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A number of scholars have analysed lynching in Latin America as a response to the recent upsurge in insecurity and crime in the region. This article turns our attention to historical and deeper socio-political undercurrents behind this practice. Drawing on several cases of lynching that took place in post-revolutionary Puebla, the article argues that, rather than signalling state absence, the occurrence of lynching expressed communities' reactions towards a state presence that was perceived as intrusive and illegitimate. It furthermore shows that lynchings emulated the brutality and visibility of extralegal forms of violence perpetrated by public officials at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the resurgence of feminist activities in contemporary Ireland, led by the arts and activist spheres, which speak to and are supported by transnational feminisms. Topics covered include the legacy of the 1916 Easter Rising as a defining moment in the creation of the Irish state that struggled for independence from British colonialism, the execution of the Rising's leaders and the state-formation that follows, and the roles played by Irish theatre makers in the Rising.

State formation below the national scale remains under-researched. In this article, the reconstitution of the local history of an upland region of Laos - Sepon - reveals a process of state formation from a territorial margin. Contrary to James C. Scott’s thesis on state-evading peoples, members of a local ethnic minority population - the Phuthai - have been part of the making of the state over centuries. In addition to the material aspects of state-making, this article explores its intangible components that are often neglected in analyses of state formation. This wider lens is particularly applied to the Communist state-making efforts in Sepon during the American-Vietnam War. These have had the unintended consequence of producing a new class that replicates age-old social hierarchies and have resulted in Sepon, and probably other upland areas of contemporary Laos, being more socially inequitable than the Communist Revolution intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Argentinian and Chilean state's colonization in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego arguing that for the making of their effective territorial sovereignties, the formation of private proprietorship was crucial. This process is understood by studying the expansion of British and German surplus capital, favored by a racialized criterion for accessing privileges and by the articulation of transnational networks of corruption that linked national authorities and local elites of European origin. Thus, the article argues, corruption built overlapping commercial and family associations that allowed both states to establish their presence in the zone. The article is mainly based on Argentinian, British and Chilean administrative sources, corporate files, memoirs and travelogues, genealogies and local and national press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an outline of an alternative narrative of the Zionist road to statehood by reading the parallel histories of partition and state-making in the British Raj in India and Mandatory Palestine/Israel in tandem. After reviewing some of the recent scholarship on the subject, the article demonstrates how the reconstruction of an analogical prism among the historical actors can contribute to the understanding of the roots of partition politics transnationally. Lastly, it points at the way in which the analogical perspective became part and parcel of the bureaucracy and legislation developed post-partition by the new states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through an examination of the political and legal debates over the role of road building in Mexico between 1920 and 1938, this essay shows how these debates became a symbol of nationalist "progress" after the military phase of Revolution. During this time, the Mexican state confronted foreign commercial interests as federal, state, and local officials launched construction efforts for new motorways. Legal and bureaucratic reforms emphasized national sovereignty over Mexico's transportation infrastructure, challenging private ownership of roads and limiting foreign investment in the highway system. Road building represented an important moment of historical continuity between the liberal regime under Porfirio Díaz and the revolutionary states that followed. This article contributes to the scholarly literature on state formation in Mexico, concentrating on how government officials, the courts, and everyday citizens shaped the country's politics of economic development and regional mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The best guarantee of protecting the rights of Christian minorities on the European territory of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century was nothing else but the establishing of own nation-states, where the Christian population could lead his life without being ruled or controlled by the Ottoman Empire. This process found support and was assisted by the Great Powers. It means, that one form of the humanitarian intervention was the state-building instructed or assisted from abroad. One of the unexpected experiences of the Balkan Wars 1912/1913 was that the members of the Balkan League committed genocides and other kinds of mass violence against other Nationalities and the Muslim population of the peninsula. Among other things the Albanian state-building project of the Great Powers aimed to prevent further genocide and other acts of violence against the Albanian population and other refugees from Macedonia and to put an end to the anarchy of the country. The main international organisation to directly represent the great powers in the new Albania and to be responsible for the state-building process was the International Commission of Control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some states fail to establish the capacity of legal regulation among significant sections of their population, and instead allow alternative norms of social order to take the place of those promoted by the state? Existing models of state building in the sociological literature treat the building of modern bureaucratic authority as a political process in which weak state authority results from a state's inability to defeat rival bases of power. On the other hand, neo-institutionalist theory highlights the significant effects that institutional environments have on organization building, but its