Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices

by Edited by Joel S. Migdal

• ISBN13: 9780521068499
• ISBN10: 0521068495
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-07-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This interdisciplinary volume maintains the importance of a spatial understanding of society and history, but suggests a way of conceiving of borders and space that goes beyond a school map of states. Its subject is the struggle among differing spatial logics, or mental maps. It is concerned with the meaning that state borders hold for people, but recognizes that such meaning varies and is contested by other social formations. To what degree do state borders encase the mechanisms that make the decisive rules governing people's lives and to what extent do they give way to other rulemakers? To what extent do states circumscribe the communities to which people feel attached and to what extent do they intersect with other communities of belonging? These essays home in on the struggles and conflicting demands on people, given that state borders are not automatically pre-eminent and that other spatial logics demand attention.

Table of Contents

List of contributors

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Mental maps and virtual checkpoints: struggles to construct and maintain State and social boundaries

On the Eve of the Nation-State: The Ottoman Empire

Do states always favor stasis? Changing status of tribes in the Ottoman empire

The preamble boundaries of Ottoman jewry Sarah

The State and 'Dangerous Populations'

'Dangerous populations': state territoriality and the constitution of national minorities

Making Myanmars: language, territory, and belonging in post-socialist Burma

Institutionalizing virtual Kurdistan West: pro-Kurdish politics in Western Europe

Inscribing Membership and Contesting Membership in the Nation

Challenging boundaries and belongings: 'mixed blood' allotment disputes at the turn of the twentieth century

Belonging and not: civil boundaries in Rossland, BC during the Great War

Boundaries and belonging in conditions of extreme politicization: the Chinese state in private and public spaces, 1949-1968

Reproductions and maintenance of group boundaries: Why the 'secular' Wtate matters to religious authorities in Israel

Beyond the State: Transnational Forces and the Challenge to the State

Belonging in the PACE lane: fast border-crossing and citizenship in the age of neoliberalism

Contested boundaries: citizens, states, and the supranational belonging in the European Union

Boundaries of the nation-state and the lure of the Islamic community in Turkey

Conclusion: Conclusion Beatrice Hibou

Index

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