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

Introduction: A State-in-Society Agenda

3 Introduction A State-in-Society Agenda AdAm WhitE Today there are more states controlling more people than at any other point in history. Wherever lines of longitude and latitude cross on the globe, human behavior is to some degree shaped by rules and regulations set down by states, either alone or in concert with one another. Through their constitutions and international alliances, these ubiquitous political organizations have sought to formalize the basic terms of human engagement in almost every square mile of the planet. We live in a world shaped by the authority of the state. The complexion of this authority, however, 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. This “everyday” transformation of state authority into multiple scripts, narratives, and political activities is the focus of the chapters in this book. Drawing upon case studies from across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, they explore 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. 4 Adam White Given its centrality to matters of peace, democracy, human rights, and other core goods, the everyday transformation of state authority is becoming an increasingly visited theme throughout the social sciences.1 So what makes the chapters in this book new and original? What do they add to this field of study? The answer to these questions lies in the theoretical approach they use to cut into their subject matter. All the chapters in this book explore the ebb and flow of state authority using the “state-in-society” approach developed over the past forty years within the extended writings of Joel S. Migdal.2 Migdal’s approach is important because it encourages us to investigate not only those everyday social forces that challenge, shape, and reconstitute the authority of the state (a foundational concern in the everyday politics literature) but also the deep-seated ideational norms that, at the same time, perpetuate the authority of the state over enormous geographic spaces (a far less systematically explored dynamic). It is this instruction to decenter state authority while simultaneously retaining the normative idea of the state as a core unit of analysis that distinguishes Migdal’s state-in-society approach from those of his contemporaries in the field of everyday politics. The systematic application of the state-in-society approach throughout the chapters in this book is valuable for two reasons. First, taken together they represent a significant paradigm-building exercise, serving to further establish the state-in-society approach within the political science discipline . Over the past few years, Migdal’s writings have inspired a new generation of researchers to study the relationship between everyday life and state authority in new ways, and this volume represents the first instance in which the work of a number of these scholars has been brought together in one place. Second, these essays serve to enhance our social-scientific understanding of some of the perennial social and political tensions in the world today. Their primary empirical focus is the Middle East, a hot spot for both historical and contemporary research on the contested nature of state authority (and indeed the focus of Migdal’s own research). However, a number of the essays go beyond the Middle East, studying a range of less prominent state-society struggles in North Africa and Asia, thereby demonstrating the broad comparative reach and utility of the state-in-society approach. 5 Introduction kEy ConCEPtS Like any school of thought, the state-in-society approach has its own distinctive vocabulary, which has evolved out of Migdal’s writings, primarily from his 2001 book State in Society, but from his other collected works too. The conceptual centerpiece of this approach is the following twopart definition of the state: “The state is a field of power marked by the use and...