Mary
Should we try to unite these different interpretations of state? Is this useful? Should we come away viewing the state as almost indefinable--which may be insightful in itself.
Dannah
In light of these diverse readings, can we make an inventory of useful approaches to studying the state?
Nathalie
So if everything we read is giving us theoretical conceptions or tools to be able to study the "state," how do deploy these tools actually? First, how are all these concepts the same or different, and second,how do we use them in modern ethnography, not just only as background on who has written what about the state, but as actual theory drivers, and what happens of we do ?
Josh
We have read many reasons why the "state" can be a misleading analytical tool, but can we still make this concept useful?
Dannah
How can we avoid falling into the trap (if it is a trap, which I think it is) of seeing the state everywhere?
Lucas
What is a failed state? To whom it failed? Who gets to tell the difference between success and failure?
Mary
I would be interested in discussing further how entities that are not typically considered of the state function in state-like, or actual stately, ways (like perhaps NGOs). I would be interested in interrogating whether this is a new phenomenon, or whether this was occurring all along.
Cathy
Ferguson makes a compelling argument. What is the discourse on development today, and if they are a mask for something else, why are development projects the model in which we continue to try to "help" others?
Josh
Scott suggests that models and statistics have become more real in institutional decision-making than any on-the-ground reality, how much can improved models help on-the-ground people?
Cathy
I'd like to discuss the economy and the (nation) state. Is there a separation? Is the intention of the state fueled by monetary needs?
Alison
Several authors (Rose & Brown, i.e.) discuss 'freedom.' I would like to open up a discussion of freedom touching on what freedom is, who gets freedom, is freedom somehow equated with truth, and/or why is it about the concept of freedom that people value? What is the opposite of freedom and what frightens people about it?
Grace
I am interested in discussing freedom as a construct--I wrote a question last week in reference to Rose's article, but I would like to look at "freedom" in a broader sense as well, both in its need to be regulated and its need to be deregulated. Is freedom truly imaginary?
Alison
One of the things I would like to do in class is to try to gain a basic understanding of how some of the previous articles relate or differ according to what the authors have done with Marx (Althusser & Foucault, i.e.) and perhaps to go further in talking about how these authors' perspectives on individuals, society, power, and the State differ and/or converge.
Lucas
Planning and reorganisation of social spaces is, according to Scot, a
method used by the state officials and administrators to exercise
direct rule via direct knowledge of the social context/environment.
Can the state exist in the context of coexistence of significant
social difference? Why such differences are considered illegible by
the state?
Grace
Mbembe discusses the postcolony as the "simulacral regime par excellence." Why is this more true for a postcolony than other states?
Lauren
Is the notion of "equality" as we discuss it in and of itself a masculine idea?
Dannah
Can we re-visit Wendy Brown's article? Maybe as a starting point: how would her analysis be different if the piece were titled "Finding the Woman in the State?"
Lauren
How different is the perceived significance of empowered minorities along gendered versus racial lines?
Grace
How would Hansen and Stepputat deal with the phenomenon of illegal workers who use false social security numbers and pay taxes to a state in which they are not citizens? How does this work into their view of migrants and illegal aliens as the "in-between" forms of life on whom sovereignty is performed?
Grace
Contrary to some theorists (Harvey maybe? not remembering who) who discuss the use of violence and protection of borders as some of the only remaining functions of a neoliberal state, Hansen and Stepputat suggest that the privatization of military and policing could be an attempt to strengthen areas in which the state was never very effective in the first place. Is the implication, then, that the state truly has no vital function left outside of the ideology that reproduces it?
Dannah
If "sovereignty" means holding a monopoly on legitimate force/violence within a territory, then how would the state assert its sovreignty if there were no occasion to use violence? In other words, does the state NEED criminals/enemies in order to assert its sovreignty, and therefore criminals/enemies are created? (I realize I'm edging toward conspiracy theory here).
Dannah
On re-reading this article, I'm struck by the fact that many U.S. citizens seem to know little and care less about the outsourcing of many important state/military functions to private companies (Halliburton is an example that comes to mind). If sovereignty, in classical political theory, resides in "the people," then why aren't the people more concerned when their supposed representatives consign the exercise of sovreignty to "the market"? Maybe we should be studying the anthropology of "the market", another diffuse and diverse fictional entity that has nevertheless real impact on people's lives. How might "the state" and "the market" be productively compared as concepts?
Lauren
I am wondering how this concept of violence maps onto violence in the sense used by Paul Farmer, structural violence, and if the two terms discuss something discretely different, or parts of the same sovereign mechanism. Structural violence strikes me as being more emblematic of the state in the elusive intangible manner we have been discussing, but does this distinction perhaps map onto Althusser’s theoretical analysis of repressive and ideological state apparatuses?
Lauren
If sovereignty, as is argued, is “fundamentally premised on the capacity and the will to decide on life and death (301),” yet sovereignty is simultaneously being described as less dependent on the nation-state model that controlled territories and bodies as on the empowerment of private companies, is the shift from a physical and spatial display of sovereignty to one of intangible capitalist and market forces a new kind of mask (not to necessarily bring us back to the complexity of “mask”…) for the violence inflicted on the lives of populations?
Alison
Is sovereignty only a performance? Is it inherently violent?
Alison
How far does sovereignty break down? The authors discuss various forms of sovereignty including "informal sovereignty," making the concept seem like there is a map to be filled in with many colors of varying hues representing various degrees of sovereignty. Are people, at some level, all within a sovereign body? Can we imagine a people to whom the idea of "sovereignty" does not apply?
Lolan
Why create a distinction or dualism between the physical body and the body of rights to which a citizen under the state is entitled when the very purpose of the body of rights is to preserve a citizen’s biological body? The body of rights serves as the basis for a fiduciary relationship between the individual and the state and in modern states the “sovereign” or leader of the state is himself subject to these same rights.
Lolan
Is “sovereign power” as characterized ever legitimate, seeing as it required constant reaffirmation by violent enforcement? If this is indeed sovereignty, then sovereignty is not always “legitimate domination,” as defined by Weber as the constant need to suppress a large , rebellious section of the population implies that the population does not voluntarily recognize the authority of the state.
Josh
How can we distinguish "formal" and "informal" sovereignty?
Josh
How much can historical context inform a study that understands sovereignty as an "always emergent form of authority"?
Nathalie
The market and the state being both fictions, how can we theorize the relationship between them and to citizenship? Does citizenship too become a kind of fiction?
Nathalie How do "rituals of state" play a role in the making (or unmaking too?) of the sovreign body?
Cathy
In defining sovereign power anew Hansen and Stepputat disentangle it from other power apparatuses we have been discussing. How does this help us move forward in understanding power apart from territory?
Cathy
Hansen and Stepputat write "But the new... policies of outsourcing sovereignty are also a sign of the increasing importance of market forces in regard to practices of informal as well as formal sovereignty" (308) How can we imagine that the "market forces" are steeped in sovereign practices?
