Thinking Beyond The State

Human mobility has been a widely examined phenomenon in the social sciences, and in this increasingly globalized world migration continues to be of significant concern. The chapters comprising this volume on Thinking Beyond the State address the need to think beyond prevailing state discourses in problematizing human movements between Japan and the Philippines, by focusing on the presence of other actors involved in these processes. This collection investigates a range of issues that are part and parcel of the migration experience: citizenship and nationality, migrant incorporation and integration, human security, migrant welfare, philanthropy, identity, and multiculturalism. The editor and contributors aim to inform the larger public of the realities that are embedded in this particular phenomenon, as well as engage academics involved in migration studies. The book will be a valuable resource to those with professional interests in the East Asian region, most particularly in Japan and the Philippines.

The French scholar Marc Abélès is one of the leading political and philosophical anthropologists of our time. He is perhaps the leading anthropologist writing on the state and globalization. Thinking beyond the State, a distillation of his work to date, is a superb introduction to his contributions to both anthropology and political philosophy. Abélès observes that while interdependence and interconnection have become characteristic features of our globalized era, there is no indication that a concomitant evolution in thinking about political systems has occurred. The state remains the shield—for both the Right and the Left—against the turbulent effects of globalization. According to Abélès, we live in a geopolitical universe that, in many respects, reproduces alienating logics. His book, therefore, is a primer on how to see beyond the state. It is also a testament to anthropology’s centrality and importance in any analysis of the global human predicament. Thinking beyond the State will find wide application in anthropology, political science and philosophy courses dealing with the state and globalization.

Law beyond the State brings together contributions by renowned experts on international and European Union law to celebrate the centennial of Goethe‒Universität Frankfurt. The essays explore Frankfurt's contribution to the development of international law; the historical development of international law; how this form of law can be used as a tool to improve the world and create a better future for all; the essential relevance of the spiritual dimension of legal orders, including the European Union, to ensuring their values will be taken seriously; and the possibility, offered by the Internet, for all persons concerned with global lawmaking to participate effectively in relevant decision-making processes.

Western philosophy has been dominated by the concept or the idea—the belief that there is one sovereign notion or singular principle that can make reality explicable and bring all that exists under its sway. In modern politics, this role is played by ideology. Left, right, or center, political schools of thought share a metaphysics of simplification. We internalize a dominant, largely unnoticeable framework, oblivious to complex, plural, and occasionally conflicting or mutually contradictory explanations for what is the case. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Marder proposes a new methodology for political science and philosophy, one which he terms “categorial thinking.” In contrast to the concept, no category alone can exhaust the meaning of anything: categories are so many folds, complications, respectful of multiplicity. Ranging from classical Aristotelian and Kantian philosophies to phenomenology and contemporary politics, Marder's book offers readers a theoretical toolbox for the interpretation of political phenomena, processes, institutions, and ideas. His categorial apparatus encompasses political temporality and spatiality; the revolutionary and conservative modalities of political actuality, possibility, and necessity; quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of political reality; the meaning of political relations; and various senses of political being. Under this lens, the political appears not as a singular concept but as a family of categories, allowing room for new, plural, and often antagonistic ideas about the state, the people, sovereignty, and power.

Guide to the theories and debates that surround the key political concepts of state, citizenship and democracy today.

The concept of constituent power plays a major part in modern political and legal theory— in how we think about the political. This book tackles the twofold issue of public authority and public autonomy in the modern conception of the political by analysing the notion of constituent power, its function in the modern political apparatus, and debates about its meaning and function in our own context. Focusing on contemporary debates on constitutionalism "beyond" the state, Geneviève Nootens assesses the prospects for recasting the notion of constituent power in a polycentric setting that challenges state sovereignty as embodying the autonomy of the political. She argues that constituent power belongs with the conceptual apparatus of a theory of government peculiar to a statist way of knowing, and being into, the world, and that it is too much dependent upon the statist framework for it to have critical purchase on the new mappings of public authority. Nootens stresses the critical need to frame public authority appropriately if we are to conceptualize a conception of collective political agency that can sustain public autonomy in the current era. Constituent Power Beyond the State will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, democratic theory, law, and constitutionalism.

The contributors to this book offer productive new readings of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy and of other facets of his thought. They each deploy his theories to adopt a critical stance on urgent political issues and contemporary situations within society. Each essay focuses on a different aspect of political transformation, be it at the personal, social, national, or international level. The book as a whole maps out possibilities for thinking phenomenologically about politics without a sole focus on the state, turning instead toward contemporary human experience and existence.

Resource and environmental management generally entail an attempt by governing authorities to dominate, reroute, and tame the natural flows of water, the growth of forests, manage the populations of non-human bodies, and control nature more generally. Often this is done under the mantle of conservation, economic development, and sustainable management, but still involves a quest to “civilize” and control all aspects of nature for a specific purpose. The results of this form of environmental management and governance are many, but by and large, across the globe, it has meant governments construct a specific idea regarding nature and the environment. These forms of control also extend beyond the natural environment, allowing for particular methods of managing human and non-human populations in order to maintain power and enact sovereignty. This volume contributes to advancing an ‘ecology of freedom,’ which can critique current anthropocentric environmental destruction, as well as focusing on environmental justice and decentralized ecological governance. While concentrating on these areas of anarchist political ecology, three major themes emerged from the chapters: the legacies of colonialism that continue to echo in current resource management and governance practices, the necessity of overcoming human/nature dualisms for environmental justice and sustainability, and finally discussions and critiques of extractivism as a governing and economic mentality.