The State, Identity and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World

by Ferguson,R. Brian

• ISBN13: 9780415274128
• ISBN10: 0415274125
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This work explores acts of mass violence occurring within national borders and examines the links such acts have to personal identities and how they challenge the character or very existence of the state. Building upon the anthropological premises of holism and cross-cultural comparison, this volume show how violent challenges to existing states should be conceptualizing as layered problems, with multiple kinds of causes.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Introduction: violent conflict and control of the state	1	(58)
R. Brian Ferguson
PART I Commentaries	59	(56)
Comments on state, identity and violence	61	(7)
Eric R. Wolf
Forces of reaction and changes of scale in the world system of states	68	(21)
Joseph A. Tainter
The state concept and a world of polities under perpetual siege	89	(7)
Yale H. Ferguson
Tribalism, ethnicity and the state	96	(6)
David Maybury-Lewis
Culture, violence and ethnic nationalism: weighing alternative strategies of explanation and media representation	102	(13)
Kay Warren
PART II Cases	115	(203)
Civil war in Peru: culture and violence in historical perspective	117	(32)
Linda J. Seligmann
``Religious'' violence in India: Ayodhya and the Hindu right	149	(28)
Johanna M. Lessinger
The specter of superfluity: genesis of schism in the dismantling of Yugoslavia	177	(22)
Bette Denich
From the margins to the center: the Macedonian controversy in contemporary Greece	199	(18)
Anastasia Karakasidou
Liberia: civil war and the ``collapse'' of the settler state	217	(26)
Diana Deg. Brown
Angola and the fragmentation of the post-colonial African state	243	(18)
Helio Belik
A Cold War story: the barbarization of Chad (1966--91)	261	(24)
S.P. Reyna
The Cold War and chaos in Somalia: a view from the ground	285	(15)
Catherine Besteman
Conflicts versus contracts: political flows and blockages in Papua New Guinea	300	(18)
Andrew Strathern
Pamela J. Stewart
Index	318