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"This collection provides new ways to understand how state power was exercised during the overlapping Liao, Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. Through a set of case studies, it examines large questions concerning dynastic legitimacy, factional strife, the relationship between the literati and the state, and the value of centralization. How was state power exercised? Why did factional strife periodically become ferocious? Which problems did reformers seek to address? Could subordinate groups resist the state? How did politics shape the sources that survive? The nine essays explore key elements of state power, ranging from armies, taxes, and imperial patronage to factional struggles, officials' personal networks, and ways to secure control of conquered territory. Drawing on new sources, research methods, and historical perspectives, the contributors illuminate the institutional side of state power while confronting evidence of instability and change--of ways to gain, lose, or exercise power"--Provided by publisher

The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from "primitive" to "civilized." This evolutionist anthropology, as many scholars have shown, reflected and justified a range of imperialist practices by presenting European conquest as bringing progress to societies existing in a noncontemporary present. Two of the most important variants of post-evolutionist anthropology are the cultural relativism associated with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the sociological universalism associated with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). The state power that evolutionist anthropology had once supported also changed radically over the same period. The forms of domination exercised by the global North over the global South gradually shifted from direct colonial rule to the combination of military intervention and economic control that characterizes the postcolonial period. Anthropology, Talal Asad has written, is "rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and Third World . . . an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment." Internally, the social welfare state continued its remarkable growth but also, in the 1960s and 1970s, faced challenges from those who rejected the patriarchy and heteronormativity that it often presupposed and reinforced. The two books under review reveal how new types of anthropology in the United States and France came to serve these new forms of state power in the twentieth century. In both cases anthropology adapted to these new political conditions by incorporating psychoanalysis to posit an especially strong bond between individual and culture that produced what one contemporary called an "oversocialized conception of man."

The article discusses state power in the political system. Clarified the distinction between the political and state authorities, investigated the sources of legitimacy and specific features of state power.

In my judgment the most striking fact in the new China is the creation of state power. Traditionally, in the agrarian empires of Asia, the government has had relatively little power: at least power of a fundamental kind. It might take arbitrary and startling action; but the total result of such deeds was small. A government, however impressive its trappings, could seldom carry through a sustained reforming policy. In China, custom or Confucius was sovereign, not the emperor.

An analysis of 20 years of official documents (1995–2014) and legislative acts at national and EU levels using Jessop's Strategic Relational Approach (SRA) offers insights into inherent structural flaws in the Justice and Home Affairs aspects of European and member state migration policies. Focusing on two triptychs (hierarchy, governance and government ; state power(s), strategic selectivities and structures) and tracking their development clarifies that this policy field's purposes stray beyond migration management. In fact, the EU migration policy model was set up to be inherently expansive and is intimately linked to EU institutions and national governments striving to enhance their power(s). This is why apparent aberrations and unlawful acts by states amounting to a power grab have developed into an attack against normative frameworks including human rights. This article investigates whether European approaches to immigration policy at the EU and national levels currently pose a problem in terms of state power and authoritarianism due to inherently expansive tendencies and the serial production of problems and hierarchies. It offers a methodological, state-theoretical contribution to address a policy fix in which the EU and its member states appear caught, with harmful effects that spread beyond EU borders through externalisation.

Drawing on Foucault's concepts of biopolitical subject formation and governmentality, this article seeks to understand transnational state power and how Vietnamese migrant workers negotiate within a transnational framework both while working in Malaysia and upon their return to Vietnam. By conducting multi-sited interviews in Vietnam and Malaysia between 2008 and 2015, we contribute to the transnational labor migration literature by focusing on Vietnamese factory and construction workers in Malaysia and their resistance to transnational state power. We argue that these two emerging economies, as part of the neoliberal world, use their systems, media, and technologies to produce and manage citizens (in Vietnam) and non-citizen subjects (migrants in Malaysia) who comply with labor export policy and foreign worker policy, respectively. These two states ensure both government and individual accumulation to sustain their power. Meanwhile, Vietnamese migrant subjects negotiate their roles, resist when necessary, and at times, even benefit from overseas labor migration.

Kazakhs constitute the majority of the population (over 63%) in Kazakhstan and their predominance in all spheres is understandable. However, there is a disparity in the percentage of Kazakhs in government and in the population of the republic. The case analyzed in the article is ethnic factor in state power in Kazakhstan. The argument of the article is that such disproportion between Kazakhs and other ethnic groups is rather the result of imperfection of personnel policy, impact of clan, tribal and family ties to personnel management, and language barriers in employment, than the result of discriminatory policy of the state. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s2p20

The power of culture and the culture of states / E. Paul Durrenberger -- Nurturance and reciprocity in Thai studies / Penny Van Esterik -- Tarnishing the Golden Era : aesthetics, humor, and politics in Lakhon Chatri dance-drama / Mary L. Grow -- Rice, rule, and the Tai state / Richard A. O'Connor -- Slavery in nineteenth-century northern Thailand : archival anecdotes and village voices / Katherine A. Bowie -- Households and villages : the political-ritual structures of Tai communities / Nicola Tannenbaum -- Rhetorics and relations : Tai states, forests, and upland groups / Hjörleifur R. Jónsson

This article examines the evolution of international thought through the notion of 'political space'. It focuses on two important domains of international politics, the nation-state and the global, to reflect on spatial categories in the discipline of International Relations (IR). Since its inception, the concept of the nation-state has dominated mainstream IR theory. Yet an investigation of how international order has been theorized over IR's first century shows that this era has also been defined by globalist visions of political order. Nowadays, globalization is sometimes seen as the apex of the historical interplay of particularity and universality. The progression towards global political and economic order, however, is today undermined by the resurgence of state-centric political nationalism which seeks to challenge the legitimacy of the global political space. By examining how past international thinkers including Alfred Zimmern, Barbara Ward, Hans Morgenthau, E. H. Carr and John Herz, imagined and interpreted the relations of space and politics in the national and global spheres, this article suggests that spatial thinking offers an insightful approach for theorizing international relations. The article argues that the global and national spaces attain their political meanings through divisions as well as interactions and connections. The focus on divisions, exemplified in the writings of Barbara Ward, helps to make sense of the modus operandi of power in the national and global political spaces by investigating differences, tensions and instability.