ABSTRACT
Powerful forces during the tumultuous last quarter of the twentieth century buffeted states, leading to widespread, transformative crises in them. From members of the European Union facing daily challenges to their local officials’ accepted prerogatives, to victims of rapid withdrawal of foreign investments in East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Russia, to the targets of brutal civil wars in Africa, states faced covert and overt challenges to their power. Rapidly increasing capital flows; unprecedented levels of debt; new information technologies; growing trade and the formation of trade blocs; heightened activity by international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, in the domestic affairs of states; wildly fluctuating commodity prices, especially for the most important of all commodities, oil; and the new power alignments spawned by the end of the Cold War were among the potent forces that strained existing governing institutions. By the beginning of the 1990s, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, and several other states were territorially disintegrating; entire regimes in other East European countries were collapsing; and formal political institutions in much of Africa seemed to be more the booty of bloody wars than actual governing organizations. Even as these momentous events brought continuous surprises, scholars continued to stick with their existing understanding of what the state is and how it interacts with its own society and outside forces. Dissatisfaction with those old ways of thinking about states in the circumstances of the transformative crisis in the last two decades led to the collaborative project that gave birth to this book. To be sure, academic divisions abounded in the older models about the future of the state. Some scholars went on championing it, despite all the problems besetting it, as the key institution in people’s lives, providing the rules and norms for daily life. Others shifted to predicting its imminent demise, with alternative institutions, both local and transnational, moving in to establish the parameters of everyday life as well as the source for collective identity. Indeed, this divergence over the centrality of the future state became the focus of serious debates in the fields of comparative politics and international relations (see, for example, Krasner 1999: 3).
