprise some substantive presuppositions, such as social and economic rights, in order to diminish existing material inequalities, especially those connected with social exploitation and domination. The author argues that a contemporary theory of democracy should reflect on the autonomization of mechanisms of egoistic action challenging not only the democratic political order, but also the very reproduction preconditions of societies all over the world. In this perspective, the model of associative democracy, which is suggested nowadays as a sort of substantive correlative to the institutional proceduralism, could not significantly rejuvenate the traditional representative democracy. Instead, democracy could only be given a fresh impulse if democratic deliberation penetrates the currently forbidden field of capitalist production and social exploitation, the locus where social inequality and effective unfreedom are endlessly reproduced. [source] The Dalai Lamas and State Power1RELIGION COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2007Derek F. Maher This article explores the evolving political standing of members of the Dalai Lama incarnation lineage. I survey the history of Tibet since the time of Tsong kha pa, the original inspiration for the dGe lugs School, showing how each Dalai Lama established his own position with an ever evolving set of external circumstances framed by rival schools, patrons, Mongolian khans, Chinese emperors, the nobility, the powerful monasteries, and their own regents. I conclude that there is no single model that captures the nature of the relationship between the Dalai Lamas and state power. [source] From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual HealingTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2003Michael Humphrey The victim has been put at the centre of states' post-atrocity strategies to reform governance, rehabilitate state authority and promote reconciliation. This paper explores the role of the victim in the truth commissions and trials aimed at reconciliation and justice and their experiences of the outcomes. The successor state's focus on recovering victims after mass atrocity ritually inverts the former regime's project of producing them. In both truth commissions and trials the state seeks to manipulate the ,spectacle' of the victim's pain and suffering to publicly project the power of the state for different ends. Whereas the repressive state seeks to deepen the effects of violence as a strategy of rule, the successor state seeks to reverse the social and political effects of violence. These strategies of transitional justice have sought to reverse the effects of exclusion, to reverse the direction of state power from producing victims towards redeeming victims, from injuring to healing. Because of the problems of mass criminality and widespread impunity, truth commissions have become widely adopted in preference to trials as a bureaucratic response to bureaucratic murder. They set about producing a ,democratising truth' through a process of public inquiry located outside the state in the people. On the whole, the process, the public testimony and the witnessing has been better received than the product, the reports and the reparations. By contrast, trials seek to produce a societal consensus based on the recovery of the law. But in both cases the victim is redeemed through the individualising discourse of law or the polarising logic of trials which establishes the guilty and innocent. The truth of atrocity is found in affirming gross human rights abuses in victims, in transacted violence rather than the deeper structures of violence. Thus, victimhood is built on a universalising human rights discourse which overly individualises the origins of atrocity. [source] Between Pinochet and Kropotkin: state terror, human rights and the geographersTHE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 3 2001John Wiley Lecture The lecture develops a civil perspective on states engaged in systematic but arbitrary armed violence against their home populations: what the Nürnberg Tribunal called ,government by terror. Civilians, or most of them, appear uniquely vulnerable to such violence and the gross violations of human rights accompanying it. Moreover, this, rather than wars as usually understood, involved the largest uses of armed force in the twentieth century. It was the main cause of violent death of civilians. Two geographical concerns are addressed: the ,geographic' nature of such violence, and its implications for the thought and practice of geographers. They are explored especially through the work of two geographers whose lives bracket the past ,century of violence, Peter Kropotkin and Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile fully illustrates the scope of state terror. Geographies of coercion are seen in the system of political prisons and torture, the making of a society and landscapes of fear, and the unmaking of civil life. The atrocities also violated Chile's former commitment to human rights initiatives. Pinochet's geographical work, especially the geopolitics, is in accord with, or offers no counter to, the repressive, authoritarian regime he headed, Kropotkin's descriptions of imperial Russia show many parallels to the Chilean case, and the kind of repressive state power that he rejected to dedicate his life to its vulnerable and innocent victims. Almost alone among geographers he developed a coherent, influential vision of violence, social justice and interpersonal ethics, based on geographical investigations as well as an anarchist perspective. These two may also seem to represent conceptual and lived extremes - respectively, an extreme deployment of state violence, and a total rejection of the state because of the facts and potential of violent repression. Unfortunately, enquiries into violence and the state, let alone terrorist states, are virtually absent from contemporary geographical scholarship. Its emergence as an essentially ,civil field' has reinforced this - when it should have had the opposite effect. In part this involves a failure to temper our long, and less-than-critical, service to the state in all areas, and a continuing governmental mind-set. It is suggested that the absence of critical reflection on the contested relations of civil society and the state, especially as they involve state violence, undermines the intellectual value and ethical standards of our work. [source] A Suicidal Woman, Roaming Pigs and a Noisy Trampolinist: Refining the ASBO's Definition of ,Anti-Social Behaviour'THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 2 2006Stuart Macdonald This article discusses the definition of anti-social behaviour employed by section 1(1)(a) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 for the purposes of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order. It argues that, if the ASBO is to remain at the forefront of the Government's campaign against anti-social behaviour, this section should be amended. The article begins by outlining the claimed benefits of, and critics' concerns about, the definition, arguing that the difference of opinion stems from different views of state power. It then argues that the ASBO has been employed for social control, often at the expense of more constructive forms of intervention, and that this has shown New Labour's willingness to vest enforcement agencies with the wide discretion conferred by section 1(1)(a) to have been misplaced. Finally, it proposes a refined version of section 1(1), which focuses the Order on the cases for which it was purportedly designed whilst maintaining any benefits of the broad definitional approach currently taken in section 1(1)(a). [source] National Security, Terrorism and Constitutional BalanceTHE POLITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2004Laurence Lustgarten ABSTRACT The 'war on terrorism' engages all the institutions of the state. A constitutional structure devoted to protection of liberty must place a paramount value on separation of powers, and a parliamentary democratic constitution should ensure that the ultimate locus of responsibility rests in the legislature, the only branch which has a direct connection to the citizens. However, in an ironic reversal of practice that prevailed before the coming of mass democracy, Parliament in the UK since the early twentieth century has largely accepted a supine role compared to the executive in matters of 'national security'. The judiciary, despite the enactment of legally enforceable human rights, has also manifestly failed to exercise its proper function of curbing abuses of state power. The result is an over-mighty executive, able to draw upon the deference of other branches of government in prosecuting the 'war on terrorism' on the battlefield and in the statute book, which has trampled on individual rights with virtually no check or counte-balance. Some principles by which the balance might be restored are suggested. [source] Dynamic Display, Propaganda, and the Reinforcement of Provincial Power in the Inca EmpireARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Issue 1 2004Dennis 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] Central State Power and its Limits in Bulpitt's Territory and PowerGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 3 2010Peter John This article assesses Bulpitt's treatment of the centre or central state. It begins by reviewing Bulpitt's argument that the UK centre elite developed a detached style of territorial management and recognized the limits to the state's power. The argument is that the elite at the centre sought to avoid the costs of intervention in the periphery so it could retain its autonomy over decisions affecting the economy and international affairs. The article then assesses Bulpitt's claims against extant evidence from the study of UK politics. It concludes that, in spite of Bulpitt's failure to appreciate the interest of the centre in the detail of local administration, the account holds up surprisingly well and could be adopted as a comparative framework for analysing how central elites seek to keep their grip on power by managing territorial politics successfully. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||