The Everyday Life of the State: A State-in-Society Approach

Conclusion

205 Conclusion bEnJAmin Smith The state-in-society approach has been a public good in political science for more than two decades. Between finishing his dissertation on peasant rebellion and publishing State in Society—a nearly thirty-year span—Joel S. Migdal’s intellectual trajectory is clear in hindsight. On the one hand, one sees an individual fascinated with the ability of state leaders to compel their country’s children to attend public school for more than ten years. On the other hand, one sees him marveling at just how limited state power often is and how relatively rarely states can convince or compel citizens to follow their rules and employ state-sanctioned survival strategies. The chapters in this book not only are a tribute to the immense impact that Migdal’s work has had in shaping comparative research on the state but also represent the latest phase in the evolution of state-in-society scholarship . thE rootS of thE StAtE-in-SoCiEty APProACh At its core, the state-in-society framework is a lens through which to view the struggles that take place within every society over whose rules are the ones people decide to follow. To squeeze Migdal’s 1988 book, Strong Societies and Weak States, unfairly into a couple of paragraphs, it focuses on the material aspects of building effective government in the postcolonial world. Many of his contemporaries in political science took for granted the power of governments around the world to act coherently and to impose Weberian order on their territories. This tendency (Evans, Rueschemeyer, 206 Benjamin Smith and Skocpol 1985), while it was a rightful corrective to stateless analyses of the Marxian and functionalist veins, often led to assuming rather than establishing state capacity and autonomy. Migdal instead urges us to focus on the variant conditions under which states have seized, or failed to seize, that power from other places in society. This accumulation of power in state rather than societal hands relies not just on force but also on obedience , drawing on Max Weber’s (1978, 53) observation that obedience is as much legitimacy as it is domination. The question for Migdal becomes, who do people obey, and why? This is a key insight of the book and the original framework. States as we know them usually arrived to the scene to find societies already populated with social organizations—churches and mosques; family, tribal, and ethnic groups; legal systems; and others. Those organizations provided the daily rules and survival strategies people used to get by, produce and trade goods, mediate their conflicts, educate their children, and so forth. And they were not eager to surrender that power. To survive, would-be state leaders had to displace, co-opt, or at least not be conquered by these other organizations. Through this lens, battles over direct versus indirect rule took place not just spatially—across territory—but at the level of authority too. How would rulers in new states accomplish the Weberian imperative of making their organization the only game in town? Ideally, they sought to make people follow state rules rather than other ones. Both the theory and the narratives in Strong Societies and Weak States revolve around the “hard” aspects of state power. For Migdal, state power grew out of the ability to reconstruct social power so that it was in one’s best interest to follow state rules and not others. In this sense, the framework focused on infrastructural power, to use Michael Mann’s (1993, 59-61) term, but its focus on obedience was also influenced heavily by Weber. Moreover, one of the major contributions of Migdal’s work on state-society relations was to focus our attention on the sites where the state actually encountered society. In his words in an e-mail to me ten years ago, the best place to uncover the realities of state power is “where the rubber hits the road.” That is a central theme of nearly all the chapters in this book: everyday actors frequently accomplish major change both in their societies and in the shape of their states. Migdal’s research has increasingly pushed us to study state-society relations at the level of practice : where people actually encounter the state, how they respond to it, how state actors respond to social ones, and how both are changed in the 207 Conclusion process. This ground-level focus led Migdal to advocate...