Edges of the State

Edges of the State PDF

Author: John Protevi

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13: 1452961778

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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

Culture and Power at the Edges of the State

Culture and Power at the Edges of the State PDF

Author: Thomas M. Wilson

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9783825875695

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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.

At the Edges of States

At the Edges of States PDF

Author: Michael Eilenberg

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 9004253467

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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.

Our 50-State Border Crisis

Our 50-State Border Crisis PDF

Author: Howard G. Buffett

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0316476587

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From one of America's most prominent philanthropists, an eye-opening, myth-busting new perspective on the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Howard G. Buffett has seen first-hand the devastating impact of cheap Mexican heroin and other opiate cocktails across America. Fueled by failing border policies and lawlessness in Mexico and Central America, drugs are pouring over the nation's southern border in record quantities, turning Americans into addicts and migrants into drug mules--and killing us in record numbers. Politicians talk about a border crisis and an opioid crisis as separate issues. To Buffett, a landowner on the U.S. border with Mexico and now a sheriff in Illinois, these are intimately connected. Ineffective border policies not only put residents in border states like Texas and Arizona in harm's way, they put American lives in states like Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont at risk. Mexican cartels have grown astonishingly powerful by exploiting both the gaps in our border security strategy and the desperation of migrants--all while profiting enormously off America's growing addiction to drugs. The solution isn't a wall. In this groundbreaking book, Buffett outlines a realistic, effective, and bi-partisan approach to fighting cartels, strengthening our national security, and tackling the roots of the chaos below the border.

Government of Paper

Government of Paper PDF

Author: Matthew S. Hull

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-06-05

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0520272145

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“Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory, science studies, and semiotics, this brilliant book makes us completely rethink the workings of bureaucracy as analyzed by Max Weber and James Scott. Matthew Hull demonstrates convincingly how the materiality of signs truly matters for understanding the projects of ‘the state.’” - Katherine Verdery, author of What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? “We are used to studies of roads and rails as central material infrastructure for the making of modern states. But what of records, the reams and reams of paper that inscribe the state-in-making? This brilliant book inquires into the materiality of information in colonial and postcolonial Pakistan. This is a work of signal importance for our understanding of the everyday graphic artifacts of authority.” - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "This is an excellent and truly exceptional ethnography. Hull presents a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich reading that will be an invaluable resource to scholars in the field of Anthropology and South Asian studies. The author’s focus on bureaucracy, “corruption," writing systems and urban studies (Islamabad) in a post-colonial context makes for a unique ethnographic engagement with contemporary Pakistan. In addition, Hull’s study is a refreshing voice that breaks the mold of current representation of Pakistan through the security studies paradigm." - Kamran Asdar Ali, Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas

Exploring the Edges of Texas

Exploring the Edges of Texas PDF

Author: Walt Davis

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2010-01-18

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1603441530

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In 1955, Frank X. Tolbert, a well-known columnist for the Dallas Morning News, circumnavigated Texas with his nine-year-old-son in a Willis Jeep. The column he phoned in to the newspaper about his adventures, "Tolbert's Texas," was a staple of Walt Davis's childhood. Fifty years later, Walt and his wife, Isabel, have re-explored portions of Tolbert’s trek along the boundaries of Texas. The border of Texas is longer than the Amazon River, running through ten distinct ecological zones as it outlines one of the most familiar shapes in geography. According to the Davises, "Driving its every twist and turn would be like driving from Miami to Los Angeles by way of New York." Each of this book’s sixteen chapters opens with an original drawing by Walt, representing a segment of the Texas border where the authors selected a special place—a national park, a stretch of river, a mountain range, or an archeological site. Using a firsthand account of that place written by a previous visitor (artist, explorer, naturalist, or archeologist), they then identified a contemporary voice (whether biologist, rancher, river-runner, or paleontologist) to serve as a modern-day guide for their journey of rediscovery. This dual perspective allows the authors to attach personal stories to the places they visited, to connect the past with the present, and to compare Texas then with Texas now. Whether retracing botanist Charles Wright's 600-mile walk to El Paso in 1849 or paddling Houston's Buffalo Bayou, where John James Audubon saw ivory-billed woodpeckers in 1837, the Davises seek to remind readers that passionate and determined people wrote the state's natural history. Anyone interested in Texas or its rich natural heritage will find deep enjoyment in Exploring the Edges of Texas. Publication of this book is generously supported by a memorial gift in honor of Mary Frances "Chan" Driscoll, a founding member of the Advisory Council of Texas A&M University Press, by her sons Henry B. Paup '70 and T. Edgar Paup '74.

