Edges Of The State

Using philosophical and scientific work to engage the perennial question of human nature This book takes a look at the formation, and edges, of states: their breakdowns and attempts to repair them, and their encounters with non-state peoples. It draws upon anthropology, political philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, child developmental psychology, and other fields to look at states as projects of constructing “bodies politic,” where the civic and the somatic intersect. John Protevi asserts that humans are predisposed to “prosociality,” or being emotionally invested in social partners and patterns. With readings from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James C. Scott; a critique of the assumption of widespread pre-state warfare as a selection pressure for the evolution of human prosociality and altruism; and an examination of the different “economies of violence” of state and non-state societies, Edges of the State sketches a notion of prosocial human nature and its attendant normative maxims. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

State borders are somewhere the state is keen to stress its presence and yet are simultaneously places where that presence is challenged. They are sites of resistance to the state, and at the same time places where the national interest is vigorously maintained. This constant ambiguity generates questions about the dynamics of borderland-state relations, and about how what happens along the border can undermine state policies. Using case studies of nation and state relations in borderlands in Europe this book seeks to understand how structures of power are created, experienced, changed and reproduced.

Set in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, this study explores the shifting relationships between border communities and the state along the political border with East Malaysia. The book rests on the premise that remote border regions offer an exciting study arena that can tell us important things about how marginal citizens relate to their nation-state. The basic assumption is that central state authority in the Indonesian borderlands has never been absolute, but waxes and wanes, and state rules and laws are always up for local interpretation and negotiation. In its role as key symbol of state sovereignty, the borderland has become a place were central state authorities are often most eager to govern and exercise power. But as illustrated, the borderland is also a place were state authority is most likely to be challenged, questioned and manipulated as border communities often have multiple loyalties that transcend state borders and contradict imaginations of the state as guardians of national sovereignty and citizenship.

Wireless sensor networks are about to be part of everyday life. Homes and workplaces capable of self-controlling and adapting air-conditioning for different temperature and humidity levels, sleepless forests ready to detect and react in case of a fire, vehicles able to avoid sudden obstacles or possibly able to self-organize routes to avoid congestion, and so on, will probably be commonplace in the very near future. Mobility plays a central role in such systems and so does passive mobility, that is, mobility of the network stemming from the environment itself. The population protocol model was an intellectual invention aiming to describe such systems in a minimalistic and analysis-friendly way. Having as a starting-point the inherent limitations but also the fundamental establishments of the population protocol model, we try in this monograph to present some realistic and practical enhancements that give birth to some new and surprisingly powerful (for these kind of systems) computational models. Table of Contents: Population Protocols / The Computational Power of Population Protocols / Enhancing the model / Mediated Population Protocols and Symmetry / Passively Mobile Machines that Use Restricted Space / Conclusions and Open Research Directions / Acronyms / Authors' Biographies

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the international symposium Formal Methods Europe, FME 2002, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2002. The 31 revised full papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. All current aspects of formal methods are addressed, from foundational and methodological issues to advanced application in various fields.

This book critically analyses the case law on EU citizenship in relation to its personal free movement rights, its status on the primary law level, and EU fundamental rights protection. The book exposes the legal space where EU citizenship variably loses or gains legal relevance, and questions how this space can be overcome. Through a thorough analysis of the core personal free movement rights of residence, family reunification, equal treatment and equal political participation, the book demonstrates how the development of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union has generated a two-tiered legal concept of EU citizenship. Depending on the nature of the legal claim at hand, EU citizenship may appear as a poor legal personhood for exercising free movement rights; sometimes pushing the individual who is in a factual cross-border situation out of the scope of Union law. Contrastingly, in other strands of the jurisprudence, we see EU citizenship and its primary law levelled-rights stretch the jurisdictional scope of Union law, triggering the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights for review of the individual case. The book enhances the understanding of the legal concept of EU citizenship in Union law and contributes to the debate on the future development of EU citizenship, its relationship to the Charter, and the strength of its legal position for the person who exercises freedom of movement.

Since the earliest development of states, groups of people escaped or were exiled. As capitalism developed, people tried to escape capitalist constraints connected with state control. This powerful book gives voice to three communities living at the edges of capitalism: Cossacks on the Don River in Russia; Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; and prisoners in long-term isolation since the 1970s. Inspired by their experiences visiting Cossacks, living with the Zapatistas, and developing connections and relationships with prisoners and ex-prisoners, Andrej Grubacic and Denis O’Hearn present a uniquely sweeping, historical, and systematic study of exilic communities engaged in mutual aid. Following the tradition of Peter Kropotkin, Pierre Clastres, James Scott, Fernand Braudel and Imanuel Wallerstein, this study examines the full historical and contemporary possibilities for establishing self-governing communities at the edges of the capitalist world-system, considering the historical forces that often militate against those who try to practice mutual aid in the face of state power and capitalist incursion.