elaborations of state building have mainly emphasized processes of the diffusion of world society models as central to the making of the modern nation-state. Both models fail to explain how limitations in new states' capacities to govern populations emerge in cases when states fulfill conditions specified by each model. I use the case of state building in the Albanian highlands to show that jurisdictional struggles and resistance that emerge out of distinct cultures of legality are key to understanding why organizationally capable states may fail to establish durable mechanisms of governance among marginal social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the development of football in interwar Romania, stressing its role in the dissemination and grounding of Romanian nationalism. I show how, due to its modular form, the game of football was deeply involved in the efforts of centralizing, territorializing and naturalizing the Romanian nation-state of the interwar period. The founding of the leading Romanian sports club at the University of Cluj and the selection of the national representative for the Paris Olympics of 1924, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure developed to nationally regulate and control the game, are used to present the acute tensions between local/regional and national aspirations and projects, with a strong ethnic component, that have shaped the history of the game in Romania. I argue that the increasing calls for the full Romanianization of football in the 1930s have their immediate roots in these tensions and frictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the history of the Imperial Ministry of Finance (Reichsfinanzministerium) which operated in Germany from 1919 to 1945 and attempts to position the institution as a counterworld within 20th-century public finance. German budgetary policy is analyzed and the impact of the shift from bureaucracy to dictatorship on the ministry is described, the history of German state-building is examined, and information is offered on structural changes in the ministry wrought by the National Socialist party of Germany.

This article discusses the phenomenon of women immigrant teachers during the 1950s in Israel, an issue which incorporates several research topics: migration, gender, and teaching. It asks whether the popular saying: "Teaching is women's work," was true in regard to Israel during this time period. In order to do so, this article examines the choices and actions of those women, all of whom were trying to cope with their new situation and to integrate successfully into the host society. A large portion of women immigrant teachers found jobs in immigrant villages and development towns. From an educational point of view, these women were not the strongest link in the pedagogical chain, and yet they were asked to assist in the formation of a new society. By doing so, they chose to become agents of acculturation and carried out leadership functions; they became empowered, and quickly shed their weak, immigrant women status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature on British colonial rule in Africa has increasingly emphasised the ways in which relatively cautious colonial states were formed in processes of engagement and accommodation with local societies. This article uses the example of a major rebellion against colonial authority in southern Darfur in 1921 to demonstrate the ways in which these processes of local engagement might themselves feed into rebellion against state authority, rather than secure colonial rule. The rebellion was inspired by Mahdist millenarian belief, but the involvement of local societies in both the rebellion and its repression was also shaped by patterns of local rivalries into which the colonial state had entered as an additional actor. The article also reminds us, more broadly, that spectacular violence and local accommodation were not distinct modes of colonial governance but rather continually intertwined in processes of colonial state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses representations of bourgeois femininity in early twentieth century newspaper coverage of the ceremonial Opening of the Legislature in Ontario, Canada's largest and most populous province. Building on theories that shed light upon the complex processes of material and symbolic reproduction required to reproduce 'the idea of the reality of the state,' I argue that mass mediated representations of women's bodies and fashions during this key civic ritual contributed to state formation. The article demonstrates the ways in which newspaper coverage of a particular type of gendered performance reflected and reinforced an imperialist and patriarchal provincial state-building project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period of state formation (1991–1992), the Slovene Ministry of the Interior erased, that is, excluded from legal status, those immigrants from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who did not become Slovene citizens when citizenship was available under initial simplified criteria. Compared with the processes of independence in Estonia and elsewhere, exclusion in the form of erasure from the register of permanent residents in Slovenia extended beyond the creation of foreigners within the country (i.e. foreign citizens with the right to remain and support themselves); this exclusion created outlaws,legal freaks(Arendt) orhomines sacres(Agamben) – bare human beings who were expunged from society and deprived of all former rights and roles. This article discusses the citizenship practices of the victims of the erasure and interprets these practices as emancipation processes: the erased used grass roots and legal means to attempt to obtain the right to dignity, the right to stay and the right to compensation for their ‘lost years’. The effects of their struggle went beyond matters of mere utility: by publicly defining themselves as ‘the erased’ and acting upon injustice; the erased challenged the boundaries of citizenship in terms of membership and content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses political violence in the province of Michoacán, Mexico, in the 1920s, highlighting the involvement of intellectuals in particular. The authors seek to use this example to illustrate the state-building process in Mexico after the revolution of the 1910s, especially as it applied to rural areas and village communities. Aspects considered in detail include the peasant intellectual Primo Tapia, support for and opposition to land reform, and the ideology of the "agrarismo" social movement.

