Periodic Reporting for period 4 - Local State (State Formation Through the Local Production of Property and Citizenship)
Período documentado: 2020-07-01 hasta 2021-06-30
This is important because it shows the inadequacy of a purely top-down approach to institutions. States are made as much from below by different popular demands.
For any kind of effective, just, and equitable policy intervention, this is important to keep this in mind, if we want to engage the institutions that actually exercise political authority and want to avoid useless engagement with vacuous formal institutions.
I parallel to the initial fieldwork, the group has held a series of workshops to discuss individual research design, research ethics, draft papers and publications. Especially, the group has held two summer-labs in 2017 and 2018, where ongoing work has been discussed in the group and with invited guests. The idea of inviting guests with whom we collaborate has been pursued a bit further. Hence, we have hosted Dr. Liliana Figueroa from Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, and Prof. Frederic le Marcis from the University of Lyon for 3-6 weeks. We further plan to host Dr. Muriel Côte from the University of Zurich for a month in the coming year.
The first achievement of the project has been to verify that the conceptual framework of the project had proved relevant in a range of very different contexts. In all the contexts, fieldwork has demonstrated that the questions of property rights and political identity interconnect in dynamic ways, and that neither property nor citizenship can be meaningfully understood in isolation. Instead, it must be understood as part of a specific social contract.
The main issue to be investigated is how property rights and citizenship rights are connected to public authority as a social contract, in places where statutory government is not the only significant political institution. While consolidated states exhibit a pattern where rights flow from state institutions, so to say, in weak or polycentric states, the pattern of social contracts between rights and authority is different. Here people’s demands for land rights and political rights are addressed not just to statutory institutions but to all kinds of power holders. These demands institute power in the institutions. We examine how political power consolidates through demands for authorization of claims.
This is important for society because it may reveal a fundamental pattern of constitution of power, and it may allow us a more serious examination of what is often referred to as ‘weak states’.
The overall objective is to establish an analytical repertoire that allows us to capture the constitution of social contracts even in situation where they are ephemeral, tentative and provisory.