Right-sizing the State

Right-sizing the State
Author: Brendan O'Leary
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2001-11-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191529613

Strategic decisions to reduce the size, scope, or ambitions of organizations - including states - in order to enhance future prospects, are among the most difficult and least well-understood choices made in collective life. This volume makes a bold effort to identify the conditions in which less really is more. Each contributor to the volume analyzes the possibilities for institutional redesign, including state contraction, for responding effectively to destabilizing and often violence-laden conflicts. Among the countries discussed in detail are Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Congo, Jordan, Indonesia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Iraq, and India. An impressive array of experts assess strategies that go against the grain, strategies to 'righsize' and even 'downsize' states by changing their external and internal borders. Typically this means opposing prevailing prejudices against partition and 'seraratist' solutions as well as paying high political costs in the short run for more manageable political problems in the long run. Understanding the conditions under which such strategies can be entertained and successfully implemented is as difficult, and as important, as making this kind of option available to beleaguered states in a complex and rapidly changing world.

Right Sizing the U.S. Presence Abroad

Right Sizing the U.S. Presence Abroad
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Reform. Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations
Publisher:
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2003
Genre: National security
ISBN:

Federal Solutions For Fragile States In The Middle East: Right-sizing Internal Borders

Federal Solutions For Fragile States In The Middle East: Right-sizing Internal Borders
Author: Liam Anderson
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2021-06-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800610076

In most regions of the world, federalism (territorial autonomy) is used as a successful institutional means of dispersing political power and accommodating ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. The Middle East is an exception. Aside from the anomalous case of the U.A.E and Iraq's troubled experiment with federalism, Middle Eastern regimes have largely resisted efforts to decentralize political power. As a result, the norm in the region has been highly centralized, unitary systems that have, more often than not, paved the way for authoritarian rule or played witness to serious internal fragmentation and conflict divided along ethnic or religious lines.Federal Solutions for Fragile States in the Middle East makes an argument for the implementation of federalism in the post-conflict states of the Middle East. The argument operates on two levels: the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical case for federalism is backed by empirical evidence, but to accurately evaluate the practical and logistical feasibility of its implementation in any given case requires detailed knowledge of 'real world' political realities. The book's focus is on four post-conflict states — Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya — though the arguments advanced within have broad regional applicability.

The Materiality of Politics: The technologies of rule

The Materiality of Politics: The technologies of rule
Author: Raṇabīra Samāddāra
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2007
Genre: India
ISBN: 1843312514

Through a series of historical illustrations, the author investigates violence, law, terror, protection, justice and post-colonial governance. His reading of the materiality of politics is disturbingly 'physical'. Unlike the 'philosophical subject' (a purely theoretical construct), the author's 'political subject' is the real product of particular conflicts and circumstances, violence and bloodshed. The universal immediacy of conflict drives home the futility of vague philosophical speculations and generalizations. Instead, it prompts a rigorous study of control and rebellion, statecraft and autonomy, law and lawlessness. History, claims the author, must be studied in a new way.

The Materiality of Politics: Volume 1

The Materiality of Politics: Volume 1
Author: Ranabir Samaddar
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2007-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781843317654

‘The Materiality of Politics’ uses a series of historical illustrations to reveal the physicality and underlying ‘materiality’ of political processes. Volume 1, subtitled ‘The Technologies of Rule’ discusses the techniques of modern rule which form the basis of the post-colonial Indian state. Beginning with the rule of law, the volume analyses the nature and manifestations of constitutional rule, the relation between law and terror and the construction of ‘extraordinary’ sovereign power. The author also investigates the methods of care, protection, segregation and stabilization by which rule proceeds. In the processes, the material core of the ‘cultural’ and the ‘aesthetic’ is exposed.

Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2001

Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2001
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2000
Genre: Electronic government information
ISBN:

Insurgency in India's Northeast

Insurgency in India's Northeast
Author: Jugdep S. Chima
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100095210X

Insurgency in India’s Northeast provides a systematic analysis of every major secessionist group and insurgency in the region within a unified and original explanatory framework, focusing primarily on the postcolonial period. This book presents a parsimonious analytic narrative involving a rich sequential account of the historical evolution of Mizo, Naga, Meitei, and "ethnic Assamese" identities from precolonial to colonial to postcolonial times. Avoiding essentialist or primordialist arguments, the chapters in the book demonstrate how ethnic/(sub)national identities are dynamic and malleable phenomenon, not immutable natural givens. In particular, it argues that the postcolonial Indian state has attempted to integrate these ethnic/sub-state national groups into the Indian Union through a combination of democratic accommodation/consociationalism and hegemonic/violent control, strategically designed to encapsulate their evolving (sub) national identities into the overarching state-sponsored Indian nationality. Through this book, readers will gain a rich understanding of the dynamics of ethnicity/ nationality and the nation/state-building process in postcolonial India. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Asian studies, ethnicity, nationalism, separatism, security studies, border studies, and international relations.