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People are said to acquire their affiliations of ethnicity, race, and sex at birth. Hence, these affiliations have long been understood to be natural, independent of the ability of political societies to define who we are. Reproducing the State vigorously challenges the conventional view, as well as post-structuralist scholarship that minimizes state power. Jacqueline Stevens examines birth-based theories of membership and group affiliations in political societies ranging from the Athenian polis, to tribes of Australia, to the French republic, to the contemporary United States. The book details how political societies determine the kinship rules that are used to reproduce political societies. Stevens analyzes the ways that ancestral and territorial birth rules for membership in political societies pattern other intergenerational affiliations. She shows how the notion of ethnicity depends on the implicit or explicit invocation of a past, present, or future political society. She also shows how geography is used to represent political regions, including continents, as the seemingly natural underpinning for racial taxonomies perpetuated through miscegenation laws and birth certificates. And Stevens argues that sex differences are also constituted through membership practices of political societies. In its chronological and disciplinary range, Reproducing the State will reward the interest of scholars in many fields, including anthropology, history, political science, sociology, women's studies, race studies, and ethnic studies

As citizens, we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that the rights to own land, marry, inherit property, and especially to assume birthright citizenship should be guaranteed by the state. The laws promoting these rights appear not only to preserve our liberty but to guarantee society remains just. Yet considering how much violence and inequality results from these legal mandates, Jacqueline Stevens asks whether we might be making the wrong assumptions. Would a world without such laws be more just?Arguing that the core laws of the nation-state are more about a fear of death

This essay contrasts the trajectory of Engin Isin's work since Being Political (2002) with a very different intellectual path pursued among scholars of a younger generation. Isin moves away from his initial critiques of citizenship and 10 years later proposes "citizenship without frontiers," a way of understanding emancipatory interventions of active citizens in opposition to state violence. During this same time frame, other political theorists began to reject "citizenship" entirely. Whereas, Isin's oeuvre since Being Political incorporates the principles of creativity and resistance of "being political" into a more expansive concept of "citizenship," other theorists began denouncing citizenship as of a piece with colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Such reactions expressly rejected efforts to recuperate citizenship for causes that oppose domination and oppression. This essay analyzes arguments antagonistic to citizenship claims through the lens of Isin's work, focusing in particular on competing views on nativism, Indigeneity, and nationality. The Conclusion considers recent examples of activist citizens and citizens without frontiers pursuing political solidarities along the lines Isin proposes.1

Since 2012, the Deportation Research Clinic, part of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University, has been pursuing research on government misconduct under the rubric of what Jacqueline Stevens calls "forensic intelligence." The Clinic uses law and publicity, including scholarship, to create new realities, which in turn produce new facts and knowledge. Stevens draws on scholarship by S.M. Amadae, Noam Chomsky, Philip Green, Chalmers Johnson, Kenneth Osgood, Ido Oren, Michael Rogin, and Frances Saunders to explain the relation of "forensic intelligence" to the "national intelligence" paradigm now organizing mainstream political science research. The article concludes by describing how U.S. government and economic elites distort research and teaching priorities, and provides examples from Northwestern University.

Since antiquity philosophers have debated the necessity of group differences and violent conflict. Analyzing the tensions in Sigmund Freud's modern contribution to this discussion reveals a symptomatic crisis in the history of his thought. Although most of his oeuvre commits Freud to a view that group differences are hereditary and biologically insuperable, his last published work, Moses and Monotheism (1938), for the purpose of saving the law of the father, elaborates a theory of group differences based on formal kinship rules.