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The new threats to US & international security emanate from countries with weak or illegitimate governments & strong societies. Traditional foreign policy is inadequate to understand events in weak states so that strong states think that they have no security alternative than the use of force. But strong states face a paradox. The use of force against weak states often weakens a strong state & strengthens the weak state & provokes increased resistance, as in the case of the Hezbollah in Lebanon. The paradox of state, society, & security is that the US & its allies cannot achieve security unless weak states become strong. Foreign policymakers must formulate dual policies: one for states & one for societies. The state oriented foreign policy would address the objective interests of the states & the social policy would address the subjective challenges of societies & cultures. References. J. Harwell

Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-253) and index. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Drawing on diverse cultural forms, and ranging across disciplinary boundaries, Nation States maps the contested cultural terrain of Irish nationalism from the Act of Union of 1800 to the present. In looking at Irish nationalism as a site of struggle, Mays examines both the myriad ways in which the nation fashions itself as the a priori ground of identity, and those processes through which nationalism engenders an ostensibly unique national identity corresponding to one and only one nation-state, the place where we always have been, and can only ever be, Oat home.O

The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins. Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside, or marginal to, Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued). The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study