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This book sets out to help unlock an intriguing interdisciplinary puzzle relating to violence: ‘what is the relationship between the instrumental uses of violence, including its main forms, and the willingness of states to employ it?’ In providing a counterweight to the notion that political violence has irrevocably changed in a globalised world, Violence and the State provides an original and innovative way to understand political violence across a range of discipline areas.
This chapter explores the concept of the state, looking at various theories of the state and identifying its major characteristics and then how far real states measure up to these characteristics. Finally, it examines the issue of whether the state is still as fundamental a political institution as it has been over the past four centuries
The Welfare State 2 ➤ Definition of the term ‘Welfare State’ ➤ What is included as part of the Welfare State ➤ Basic principles of the Welfare State ➤ The future of the Welfare State This short chapter is designed to introduce the subject of the Welfare State as a complete concept before we discuss some of its individual elements – education, health and social security – in further chapters. The origins and principles of the Welfare State will be discussed and the changing attitude of the parties and their policy makers to it will be traced. DEFINITION There
One of the typical features of contemporary imperialism is the growing and indispensable importance of state support, particularly for big capital. Boron argues that ‘virtually all of the world’s largest corporations have experienced decisive support from government policies and trade barriers to make them viable’. 1 However, much contemporary writing tends
7 The good state This book has been about the way in which Britain under New Labour ‘did good’ in Africa as a way of creating a central core of ideal activity for the state. The themes and approaches contained within this trend were not new, but drew on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about the continent and Britain’s role there. I have suggested that the creation of a good project formed an important part of protecting the state from internal ambiguity and decay, by creating a utopian core at the heart of what it does. In this chapter, I am going to
6 Rethinking the state Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. — George Orwell The United States spent more on its big bank bailout, which helped the banks to maintain their generous bonuses, than it spent to help those who were unemployed as a result of the recession that the big banks brought about. — Joseph Stiglitz1 The Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath alerted us once again to the dangers of an unfettered and unregulated market. The US, followed by the UK
M1634 - HAYWARD TEXT.qxp:ANDY Q7 27/1/09 13:23 Page 189 8 Governance, state and polity This chapter examines the conceptualisation of ‘governance’ in Irish official discourse in relation to both the Irish ‘state’ and the European ‘polity’. ‘State’ and ‘polity’ constitute the broad conceptual and institutional supporting frameworks for the meaning and significance of governance in nation-statehood and European Union respectively. The traditional narrative of the state is national self-determination, i.e. quest of the nation to decide and direct its own forms
Introduction This chapter is about national ties and how they are supposed to act as a glue that holds the state together in the eyes of its citizens. A nation-state, so the story goes, is one where all the people in the state are bound together by ties of national solidarity. The solidarity legitimates the state – it tells the citizens why they are members and why it is right for the state to exist
The image of Iran stretches back thousands of years to the time of Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire. The vast empire covered lands from Asia Minor to Europe and Egypt, and was the largest of its kind until the last emperor was overthrown by Alexander the Great. Thus, the components feeding into Iranian state identity have been continually negotiated and (re)constructed over time. Iranian state identity under the Pahlavi shahs, from 1925 until the overthrow of the last shah in 1979, is often understood as completely distinct from the post
8 A permanently leaner state? The concluding chapter considers the durability of the processes of restructuring and the efforts to create a permanently leaner state that are now taking place, particularly in the UK. It argues that despite the radicalism of the changes being ushered in, they are nonetheless vulnerable to later roll-back In surveying the state and its institutional ‘stickiness’, Chapter 2 suggested that gradual change processes may have a rather more limited character than it sometimes appears. While the scholarly pendulum has now swung