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Layered Authority and Social Institutions: Reconsidering State-Centric Theory and Development Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2018

Ellen Lust
Ellen Lust*
Affiliation:
Program on Governance and Local Development, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden; e-mail: ellen.lust@gu.se
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Extract

Political scientists, development specialists, and policymakers assume a central place for states and state action as they define problems and design solutions. They ascribe to the state dominance over all other social organizations, viewing it as pervasive and inevitably triumphant. Even scholars such as Joel Migdal, Timothy Mitchell, and James Scott, who focus on the boundaries of the state, portray the state as more organized, technologically savvy, and capable of extending its power than social counterparts, putting the latter on the defensive. Scholars and policymakers alike also have arrogated to the state the moral monopoly to pursue certain imperatives that other organizational forms can and do aspire to provide. These include providing security and protection from predation, allocating scarce resources, and arbitrating values and interests in society.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 2018 , pp. 333 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 Migdal, Joel, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77–96Google Scholar; Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 Mara Revkin, “Does the Islamic State Have a ‘Social Contract’? Evidence from Iraq and Syria,” GLD Working Paper Series No 9, Gothenburg University, 2016, accessed 7 December 2017, http://gld.gu.se/en/resources/gld-working-papers/wp9-islamic-state-social-contract.

3 Wessels, Joshka, To Cooperate or not to Cooperate? Collective Action for Rehabilitation of Traditional Water Tunnel Systems (Qanats) in Syria (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers, 2014)Google Scholar.

4 Lise Rakner and Ellen Lust, “The Other Side of Taxation: Extraction and Social Institutions in the Developing World,” Annual Review of Political Science (forthcoming).

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8 GNC Member, interview with the author, Al-Waddan Hotel, Tripoli, 5 March 2013.

9 Corstange, The Price of a Vote.

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11 Steven Brooke, “Non-State Public Goods Provision and Authoritarian Durability in the Middle East” (paper presented at the Governance and Local Development Conference, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 9–10 April 2015).

12 Leeson, Peter T., Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better than You Think (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.