Rethinking War State Formation And System Formation

This engaging volume scrutinises the causal relationship between warfare and state formation, using Charles Tilly's work as a foundation.

War and the State exposes the invalid arguments employed in the unproductive debate about Realism among international relations scholars, as well as the common fallacy of sharply distinguishing between conflict among states and conflict within them. As R. Harrison Wagner demonstrates, any understanding of international politics must be part of a more general study of the relationship between political order and organized violence everywhere--as it was in the intellectual tradition from which modern-day Realism was derived. War and the State draws on the insights from Wagner's distinguished career to create an elegantly crafted essay accessible to both students and scholars. "Possibly the most important book on international relations theory since Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics." ---James Fearon, Stanford University "This is one of the best books on international relations theory I have read in a very long time. It is required reading for any student of modern IR theory. Once again, Wagner has shown himself to be one of the clearest thinkers in the field today." ---Robert Powell, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley "Painting on a vast canvas, and tackling and integrating topics such as state formation, domestic politics, and international conflict, R. Harrison Wagner's War and the State offers many brilliant insights into the nature of international relations and international conflict. War and the State compellingly highlights the importance of constructing rigorous and valid theorizing and sets a high standard for all students of international relations. The field has much to gain if scholars follow the trail blazed by Wagner in this book." ---Hein Goemans, University of Rochester R. Harrison Wagner is Professor of Government at the University of Texas.

Existing models of state formation are derived primarily from early Western European experience, and are misleading when applied to nation-states struggling to consolidate their dominion in the present period. In this volume, scholars suggest that the Western European model of armies waging war on behalf of sovereign states does not hold universally. The importance of 'irregular' armed forces - militias, guerrillas, paramilitaries, mercenaries, bandits, vigilantes, police, and so on - has been seriously neglected in the literature on this subject. The case studies in this book suggest, among other things, that the creation of the nation-state as a secure political entity rests as much on 'irregular' as regular armed forces. For most of the 'developing' world, the state's legitimacy has been difficult to achieve, constantly eroding or challenged by irregular armed forces within a country's borders. No account of modern state formation can be considered complete without attending to irregular forces.

This volume brings together a collection of leading scholars to consider various dimensions of the 'turn' to history in International Relations. The scope of this volume is broad. It includes conventional accounts of the development of the European states system, but is not limited by it. Other essays consider the non-European experience; a number of path-breaking essays on how other cultures and continents have ordered their political communities, in particular, the question how and why a states system triumphed over other forms of political organisation. The theme of the subtitle - great transformations - is pursued by each author. The essays consider one of the biggest questions of our time, namely, how did we arrive at this historical and institutional expression of political community? And what alternative future world orders exist? The volume will be of interest to scholars of International Relations and History interested in great transformations in world politics.

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of chapters written by forty-seven top scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes chapters surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method; the use of history; the practice and status of case-study research; the contributions of field research) and assessing the possibility of constructing a science of comparative politics. Parts II to IV examine the foundations of political order: the origins of states and the extent to which they relate to war and to economic development; the sources of compliance or political obligation among citizens; democratic transitions, the role of civic culture; authoritarianism; revolutions; civil wars and contentious politics. Parts V and VI explore the mobilization, representation and coordination of political demands. Part V considers why parties emerge, the forms they take and the ways in which voters choose parties. It then includes chapters on collective action, social movements and political participation. Part VI opens up with essays on the mechanisms through which political demands are aggregated and coordinated. This sets the agenda to the systematic exploration of the workings and effects of particular institutions: electoral systems, federalism, legislative-executive relationships, the judiciary and bureaucracy. Finally, Part VII is organized around the burgeoning literature on macropolitical economy of the last two decades.

Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

State domination in the non-Western world is hallmarked by its constantly shifting character. This stimulating book develops a new approach to the study of state formation and state erosion to explain dynamics that neither follow the pathways of development nor the rule of stagnation that dependency theory once suggested. Carefully edited by Klaus Schlichte, this book provides a fresh angle to the study of states with an attempt to 'overcome Weber with Weber'. The approach focuses on the historical authenticity of states and their institutional frameworks, describing the trajectories taken as they react to the effects of changes in their international and local social environments. The emphasis laid on the specific characteristics of individual states does not however lead to the theoretical difficulty of a new contextual relativism. The conceptual design employs sociological categories developed by Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and others.