Project Summary

Through anthropological fieldwork in non-western and western contexts, this collaborative institutional project (by eleven senior researchers at the University of Bergen) takes a comparative approach to the problems of state control and legitimacy under contemporary global conditions. However similar modern states may appear in their governmental structures, the project assumes that "states" and "state processes" can be satisfactorily comprehended only by investigating how they are embedded, historically, culturally, politically, in their respective societal contexts. Instituted state orders and structures are currently challenged. Relinquishing its once supreme regulatory hold over economy and citizenry, the modern state sees its dominant form being questioned. Former state monopolies over power appear weakened, and the territorially bounded hierarchical state order, epitomized in "the nation state", is being crosscut and subverted by lateral networks. In order to comprehend comparatively the highly variable processes that determine the state's societal controls, legitimacy and, ultimately, fate, the project critically examines localized (religious or secular, traditional or emergent) modes of response to state forms and how these may arcticulate with more recent imperial globalizing processes. The project's constituent cases are from Canada, USA, Norway, Italy, Slovenia, Sudan, Botswana, Kuwait, Lebanon, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and Australia. Several more cases will be added as doctoral students and other collaborating scholars are attached to the project.