Recreating the state

Abstract

If analysts want to understand the forces that give rise to the sovereign units that make up the ‘us’ and ‘them’ comprising the affinities and enmities of enduring inter-state inequality and systemically violent conflict, then we must move beyond the Weberian understanding of the state as an institution that has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence and towards a deeper understanding of the rules that hold together the state as a membership organisation. This means several things but, for the purposes of this article, imagining the cessation of war and a truly global politics (committed to enabling conditions for the creative recreation of the planet and its inhabitants, regardless of where or to whom they were born) means understanding how all states create the form of the ‘other’ liable to yield death as an active or passive consequence of their kinship rules.

Notes

1 I describe this in Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

2 Carl Pletsch, ‘The three worlds, or the division of social scientific labor, circa 1950 – 1975’, Comparative Studies in Social History, 23 (4), 1981, pp 565 – 590, citing Alfred Sauvy, ‘Trois mondes, une planète’ (three worlds, one planet), L'Observateur, 14 August 1952.

3 Sauvy, ‘trois mondes’, in ibid, pp 569, 571.

4 It is impossible to compare a map of the USA in 1800 and in 1900, and especially the major portions of land taken over from Spain, Mexico, and the Indian nations (with their respective populations) and abide by the odd myth that America is not an imperialist country.

5 ‘Prospectus’, American Journal of International Law, January and April, 1907, p 131.

6 The first volume of the American Journal of International Law's imprimatur carries the motto, ‘Inter Gentes Jus et Pax’.

7 And there are communitarian contributions as well, most notably work by Will Kymlicka, Alisdair Macyntyre and Michael Walzer, suggesting the imperative for state boundaries to map onto those of putative ethnic groups.

8 For an excellent example of using a kinship framework to analyse national conflict in a postcolonial context, see Veena Das, ‘National honor and practical kinship: unwanted women and children’, in Faye D Ginsburg & Rayna Rapp (eds), Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. For using a kinship framework to analyse colonial domination, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, New York: Routledge, 1995; and Ann Stoler, ‘Making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in twentieth-century colonial cultures’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp 344 – 373.

9 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

10 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

11 Data and analysis for this claim appear in my ‘On the class question’, 2001, available at www.jacquelinestevens.org.

12 J Bradford Delong, ‘Inheritance: an historical perspective’, mimeo, 2001, cited in Karen Dynan, Jonathan Skinner & Stephen P Zeldes, ‘The importance of bequests and life-cycle saving in capital accumulation: a new answer’, American Economic Review, 92, 2002, p 277.

13 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

14 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

15 Lahouari Addi, ‘The failure of Third World nationalism’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (3), 1996, pp 94 – 107.

16 This is precisely what Hannah Arendt did when, in 1944, she wrote her scathing attack on the Zionist programme for a purely Jewish nation-state. For a Jewish refugee who wrote contemporaneously with the catastrophe to condemn and even ridicule the idea of a Jewish state is a beautifully clear and, sadly, rare, instance of speaking truth to anger and desperation.

17 Condoleezaa Rice, ‘Address to the 60th General Assembly of the United Nations’, 17 September 2005, at http://www.state.gov/secretary.

18 Condoleezaa Rice, ‘Comments at Princeton University’, 30 September 2005, at http://www.state.gov/secretary.

19 ‘The dangers of exporting democracy’, Guardian, 22 January 2005, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1396038,00.html.

20 Aram Ziai, ‘The ambivalence of post-development: between reactionary populism and radical democracy’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (6), 2004, p 1060.

21 For an elaboration, see my ‘Legal aesthetics of the family and nation: agoraXchange and notes toward re-imaging the future’, New York Law Review, 49, 2004 – 05, pp 316 – 352; and ‘Sigmund Freud and international law’, Law, Culture, and Humanities, forthcoming, 2006.

22 See my ‘Pregnancy envy: the politics of compensatory masculinities’, Gender and Politics, 1 (2), 2005, pp 265 – 296.