This chapter contrasts with the introduction by focusing on an event that an intersection of different sources (Ottoman, Arabic, English and French sources) document in an exceptional way: the attack of a big caravan on its road from Damascus to Baghdad in 1857. Its aims at plunging readers into the life, business and management of caravans in the mid-nineteenth century – a period that is introduced here as a turning point for life and business in the steppe in the Ottoman realms. Built as an enquiry into the attack and into what the historiography has considered a handicap of overland trade (insecurity) unlike oceanic trade, this chapter illuminates the regional system institutionalised by Bedouin/State/Traders to deal efficiently with insecurity and hazards of caravan trade over long distances.

In most scholarly accounts, borders are portrayed simply as thin, jurisdictional lines; they define where one sovereignty ends and a new one begins. Recently, scholars have shown that borders are increasingly becoming wide and zonal – an important advance in our understanding. In this chapter, however, it is suggested that even these accounts are insufficient to change our paradigm as they still rely on the state/territory/border triad as their baseline and see contemporary changes as deviations from this norm. In other words, while such work can generate shifts in our understanding of borders, they nonetheless perpetuate the border’s naturalness. To redress this problem, this chapter begins by defining the “Westphalian” border as it is conventionally understood – distinguishing two features, borders-as-authority and borders-as-control. Second, it looks at the development of modern bordering to locate when this “Westphalian” border starts to take shape. The chapter concludes with a reconceptualization – referred to as the Accordion Model – which captures the conditional and oscillating relationship between states, territories, and borders. The hope is that by doing so, we might chip away at the hegemonic hold that the linear border – and the state/territory/borders triad – has on our political imaginaries

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

This chapter explores how taxes shape the meaning of other payments and money flows in highland Bolivia. The concept ‘ecology of payments’ is introduced to describe the world of payments amongst the so-called informally employed in the city of Cochabamba. It explores how, for instance, receipts for commercial licence taxes and property taxes paid provide people with the right to make other kinds of payments, such as fees to local neighbourhood associations and unions. An ‘ecology of payments’ pays attention to the multiple links and dependencies between payments and the way they transform each other. This approach encourages a focus on the local impact of taxes paid, as opposed to the effect of taxes on long-term state–society relations. To ascertain the role of taxes within this ecology, the chapter also aims to understand how the concept of formality informs the power and character of different payments.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

Rebecca West’s novel of ideas, The Birds Fall Down, responds to the intense debate around capital punishment that took place in the UK after the Second World War. Partly motivated by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which West attended as a journalist, this debate led to the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill in 1947 and the establishment of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1949. Alongside other public intellectuals, West acted as an honorary member of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, founded in 1955. In such non-fictional works as Black Lamb, Grey Falcon and A Train of Powder, West reflects on the meaning of justice and the appropriateness of punishment for murder, assassination, and crimes against humanity. In The Birds Fall Down, she extends her reflections to the political utility of assassination and the wisdom required to pass judgment on crimes and criminals.

This chapter explores the different types of illicit and informal economy in the two migrant communities and examines why and how Sanhe gods get involved in the gray economy. It also discusses state intervention in the communities through surveillance, raids, and compaigns as well as through gentrification projects. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ friendships in the community.

This chapter discusses the larger implications of Sanhe gods’ experiences. It analyzes the various forms of their resistance, from non-compliance to direct confrontation, and the state’s mechanisms of control, from gentrification to coercion. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ precarious future, as flexible employment becomes more widespread and the prospects for settling down in cities reduce even when the great gods have intentions to stay. It presents migrant workers’ experiences not only of factory hopping but also, and increasingly, of city hopping, as both livelihood strategies and coping strategies formed in response to state policies and repression.

This chapter examines the role of the state in collaborative governance as well as the mix between hard (regulation) and soft modes of governance (orchestration) to achieve decarbonization in Sweden after the adoption of the 2017 Climate Policy Framework. The chapter focuses on state-led transformation and critically examines Sweden’s progress toward its overarching goal to become the first fossil-free welfare state by 2045. It investigates Sweden’s national strategies and governance modes to achieve decarbonization and overcome carbon lock-ins through institutional, economic, technological, and behavioral transformation. It concludes that Sweden’s path to decarbonization – like many other countries – resembles more of an incremental transition limited to certain sectors rather than the wholesale transformation toward achieving a fossil-free society.

In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

This final chapter compares the country findings and brings together the conceptual and empirical insights presented. It also aims to answer the questions presented in the introductory chapter: What are the security implications of energy transitions? What elements of positive and negative security can be found? How should energy security and security of supply be redefined in the context of the energy transition? Is there a hidden side to policymaking in the energy–security nexus? It first discusses the interplay between energy, security, and defense policies, followed by securitization and politicization. Subsequently, focus is placed on the security implications of energy transitions, and on negative and positive security. The chapter ends by summarizing the key technological, actor-based, and institutional aspects of the country cases, perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure, and final conclusions.

In this chapter I lay the foundations of the book and give an overview of the argument. After introducing the importance of studying state capacity and the main puzzle of why certain states are set in divergent state building trajectories, I discuss the state of bellicist theory and criticisms related to its alleged functionalist approach to history, and lack of fit with a world where inter-state war has become less frequent. I then turn to Latin America, a poster child of anti-bellicist scholars. There I review the aforementioned books by Centeno, Kurtz, Mahoney, Mazzuca, Saylor, and Soifer, amongst others. My book is set against this new consensus which dismisses war as an explanation for intra-regional variation in state capacity. In a final section, I propose the need to rethink the theory with a focus on the long-term consequences of war outcomes rather than pre-war conditions. The introduction closes with a discussion of my case selection strategy and chapter layout.

What is a system? What is a dynamical system? Systems are characterized by a few central notions: their state and their behavior foremost, and then some derived notions such as reachability and observability. These notions pop up in many fields, so it is important to understand them in nontechnical terms. This chapter therefore introduces what people call a narrative that aims at describing the central ideas. In the remainder of the book, the ideas presented here are made mathematically precise in concrete numerical situations. It turns out that a sharp understanding of just the notion of state suffices to develop most if not the whole mathematical machinery needed to solve the main engineering problems related to systems and their dynamics.