Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

Abstract

Christian Lund and how this ought to be the centre of analysis of the formation of political authority. Finally, I provide two concise examples from Ghana and Indonesia. THE ARGUMENT Dynamics of State Formation and Institutional Pluralism Treating the 'state' as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it. The state is always in the making. Political authority is (re-)produced through its successful exercise over an important issue in relation to the social actors concerned. 2 To move beyond the mere incantation of this claim, this Introduction investigates and specifies contracts of recognition as the key dynamic of the constitution of authority, and the chapters which follow describe and demonstrate it. The argument I pursue is that the ability to entitle and disenfranchise people with regard to property, to establish the conditions under which they hold that property-together with the ability to define who belongs and who does not, and to establish and uphold rank, privilege and social servitude in its many forms-is constitutive of state power. Claims to rights prompt the exercise of authority. Struggles over property and citizenship are therefore as much about the scope and constitution of political authority as they are about access to resources and membership of polities. Hence, investigating the social production of property and citizenship enables concrete understanding of the dynamics of authority or state formation. Granted, there are many problematics of government (Rose and Miller, 1992), and not all questions of state formation can be reduced to property and citizenship. Government-or authority-forms around the control over central resources, and in some historical periods, and in some places, key resources may be trading points and routes; they may be 'knowledge' or 'security', or even more abstract sources of wealth. It seems prudent to remain open to different kinds of combinations at all times. Yet, property (especially in land) and citizenship are increasingly such central resources in most societies, and engaging with these two fundamental and substantive questions in terms of their production allows us to traverse a broad series of dynamic questions of how property and citizenship are made. 3 This takes 2. I use public and political authority interchangeably. Public points to the 'not private and not secret' aspect of exercised authority. Political, on the other hand, points to its contentious element. In most cases, both features apply. 3. I draw on a broad literature on state and political authority, property and citizenship, including:

Agrarian class struggle and state formation in post‐colonial Pakistan, 1959–1974: Contingencies of Mazdoor Kisan Raj

“…I make this argument through close study of hitherto largely unstudied state records at the Directorate of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Libraries and Archives in Peshawar, an original documentary archive of the MKP's bulletins and literature assembled from remaining party members throughout Pakistan, and oral histories that I collected over 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Charsadda district. My study brings these sources into conversation with the emerging literatures on the intersections of state formation and subnational variation (Naseemullah & Staniland, ), agrarian contestation (Lund & Boone, ; Lund & Eilenberg, ), and the roles played “not only by elites but also by the masses” (Vu, , p. 149; see also Slater, ).…”

A hybrid approach to decolonize formal water law in Africa

“…For example, after South Africa's drafting of a new constitution, Kenya and Tanzania also initiated massive debates about new developmental constitutions in which human rights frameworks are used as references. The continuous state formation needs legitimacy by citizens and vice versa (Lund and Eilenberg 2017). Similarly, states depend at least partly on the overwhelming numbers of investors in self-supply who vote.…”

Amazonian struggles for recognition

“…Legal recognition (by institutions) is not “legalistic” per se, rather it means the recognition of rights to citizenship and territory by an institution and reciprocal recognition of its authority by subjects (Lund, , p. 1206). As Lund () notes, the core element of both the right to property and the right to citizenship is recognition. Citizenship is an apparatus of inclusion and exclusion – it is a key way of extending the “right to have rights,” as Arendt put it.…”