Challenging the State:
Transmutations of power in contemporary global realities.

Project Director: Professor Bruce Kapferer
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway

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 articulate with more recent imperial globalizing processes. The project's constituent cases are from Canada, USA, United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, Slovenia, Sudan, Botswana, Kuwait, Lebanon, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and Australia.

Some of the Main Objectives of the Challenging the State project are:

• Transformations in state sovereignty and power in the contemporary context of globalization.
• State and Imperialism.
• Socio-cultural orders of states, the diversity of contemporary forms, continuities and disjunctions between modern state formations and preceding forms of state power, bureaucracies and other institutions. Cosmologies of the state.
• Philosophical and theoretical discourses pertaining to the state, the relation of the state to society. Alternatives to state systems.
• Non-state or non-governmental organizations and their "state effects". Community and other civil organizations, the arts, religious groups and their intersection (resistance or cooperation) with state institutions. Corporate structures and state interrelations and conflicts.
• Social movements and the state. The state and social displacement, refugees and human rights.
• Marginal populations and state authority. The challenges to state authority and power effected in discourses of human rights, democratization.

Initial Project Period: 2004 through 2008