Currently viewing the tag: "Disorder"

Talking about Disorder

On September 30, 2020 By

Every day we read that we live in an age of disorder. But what does that mean? Are our intellectual tools for ordering the world just not sharp enough?

In my essay ‘No End State: Exploring […]

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In other words, order is the purpose of society. Disorder is therefore always a failure of society or otherwise undesirable, and the purpose of social mechanisms is to contain and process conflict. These equations whereby order = good and disorder = bad, have often been taken to be key elements of what Geertz critically called the “consensus gentium” (nuggets of cultural universals)[ii]. But there is good reason to question whether the values embedded in those equations are indeed universal/neutral.

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In the post-Westphalian world, sovereignty is the norm that simultaneously produces anarchy between states and the possibility of its opposite, order, within those states. While sovereignty ostensibly gives national authorities ultimate control over subnational actors and spaces, along with the formal ability to impose order from above, the reality is much more complicated – and much more interesting. Order is never a foregone conclusion, even within the sovereign states that form the units of the international state system. From the seminal works of scholars like Michael Mann, Stein Rokkan, and Charles Tilly, we know that the emergence of the nation-state as the dominant unit in the modern world was everywhere associated with dramatic territorial struggles between national and subnational actors over who got to do what, and with whose resources. Whether peripheral regions were incorporated into proto-states by core areas using direct or indirect forms of rule, territory was always at the heart of state building. But territorial struggles do not simply disappear once the process of state formation is complete; well after their emergence, states are constantly negotiating and renegotiating territorial arrangements between core and periphery, and between national and subnational. We see this in the wave of decentralization that swept the global south at the end of the last century, and in the set of re-centralizing changes that have occurred in the opening years of the new century.

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An Age of Uncertainty

On March 30, 2017 By

It is worthwhile at this juncture to consider the nature of the US presidency and its likely impact on the role of the US in the post-World War II and post-Cold War world order. The issues inherent in the US president’s recent statements and behavior — his fondness for autocrats, dismissal of allies and long-term partnerships, and his embrace of mercantilist approaches to trade —constitute a major break with core bipartisan traditions in US foreign policy.[i] Close advisors to the president articulate broad views of global politics that they define as standing at odds with this tradition.[ii] These developments contribute to a major increase in uncertainty for those who govern amidst disorder.

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Prepared for the March 2 – 3, 2017 seminar, Theorizing (Dis)Order: Governing in an Uncertain World, organized by the winners of the 2016 – 2017 WPF Student Seminar Competition

In northern Uganda, where I have conducted field research on local security initiatives over the past three years, issues related to politics, power, and the state […]

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Prepared for the March 2 – 3, 2017 seminar, Theorizing (Dis)Order: Governing in an Uncertain World, organized by the winners of the 2016 – 2017 WPF Student Seminar Competition

One way to theorize disorder is to address the ambiguity of its impact. Many studies show, for example, that disasters have winners as well as losers. […]

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