The Everyday Life of the State
The Everyday Life of the State

Author: Adam White

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2013-07-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0295804637

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Today there are more states controlling more people than at any other point in history. We live in a world shaped by the authority of the state. Yet the complexion of state authority is patchy and uneven. While it is almost always possible to trace the formal rules governing human interaction to the statute books of one state or another, in reality the words in these books often have little bearing upon what is happening on the ground. Their meanings are intentionally and unintentionally misrepresented by those who are supposed to enforce them and by those who are supposed to obey them, generating a range of competing authorities, voices, and allegiances. The Everyday Life of the State explores this "everyday" transformation of state authority into multiple scripts, narratives, and political activities. Drawing upon case studies from across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, the chapters in this book investigate the many ways in which those subjects traditionally regarded as being weak, passive, and obedient manage not only to resist the authority of state actors but to actively subvert and appropriate it, in the process making, unmaking, and remaking the boundaries between state and society over and over again. Collectively, these chapters make an important contribution to the expanding literature on "everyday politics." The "state in society" concept used in this volume has been developed by political scientist Joel S. Migdal, the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

Everyday Life under Communism and After
Everyday Life under Communism and After

Author: Tibor Valuch

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9633863775

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By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism. Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

State in Society
State in Society

Author: Joel S. Migdal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-08-27

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521797061

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The essays in this book trace the development of Joel Migdal's "state-in-society" approach. The essays situate the approach within the classic literature in political science, sociology, and related disciplines but present a new model for understanding state-society relations. It allies parts of the state and groups in society against other such coalitions, determines how societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day life, the nature of the rules that govern people's behavior, whom they benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them, and what shared meaning people hold about their relations with others and their place in the world.

A People's Constitution
A People's Constitution

Author: Rohit De

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0691210381

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It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy
The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy

Author: Joshua Arthurs

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-08

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1137586540

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This book explores the complex ways in which people lived and worked within the confines of Benito Mussolini’s regime in Italy, variously embracing, appropriating, accommodating and avoiding the regime’s incursions into everyday life. The contributions highlight the experiences of ordinary Italians – midwives and schoolchildren, colonists and soldiers – over the course of the Fascist era, in settings ranging from the street to the farm, and from the kitchen to the police station. At the same time, this volume also provides a framework for understanding the Italian experience in relation to other totalitarian dictatorships in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.

Ambiguous Transitions
Ambiguous Transitions

Author: Jill Massino

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1785335995

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Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.

The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty
The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty

Author: Rebecca Bryant

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1501755757

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Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre

Author: Chris Butler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1134045883

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While certain aspects of Henri Lefebvre’s writings have been examined extensively within the disciplines of geography, social theory, urban planning and cultural studies, there has been no comprehensive consideration of his work within legal studies. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City provides the first serious analysis of the relevance and importance of this significant thinker for the study of law and state power. Introducing Lefebvre to a legal audience, this book identifies the central themes that run through his work, including his unorthodox, humanist approach to Marxist theory, his sociological and methodological contributions to the study of everyday life and his theory of the production of space. These elements of Lefebvre’s thought are explored through detailed investigations of the relationships between law, legal form and processes of abstraction; the spatial dimensions of neoliberal configurations of state power; the political and aesthetic aspects of the administrative ordering of everyday life; and the ‘right to the city’ as the basis for asserting new forms of spatial citizenship. Chris Butler argues that Lefebvre’s theoretical categories suggest a way for critical legal scholars to conceptualise law and state power as continually shaped by political struggles over the inhabitance of space. This book is a vital resource for students and researchers in law, sociology, geography and politics, and all readers interested in the application of Lefebvre’s social theory to specific legal and political contexts.