This article examines the militia - the Soviet regular police force - and its criminal investigation branch in the context of the state's dramatic expansion during the Russian civil war, 1917-21. It argues that, although the Bolsheviks harboured ideological doubts about centralized police forces, they quickly came to regard the militia as a key fulcrum of the revolutionary state, evidenced not least by the re-establishment of a unitary force under central state supervision, by its rapid growth during the civil war, and by efforts to ensure its political reliability. Despite the importance attached to the militia, however, it remained a dysfunctional organization during the 1917-21 period. Its criminal investigation branch, in particular, was afflicted by a range of operational problems that undermined its ability to function as an effective arm of the state. This suggests a counter-narrative to the assumption that statization in itself conferred extensive coercive influence upon the Bolshevik regime. Despite the dramatic growth of the state during the civil war, its traction at the grassroots of society remained uneven and unpredictable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between violence, the transition from apartheid, and contemporary state formation in South Africa. Through an ethnographic case study of the rural area of Umbumbulu outside Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, the article argues that prevailing interpretations of violence that focus on rivalry between political parties obscure the ways in which other factors – such as local power struggles among customary leaders and strongmen, state support for the rise of warlords, and the recruitment of young men through kinship and patronage networks – helped spread the violence. Local strongmen or warlords were motivated by the quest for power and economic success in their local communities as well as their beliefs in and strategic alliances with national-level political parties engaged in the struggle to end apartheid. In particular, the article focuses on a ‘faction fight’ in the mid-1980s and the subsequent violence that surrounded two warlords affiliated to the African National Congress in a region that was mostly dominated by Inkatha supporters. The alliances the ANC made with these warlords continued into the post-apartheid period and helped shape the ways in which power was exercised within the new political institutions of the democratic state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which discusses the referencing of ghosts and Gothic themes in Irish political discourse during Ireland's period of post-colonial state formation of the 1920s and 1930s. An overview of Gothic printed ephemera, including by the Irish government and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is provided. The relationship between the Irish supporters and detractors of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, who are respectively referred to as pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty forces, is discussed.

By choosing to transition to modern, set-piece battle during the second half of the Indochina War, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) created one of the most socially totalizing wars in order to meet that ambitious goal. This article argues that, while the DRV did indeed create a remarkably modern army of six divisions, the lack of a mechanized logistical system meant that it had to mobilize hundreds of thousands of civilian porters to supply its troops moving across Indochina. To do this, the communist party undertook a massive mobilization drive and simultaneously expanded its efforts to take the state in hand. The DRV made war, but war also directly shaped the nature of this state. This article also shows why this transition to modern war rapidly collapsed the line between civilians and combatants in ways more 'totalizing' than many have previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction is offered to the article "The Peasants in turmoil: Khmer Rouge, state formation and the control of land in northwest Cambodia," by J.-C. Diepart and D. Dupuis, which appeared on the journal's computer network resource.