- The Oxford Handbook of Governance and Limited Statehood
- Preface
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood: Conceptual Clarifications and Major Contributions of the Handbook
- Theories of Development and Areas of Limited Statehood
- A Historical-Sociological Perspective on Statehood
- Anthropological Perspectives on the Limits of the State
- Critical Approaches
- Measuring Governance and Limited Statehood
- Histories of Governance
- A Global History of Governance
- Geographies of Limited Statehood
- External State Actors
- INGOs and Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships
- ‘Traditional’ Authorities
- Business
- Violent and Criminal Non-State Actors
- Coercion and Trusteeship
- Hierarchical and Non-Hierarchical Coordination
- Brokerage, Intermediation, Translation
- Social Trust
- Security
- Foreign Aid
- Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Democracy
- Health
- Food Security
- Education
- Environmental and Natural Resources
- Migration
- International Legal Order
- Normative Political Theory
- Policy
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines how anthropological work on the state and political power not only complements, but also contests the political scientific conception of limited statehood. The two disciplines are no longer distinguished by the methods they employ, or their analytical dispositions, or the regions of the world where they conduct research. Here it is suggested instead that anthropology continues to be defined by its commitment to challenging universalizing social scientific assumptions on the basis of ethnography that theorizes from everyday experience. Drawing on examples both from the global South and North, we delineate how anthropology nuances various conceptions of limits of state power, particularly those that structure the binaries of West and non-West, public and private, state and non-state, formal and informal, national and trans- or supranational, on which much of the discussion of state capacity, or its partial absence, is predicated.
Keywords: anthropology, power, ethnography, post-colonial theory, Western and non-Western states
Andrew Brandel is lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Shalini Randeria is rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria, and professor of anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Governance and Limited Statehood
- Preface
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood: Conceptual Clarifications and Major Contributions of the Handbook
- Theories of Development and Areas of Limited Statehood
- A Historical-Sociological Perspective on Statehood
- Anthropological Perspectives on the Limits of the State
- Critical Approaches
- Measuring Governance and Limited Statehood
- Histories of Governance
- A Global History of Governance
- Geographies of Limited Statehood
- External State Actors
- INGOs and Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships
- ‘Traditional’ Authorities
- Business
- Violent and Criminal Non-State Actors
- Coercion and Trusteeship
- Hierarchical and Non-Hierarchical Coordination
- Brokerage, Intermediation, Translation
- Social Trust
- Security
- Foreign Aid
- Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Democracy
- Health
- Food Security
- Education
- Environmental and Natural Resources
- Migration
- International Legal Order
- Normative Political Theory
- Policy
- Name Index
- Subject Index
