Anthropology of State Power and Powerlessness

Catalog description

How do we conceptualize state power? Is sovereign power primarily a capacity for force and coercion or a source of welfare and social cohesion? States the world over often do not manage to provide adequate welfare or to maintain a monopoly on violence. How then might we understand state power not only as a capacity but also in its incapacities and vulnerabilities? We engage these paradoxes of power through classic texts of anthropology and political theory including Foucault, Deleuze, Weber, Hobbes, and Rousseau, in tandem with lively ethnographic analyses of state power in its capacities and incapacities.