{"id":18025,"date":"2012-12-12T04:34:48","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T04:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=18025"},"modified":"2012-12-12T04:34:48","modified_gmt":"2012-12-12T04:34:48","slug":"two-cheers-for-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=18025","title":{"rendered":"Two Cheers for the State?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An excellent post from Adam Elku<\/strong>s – strongly recommended!<\/p>\n

The State Problem In National Security Policy<\/a><\/h3>\n

….The report makes a lot of comments about the rise of individual autonomy, the empowering of regional network-cities, and technology\u2019s acceleration of the power of non-state actors.\u00a0Wired\u00a0<\/em>interpreted part of this as signaling a\u00a0decline<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>of the state,\u00a0<\/em>which has been a popular theme since Martin van Creveld\u2019s\u00a0work<\/a>\u00a0on theTransformation of War<\/em>. I think that is an accurate characterization of the parts of the 2030 report that talk about the empowerment of non-state actors and the rise of international networks. I\u2019m less interested in the report, though, than in the general narrative of state decline in national security policy discourse.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard that states are in decline, and both benign and malign networks and private actors are on the rise. This isn\u2019t a new theme\u2014if you look back a few decades the rise of multinational corporations and the multilaterals prompted a similar debate about sovereignty and power in the modern world. The state-centric defense practitioner is enjoined to move beyond caring about states and embrace a new reality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

….\u00a0What we have been dealing with, however, is an unfortunate tendency to write the non-state actor and transnational network out of the last few centuries of history. But he (or she) stubbornly refuses to go away. We can talk about some of the reasons why this might be the case in the\u00a0international<\/em>\u00a0environment but it is also worth talking about why we often assume much more coherence and cohesion in our domestic environment than reality may justify.<\/strong><\/p>\n

….In Charles Tilly\u2019s book\u00a0Democracy<\/a><\/em>, he argues that four processes are necessary to create and sustain a democratic state: the growth of state capacity by suppressing alternative sources of power, the reduction of categorical inequalities, and the integration of strong tie-based trust networks into public life. Warlords and kingpins that predate make it difficult for rights to be guaranteed. Categorical inequality lessens the ability of the people to meaningfully control their own destiny. And\u00a0strong trust networks<\/a>\u00a0that cannot express themselves in political and social life also have the potential for predation and the erosion of state authority. Tilly casts these processes as never-ending in scope, and states are capable of backsliding on any one of them.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Very rich food for thought.<\/p>\n

Trust networks are an interesting way to look at broader social networks and discern, at times, the presence of modularity<\/a> (and therefore specialized skills, capacities, knowledge etc.) within a looser network structure (weak ties and links vs. highly interconnected sets of hubs with strong ties). We tend to graph these things in simple diagrams, like concentric circles with “al Qaida hard core” in the center, but really, they are more akin to clumping or clotting or uneven aggregation within a less dense field of connections.<\/p>\n

Adam is also right that the irregular, the illegal, the tribal, the secret society, the rebellious peasant was largely ignored by nationalistic \u00a0historians in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century – and when they came back in vogue in the 1960’s with revisionist, labor, social, cultural etc. schools of historians, they tended to groan under the heavy yoke of dogmatic Marxist class analysis and then later the radical academic obsessions with race, gender and sexual orientation “oppression”. Too seldom, were these people and their doings found to be interesting in themselves so much as puppets for a very tortured, abstract passion play to exorcise demons and pursue petty grudges against other scholars.<\/p>\n

In any event, Adam is worth reading in full<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An excellent post from Adam Elkus – strongly recommended! The State Problem In National Security Policy ….The report makes a lot of comments about the rise of individual autonomy, the empowering of regional network-cities, and technology\u2019s acceleration of the power of non-state actors.\u00a0Wired\u00a0interpreted part of this as signaling a\u00a0decline\u00a0of the state,\u00a0which has been a popular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[516,46,662,321,574,425,165,51,78,336,74,549,39,367,270,376,14,372,626,562,187,66,179,131,268,558,381,11,10,13,375,312,355,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ae","category-analytic","category-blog-friends","category-blogosphere","category-failed-state","category-government","category-historians","category-history","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-ir","category-markets","category-military","category-military-history","category-national-security","category-network-theory","category-networks","category-non-state-actors","category-patterns","category-perception","category-politics","category-primary-loyalties","category-revolution","category-security","category-social-networks","category-social-science","category-society","category-state-building","category-state-failure","category-theory","category-transnational-criminal-organization","category-tribes","category-uncertainty","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18031,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18025\/revisions\/18031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}