Courses

This graduate seminar explores the structural transformations that neoliberal reforms has sparked in weak states, focusing particularly on the tense relationship between sovereignty and governance.

Due to the relatively recent emergence of neoliberalism as a form of governance, anthropologies of the state and neoliberalism have tended to focus on the dialectic between neoliberal reform-- together with its normative principles-- and resistances to it.  Given the decline of neoliberalism, however, this mode of analysis is now patently insufficient, and it needs to give way to the study of a post-neoliberal order.  In this seminar we shall analyze the nature of this order empirically, particularly in weak states.  Specifically, the seminar explores the mechanisms by which states have sought to secure or even fortify sovereignty, while neglecting or even relinquishing core attributes that had characterized modern states in the 20th century, such as policing, or the administration of justice.  While the consensus around the desirability of neoliberal reform is now past, and some of its organizing principles are in jeopardy, the form of governance that is emerging in many weak states-- a form of governance that we characterize broadly as "sovereignty without justice"-- has neoliberal reforms as its condition of possibility, and often as a key ideological referent.   By way of an engagement with recent thick descriptions of cases of contemporary state transformation, we seek to conceptualize, characterize and move toward a typology of weak states in the contemporary global ecumene.