Anthropology in the Margins of the State

Anthropology in the Margins of the State PDF

Author: Veena Das

Publisher: James Currey Publishers

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781930618411

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The very form and reach of the modern state are changing radically under the pressure of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Peru, Guatemala, India, Chad, Colombia, and South Africa, the contributors examine official documentary practices and their forms and falsifications; the problems that highly mobile mercenaries, currency, goods, arms, and diamonds pose to the state; emerging non-state regulatory authorities; and the role language plays as cultures struggle to articulate their situation.

The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre

The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre PDF

Author: Sean Prentiss

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1628950234

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Though creative nonfiction has been around since Montaigne, St. Augustine, and Seneca, we’ve only just begun to ask how this genre works, why it functions the way it does, and where its borders reside. But for each question we ask, another five or ten questions roil to the surface. And each of these questions, it seems, requires a more convoluted series of answers. What’s more, the questions students of creative nonfiction are drawn to during class discussions, the ones they argue the longest and loudest, are the same ideas debated by their professors in the hallways and at the corner bar. In this collection, sixteen essential contemporary creative nonfiction writers reflect on whatever far, dark edge of the genre they find themselves most drawn to. The result is this fascinating anthology that wonders at the historical and contemporary borderlands between fiction and nonfiction; the illusion of time on the page; the mythology of memory; poetry, process, and the use of received forms; the impact of technology on our writerly lives; immersive research and the power of witness; a chronology and collage; and what we write and why we write. Contributors: Nancer Ballard, H. Lee Barnes, Kim Barnes, Mary Clearman Blew, Joy Castro, Robin Hemley, Judith Kitchen, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, Dinty W. Moore, Sean Prentiss, Lia Purpura, Erik Reece, Jonathan Rovner, Bob Shacochis, and Joe Wilkins.

Man and the State

Man and the State PDF

Author: Jacques Maritain

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780813209050

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"Of time-transcending value, this book is probably the most succinct and clearest statement of Thomistic political theory available to the English-language reader. Written during his exile from war-torn Europe, Man and the State is the fruit of Maritain's considerable learning as well as his reflections on his positive American experience and on the failure of regimes he closely encountered on the Continent."--Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America "The lectures that were the basis for Man and the State were delivered at the University of Chicago at a time when Maritain was still in the first enthusiasm of his participation in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He devotes particular attention to the concept of rights, since, historically, rights theories were fashioned to supplant the natural law theory to which Maritain as a Thomist gives his allegiance. Maritain provides an ingenious and profound theory as to how natural law and natural rights can be complementary. For this reason alone it remains a fundamental contribution to political philosophy, but it is filled with other gems as well. Was Maritain too optimistic in his appraisal of modernity? Or have we unjustly lost the optimism that was his? Man and the State is an invitation to rethink the way we pose the basic questions of political philosophy."--Ralph McInerny, Jacques Maritain Center, University of Notre Dame ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), distinguished French Catholic philosopher and writer, was the author of more than fifty books. A preeminent interpreter of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Maritain was a professor of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris, Columbia University, and Princeton University. He served as French Ambassador to the Vatican from 1945 to 1948. CONTENTS 1. The People and the State 2. The Concept of Sovereignty 3. The Problem of Means 4. The Rights of Man 5. The Democratic Charter 6. Church and State 7. The Problem of World Government

New Models for Population Protocols

New Models for Population Protocols PDF

Author: Othon Michail

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Published: 2010-04-04

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1608455904

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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